Anyone hoping for improvement in Madison’s public schools will need to keep waiting. Incumbent school board members Savion Castro and Maia Pearson will be reelected by default in April as no challengers showed up before the filing deadline yesterday.
Sincere congratulations to Castro and Pearson. They’ve stepped up. They put their names on the line. I strongly disagree with their views, but I have to respect the fact that they’ve put themselves in the arena.
It’s ironic that the story of their de facto reelection appeared on the same day as a story about how MMSD is moving away from letter grades. Failing a class? Heading for a “D”? Turns out you’re not failing at all. You’re “emerging.” It wasn’t at all clear what MMSD is trying to accomplish by moving away from letter grades. They admit that it will create more work for already over-burdened teachers and they’ll need to translate “emerging” into a “D” at some point so that high school students can have a GPA for their transcripts when applying for college. I guess it spares a kid’s feelings in the short-run, maybe.
Also, attendance and behavior won’t be taken into account with the new non-grading system either. In fact, this board seems to view good behavior as some sort of privileged cultural hegemony. I see it as just good behavior. It’s being respectful of your fellow students and teachers. Maybe I just don’t get it. I guess you’d have to say that when it comes to my grasp of MMSD policies my work is emerging.
This is precisely the kind of stuff about this school board that drove me to encourage challengers to the incumbents. When this board, or any group of leaders, sees every issue in terms of race and gender they’re pretty much guaranteed not to solve the problem because they’ve misdefined it from the start. The problem is not a racial achievement gap. The problem is that there are some kids, of every race, who aren’t learning. To cover that up with words like “emerging” is just moving us further away from solutions rather than confronting the problem.
We’ve got a school system where more than 60% of students are consistently performing below grade level in English and math, where behavioral problems are going unaddressed thanks to an ill-conceived “Behavior Education Plan,” and where parents have been voting with their feet for over a decade. And now we’re going to continue down that same road by phasing out the accountability (and yes, the pressure — it’s a good thing) that comes with real grades.
And in April we’ll reelect two of the primary architects of that strategy. But don’t blame Castro and Pearson. They’re upfront and honest about their philosophy and they stepped up to do the work and take the criticism from folks like me. And, without any evidence to the contrary, we have to conclude that they have no challengers because some critical mass of our community approves of that direction.
But count me in the minority then.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
The grades should be a bellwether of where the kid is likely to end up as an adult. You could have an “Elon Musk” at the top and then at the bottom, fifty rings lower, you’d have “2nd assistant crack whore” (nod to Norm Macdonald).
There is probably some kind of principle that guarantees a city like Madison is impossible to turn around from being wildly progressive once certain conditions are met.
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Dear old dad told me that if you want the job done right you got to do it yourself. How about yer old man?
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