The School Perceptions Podcast

Three days after Wisconsin's November 3 election, Derek sits down with Rob DeMeuse, Vice President of Research at School Perceptions, to talk about the results that got less attention than the Legislature: school referendums. Rob wrote his dissertation on what shapes referendum outcomes, and he has tracked Wisconsin's results back to 1993, when revenue limits began.

In unofficial results, voters passed 44 of 79 questions, or 56%, across 72 districts. It looks like a shock, but it fits a slide that has run since about 2018. Nearly all of the damage was on the operating side. Capital questions went 13 for 17, about normal for a fall election, while operating questions split 31 to 31. Non-recurring questions have passed 52% of the time this school year, the lowest rate since 2002-03.

The biggest change was in rural districts, which passed 27 of 60 questions (45%), down from about three-quarters in November 2024. Suburban districts held steady. Races also keep getting closer. The gap in yes share between questions that pass and questions that fail has shrunk from about 20 points a decade ago to about 11, and about a quarter of Tuesday's questions landed between 48% and 52%. Geneva J4 lost by one vote.

Also in this conversation:

• Why capital questions fell from 58 in November 2024 to 17 this time, and why it's hard to "build a building and then lay off the teachers."
• How the top of the ballot and the referendum vote came apart: "When I vote for a candidate, there's no dollar sign next to it."
• Derek's forecast model ran high, especially on operating questions. About half of the variation can't be explained with public data, and Derek's advice on anyone promising otherwise is blunt.
• What a model can't quantify: a community's feeling for its historic buildings, and the woman in the Northwoods who told Rob, "I like that the school is here," because it means she can still go get milk.
• Building closures: what a study of Wisconsin districts found about savings of about 1.8%, why closing an outlying rural school can cost you families, and how one closure came back to bite a district at its next referendum.
• Coming back after a no: 16 of the 28 districts that failed in April tried again in November. Five passed, all with smaller asks. The five that asked for the same amount or more all failed. Derek explains why the longer record is more puzzling.
• Why there's no magic election date: "You gotta go when you're ready."
• What surveys add: each 10% change in the ask moves support by about 5.5 points.
• Only three Wisconsin districts have never asked voters for a referendum. Referendums have become an ordinary part of school finance here.

Plus: one brown sugar latte is lost in the making of this episode.

Links
Wisconsin DPI on referendum rules and procedures: dpi.wi.gov
Wisconsin DPI referenda report: sfs.dpi.wi.gov
School Perceptions: schoolperceptions.com

Derek talks with Aaron Tarnutzer, superintendent of the McFarland School District, now in his fifth year in the role and his twentieth in the district. He's also the show's first two-time guest. Last season he talked about McFarland's data retreats; this time the subject is student voice.

McFarland first surveyed only parents and staff, and found it had "a lot of adults speculating about the student experience." For three years now it has run student, parent and staff climate surveys, in that order, analyzed each one separately, then compared them.

Derek explains the pattern he sees across districts. Staff and parents tend to agree about the district: the board, the administration, the direction, communication. Staff and students tend to agree about the classroom. Asking all three groups is what lets you confirm each view.

McFarland's students rate their own and their peers' behavior more positively than staff do, which helps teachers ask whether one or two hard situations are shaping their view of the whole student body. Parents report more bullying than students do, so the district started telling families what its schools actually do to prevent and respond to it.

Links
McFarland School District: mcfsd.org
Wisconsin's classroom cellphone law (PBS Wisconsin): pbswisconsin.org
Reeve & Tseng (2011), "Agency as a fourth aspect of students' engagement during learning activities": doi.org
School Perceptions: schoolperceptions.com

This is a video episode (an optional component) because it is the podcast version of a WASBO presentation from Thursday, Oct 8th, 2026.

In this episode, Derek presents some survey-based research on Wisconsin communities' tax tolerance relative to various levels of referendum asks, discusses the factors that seem to lead communities toward saying Yes or No to those asks, and encourages school leaders to build up two-way communication infrastructures with their constituents.

In case you prefer the audio-only option, here's a link to the slide deck for reference!

Steve Considine, superintendent of the School District of Baraboo, joins us to talk about how he does what he does.

Steve came up through Baraboo: middle school social studies teacher, then an administrator in Lake Mills, then back as Baraboo High School principal.

What drew our attention was a significant jump in Baraboo's parent survey results over the last couple of years, especially on district-level items, which are some of the slowest-moving numbers we track. Steve sees Baraboo's report card, attendance, and School Perceptions data as parallel lines. Derek shares what his own research shows about which comes first: things start feeling better, and outcomes follow.

Links

School District of Baraboo: https://www.barabooschools.net

Baraboo News Republic: https://wiscnews.com/news/community/baraboonewsrepublic/

Wisconsin DPI School and District Report Cards: https://dpi.wi.gov/accountability/report-cards

School Perceptions: https://www.schoolperceptions.com

Derek talks with Damian LaCroix, who became executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA) on July 1 after 33 years in public education, including nearly 20 as a superintendent in Howard-Suamico.

Derek raises a pattern out of a summer spent in the data: roughly 53 Wisconsin districts that are small and rural, with older communities and fewer households with children in school — and higher property tax rates, meaning they are doing more locally to fund their schools. Being a superintendent in one of those communities can be isolating, and those communities are rarely neighbors.

Damian's answer starts with loneliness. He points to former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who traveled the country expecting to hear about cancer and heart disease and kept hearing about disconnection instead. Hence this year's theme, Forward Together, taken from the state motto.

Also this conversation:

• Wellness and Leadership, a new initiative built on four seasonal variations on resilience, with regional stops, an online offering, and one-on-one consultation for superintendents who need more than the association can provide in a group setting.

• The Fall Superintendents Conference (Madison Concourse, September 23–25), themed Creating the Conditions for Successful Leadership. Joe Gothard, the 2024 national superintendent of the year, opens; State Superintendent Jill Underly and the governor speak Thursday morning; Tony Frontier keynotes on moving beyond compliance to an intentional approach to AI; AASA delivers a federal update; and clinical psychologist Doug Bolton closes on belonging. Attendees walk over to the Capitol for the state superintendent's address and the teacher and business partner of the year recognitions.

• The rest of the year: monthly topicals beginning in October, the joint State Education Convention in Milwaukee, a spring conference back in Madison, a national education conference in Atlanta in February, and the summer legal conference in July.

• Breakout sessions built from member input rather than handed down — district consolidation, strategic reset, a women in leadership roundtable — and a program designed so you can wade in shallow or go deep.

• Every attendee goes home with Simon Sinek's Together Is Better, courtesy of Performance Services, as the basis for a year-long book study. Check page four for the scratch-and-sniff scent of optimism.

Links

WASDA: https://www.wasda.org

Conference registration and calendar: https://www.wasda.org/event/26Fall

Together, Vivek Murthy: https://www.vivekmurthy.com/together-book

AI with Intention, Tony Frontier: https://www.ascd.org/books/ai-with-intention

Together Is Better, Simon Sinek: https://simonsinek.com/books/together-is-better

The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey: https://www.franklincovey.com/books/the-speed-of-trust/

Doug Bolton: https://www.drdougbolton.com

Performance Services: https://www.performanceservices.com

We're joined today by Harvard's Jal Mehta and Radford's Max Yurkovsky to discuss their new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods to Remake Public Schools.

Their project was motivated by a fascinating question: Why do reforms sometimes work?

The resulting book splits the difference between "improvement is impossible" and "improvement is easy if you just use this one neat trick." It's a fascinating conversation with a lot for school leaders to chew on.

Links to other works we discuss (or are operating in the background):

Jal Mehta, The Allure of Order

Max Yurkovsky, "Environmental, Technical, and Representational Uncertainty: A Framework for Making Sense of the Hidden Complexity of Educational Change"

Me, Education Reform and the Concept of Good Teaching

A summary of a summer's worth of research on all of our climate surveys and what they mean for the outcomes that districts and states tend to track, with a bonus section on Wisconsin referendums -- what impacts they have on various outcomes, how our surveys predict passage and vote share, and so on.

Dr. Ashley Carey joins us to talk about her recently-published study on students' experience of the Covid years. Tracking student survey data across six years and nearly 100,000 survey responses from Massachusetts schools, Ashley ranges from the specific findings of her paper to broader questions about what schools should be accountable for, what the pandemic did and didn't do to students, and what survey data can tell us that test scores never will.

This week, Mia Trippi, Senior Director of Public Affairs at Mueller Communications, joins us to unpack how public institutions build — and lose — the trust that makes hard conversations possible. She talks about why the act of communicating sometimes matters more than what you're actually saying, how a website's ease of navigation predicts public trust more than you might expect, and the many pitfalls public institutions encounter as they try to engage their constituents.

We're not out of the nerd woods yet, folks!

Continuing in our summer deep-dive series into our own survey data, today we're testing candidate predictors of teacher retention.

We have now sorted through literally every response to each staff, student, and parent survey we have run from the fall of 2021 to the present.

Filtering for Wisconsin public school districts in order to compare findings to five years' worth of datasets from the Wisconsin DPI all-staff report, we asked:

1.) Do our surveys predict teacher "stayers," "movers," and "leavers"?

2.) If so, which stakeholder survey does the most predictive work?

3.) But surely it can't be as predictive as salary or total compensation, right?

Short answers, as a headline:

1.) Yes, they do.

2.) Staff surveys are the least predictive of the three, weirdly. Student surveys are robustly predictive of teacher retention two years in advance, but not in the present. Parent surveys are tremendously predictive in the present, and once you know what parents think, student and staff surveys add virtually no explanatory power.

3.) Salary alone is modestly predictive of TEACHER retention in particular, but "total compensation" adds little value; and neither salary nor total compensation is predictive of any other staff category's retention.

4.) Also, if you have ANY climate survey data at all, that dwarfs salary in predictive value -- salary adds very little beyond what even the staff climate survey would predict.