Set the record straight, get the facts right on SAGE
Angela McManaman
Dear Parents of Public Schools:
Do you think smaller class sizes help your kids? Or do you think they’d be better off in larger classes?
According to a piece published Nov. 19 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the “SAGE” small-class size program is a “horror” for Wisconsin. According to the right-wing activist author, having manageable class sizes in our public schools does little more than provide jobs to “worse teachers” who babysit kids who eat Elmer’s glue. Really, he said that.
Read the insanity here: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/sage-program-hasnt-paid-off-3a32nhd-134154328.html
He went on to say SAGE does little more than turn 17-student classrooms into 15-student classrooms. Could he be more wrong? Since most SAGE classes are already at 18 kids, fully 20% more kids per classroom than just a few years ago, it seems he has trouble with the basic facts.
Think about the kids at schools like Milwaukee's Hartford School or Spanish Immersion, both of which lost SAGE funding this year. Have class sizes grown by only two or three kids? Of course not, classes are actually much larger this year.
One of the author’s final lies is that the GOP budget “actually didn't cut anything in the school districts that utilized the ‘tools’ [Walker] provided them.” Maybe he was so busy calling kids glue-eaters that he missed the facts:
· More than 97% of Wisconsin districts faced school aid budget cuts, regardless of the huge teacher pay-cuts that Walker calls “tools.”
· A much greater number of jobs were lost in the K-12 sector in 2011 than in previous years of budget cuts.
· Half of all districts reported that they used one-time federal funds to offset even deeper cuts – funds that will be unavailable next year, meaning more cuts.
So what is the real impact of this assault on SAGE? Two MPS schools achieved double-digit increases in WKCE math and reading scores in 2010. The hardworking children at SAGE-supported Browning School and Rogers St. Academy deserve our support and congratulations for their remarkable WKCE performance. I’m most familiar with how my two children at Fratney School benefit from SAGE, as they are at a school that realized a nearly double-digit increase in reading scores last year. Add to this list the hardworking scholars at 81st School, who achieved a double-digit rise in their WKCE reading scores.
I don’t think test scores are the only way to measure success – and I know from experience as a public school student and public school parent, that small class sizes help kids succeed. Attacking SAGE is just another arrow in the assault on public education.
We need your help to push back. Please write to the Journal Sentinel and demand they raise their standards for op-ed pieces. Here are their submission “standards”: http://www.jsonline.com/news/30627794.html
Publishing attacks on educators and kids in low-income schools, and calling them glue-eaters, crosses a line and belittles the hard work of our teachers and our precious, hardworking children.
And demand an apology from the guy who wrote this poorly researched, inaccurate and insulting article about our children. Ask him to make his apology as public as our kids’ test scores. You can reach him here: http://wpri.org/pages/emailchristian.html