Public schools problems run deeper than charters

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 18:05:09 -0000

Ruth Conniff is absolutely right that Wisconsin’s skewed financial support for voucher schools threatens public education.

Unfortunately, the rot runs far deeper. For many of our public schools -- like right here in Madison -- are being run by school boards consumed by counterproductive identity politics. While MMSD talked endlessly about rooting out racism, apparently they have been unfazed by the fact that almost 95% of their black students entering high school have been unable to read at grade level.

Forced to confront their tragic failure, the board commissioned a blue ribbon panel. It found the error was the District had not delivered enough “biliteracy instruction in ways that promote social justice and anti-racism through culturally and linguistically responsive teaching practice.”

Unmentioned was the fact that the District has been teaching reading with whole or balanced language (guessing the word) instead of phonics (sounding words out) -- ignoring the fact that for 30 years the research has demonstrated that only phonics works for troubled youth.

How can such a travesty have persisted in which, through malfeasance, they have consigned dozens of generations of our black children to lives crippled by illiteracy? Because phonics had been the cause celeb of conservatives, and the “experts” at MMSD were too egotistical to accept that their intellectual opponents might have been right. Even today that colossal mistake is only finally being corrected because the conservative legislature recently mandated phonics.

To do the right thing for our children, we must first fix all the other discredited racial pieties crippling our own schools, like failing to understand the need to couple love with discipline, or have little credibility challenging the wrongs in charter school funding formulas. Instead we have contented ourselves accumulating moral pretensions like epaulets, which is why black leaders really concerned about justice were left no choice but to form charters like One City Schools.