Photo: Thinkstock - Getty Images
Public schools bus
Two Republican legislators from affluent suburban areas, River Hills and Brookfield, with the backing of Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, slipped an amendment into the state budget that will have a very serious impact on the future of poor, predominately black inner-city Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) children. There were no hearings in Milwaukee and the public had absolutely no input, but now this amendment is state law and poor children will be the victims.
This amendment creating the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program will begin to privatize Milwaukee’s public schools under the guise of helping poor children, despite the fact that there is virtually no solid research that shows that the current Milwaukee school privatization schemes are improving our children’s educational outcomes. We do know a few things from the research on educational outcomes and our own Milwaukee experiments. One is that using public school dollars to reduce class size, for example, can significantly improve student outcomes, and we also know that monies that go into these public school privatization schemes make the private school management companies millions of dollars.
To make matters even worse, this legislation makes Chris Abele an education czar and he will appoint a commissioner to slowly start privatizing our public schools. The first year, he can privatize three schools and thereafter an additional five schools per year. Abele has absolutely no professional expertise with urban education or poor children in general. He is the child of a billionaire and lacking a college degree he could not even qualify to be a teacher in MPS, let alone be the education czar. He went to expensive private schools with his family providing him with all the educational opportunities that money can buy, and yet he was still unable to graduate from college. If the average Milwaukee child had a fraction of those opportunities, they would become teachers, doctors, engineers, social workers or Ph.D.’s.
Abele can give you all the excuses he wants about why he couldn’t graduate, but many feel that comes down to the fact that he either doesn’t respect education and fails to understand its real value, or more realistically, as some who have worked closely with him have stated off the record, he either didn’t have the self-discipline or ability to graduate from college. As one of these people said, “When you have a lot of money, it is amazing how you can hide many serious shortcomings.” Either way, he is a very poor role model for encouraging children who will have to work for a living to strive to graduate from high school and post-high school education.
|
|
Low income, inner-city children’s futures should not be the damaged by naïve policies created and managed by people who have absolutely no understanding of the complex challenge of improving the educational outcomes in our inner-city neighborhoods.
