Educating Milwaukee: How One City’s History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped Its Schools, author and educator James K. Nelsen examines Milwaukee’s legacy of segregation as it relates to the state and structure of the Milwaukee Public Schools system. A current employee of MPS, Nelsen encourages readers to reconsider past notions of success in order to inspire new solutions and meaningful progress within the struggling school district.
In your book you discuss some of the misconceptions we often have about Brown v. Board of Education—how we misidentify it as this watershed moment that caused immediate change, when that really wasn’t the case in many places. I was surprised to learn that Milwaukee was integrating schools in 1976.
The issue with studying Brown—and we all get Brown in eighth grade and again in high school—is that it’s always seen as a watershed moment, but what people forget is that Linda Brown actually lived in an integrated neighborhood … So when we say that [Brown] integrated the schools, that is only true to an extent because from that point on school districts had to prove that they had not segregated students by race, and that is why MPS was able to get away with it for so long because of the segregated residential pattern in Milwaukee … The school board was actually engaging in racial segregation so [integration] was very long and very drawn out. The one good thing about that though is that it gave Milwaukeeans a long time to prepare for integration and we were able to avoid the violence of other cities like Boston.
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What patterns emerged from your research?
The overall pattern is one of choice. That’s why I break the history up into three time periods, The Era of No Choice, Forced Choice and School Choice. One of the things I sought to demonstrate in the book is that we keep trying this solution that hasn’t really improved anything, and so then we say, well it didn’t work so therefore we need more of it, so maybe we just didn’t apply enough of it. What you end up with then is a financially strapped public school system competing against all the other options and all of these other options are competing for the same students, and also the same pot of money. So we’ve divided that population and divided the financial resources.
What do you hope people gain from reading Educating Milwaukee?
My objective, honestly, was to start a discussion. Specifically, I would like to see it happen in the Milwaukee area, but on another level, I see it as a larger statewide discussion because unfortunately the policymakers in Madison, even those with good intentions, really don’t understand urban education. They really don’t understand how schools are different in the Milwaukee area today. If we can engage the decision makers and the legislators and the governor’s office, as well as the public, to start the discussion about what it’s really like to go to school here, to teach here, to live here, we can all make better decisions.
