MPS Rips Off Milwaukee Taxpayers

In today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin schools get more bad press.

Hillary Clinton and her campaign might refer to it as "piling on."

The unavoidable reality is that Wisconsin schools are failing its students; and by failing the students, the schools fail the communities.

Education Sector, a non-profit group, finds fault with the picture that Wisconsin officials paint of the schools.

Wisconsin - especially the state Department of Public Instruction - continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.

For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author's assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.

"Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect," said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. "As a result, the most vulnerable students aren't getting the attention they need."

...The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector's founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a more conservative organization, recently issued a study saying the bar for judging students proficient in reading and math is set lower in Wisconsin than in almost any other state.

Efforts can be made to categorize the various studies and view them through a political lens. Excuses for MPS and Wisconsin's other schools can be made by criticizing the studies' methodology.

Blah, blah, blah.

The fact is the schools in Wisconsin aren't performing.

Nonetheless, more and more tax dollars are poured into the broken system.

In the case of MPS, it's like dumping money down a sewer.

At the beginning of this month, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos proposed a a 16.4% increase in property taxes to fund MPS.

The public rose up and in a clear voice shouted, "NO." So, the School Board voted to decrease the increase and decided to go with 9% instead.

The audacity of that proposed tax hike is all the more stunning when one looks at how MPS spends its funds.

In an investigative report, Aaron Diamant and TMJ4 exposes the ugly underbelly of the MPS travel records.

"You can't keep doing this to us," warned one weary taxpayer last week. She was one of hundreds of ticked off Milwaukee taxpayers who showed up at MPS headquarters to protest a planned 16% property tax hike.

Board members told the capacity crowd they had no other choice, but to most, it just didn't seem fair.

Months before any of this, the I-Team had already started looking at how the district spends its money. First, we dug through the last four years of travel expenses for MPS employees, administrators, and board members.

"We do not condone junkets," said Board President Peter Blewett. "We don't condone travel as a reward or travel for the sake of travel."

Maybe not, but they sure do a lot of it. Blewett admits even he didn't realize how much.

"This is the first time I've seen the aggregate numbers," Blewett said after the I-Team showed him our research.

Over the last four school years, the folks on the MPS payroll, from the superintendent to the secretaries, took nearly 10,000 trips mostly to out of state conventions, conferences and workshops all over the country. We found some school which sent ten or more people to the same event. All totaled, MPS racked up nearly $6 million in expenses on the road in just four years.

"That's a lot of money," exclaimed District PTA President Roxanne Sparks. "That's a lot of books. That's a lot of teachers who we've lost because of budget cuts. The music, the gym, the languages, the art. We could be using that."

Grants covered some of the tab, but grant money is still mostly public money.

$6 million to send MPS staff on the road.

Gee, do you think it would be possible to trim some of that, just a little bit?

You'd think the buck would stop with the superintendent, and we figured what better place to speak to him about what the district spends on travel than Savannah, Georgia. Why Savannah? In October, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, and four other MPS employees, made the trip for the two-day National Association of Charter School Authorizers Annual Conference. Andrekopoulos sits on the board.

On day one, after breakfast, browsing the vendors' booths, and a board meeting, Andrekopoulos headed for the airport. We questioned Andrekopoulos about those 10-thousand trips before he climbed into a cab.

I-Team: "Do you ever get reports from these schools as to what was done, why they send so many people, spending tens of thousands of dollars in some cases?"

Andrekopoulos: "That pretty much is a school based decision. Based on that, occasionally we'll get some reports on it, but most of it is really a school-based decision."

Expensive decisions without whole lot of oversight.

I-Team: "Should the principals be allowed to spend that kind of money on travel?"

Andrekopoulos: "I think that's an area that we have to constantly look at. We have district policies and procedures and we hold people accountable to those policies and procedures."

But clearly, we got him thinking about those policies on the way home. Andrekopoulos made sweeping changes--effective now.

Principals only get one out-of-state trip a year. Assistant principals get one every other year. Only 5 percent of teachers can attend out-of-state conferences each year. No more than one trip a year for support staff. Plus, the superintendent now gets copies of all travel requests.

It's a big deal for the district, and for parents whose taxes still went up this year.

"If you're going to spend my tax dollars, I want to see results," said taxpayer Valerie Jamison.

Jamison says MPS owes it to her and to every other taxpayer whether it spends one dollar or one million dollars on travel.

Obviously, traveling for professional development can be valuable, but after our investigation, the superintendent is looking at other options like online, video, and distance learning. Ultimately, these new policies will save taxpayers a lot of money.

If the new policies cut down on travel and save the taxpayers money, then that's a step in the right direction.

When I hear that Andrekopoulos is looking at other options to travel, such as online, video, and distance learning, I think he's doing exactly that -- looking a little.

Just looking. I don't have a lot of faith that the new policies will be implemented.

10,000 trips at a cost of $6 million in just four years.

That's insane.

As Andrekopoulos down to the secretaries were spending millions going to out-of-state conventions and workshops, taxpayers were being told that critical student programs had to be cut for lack of funds.

What a crock!

How typical of MPS -- wasteful, ineffective, corrupt.