Milwaukee Public Schools Need Teachers: MPS Talent Director Michael C. Harris Explains the Challenge

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Michael C. Harris

Michael C. Harris

When it comes to educating the 71,000 students attending Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), the system is under a dark cloud, and the thunder is growing louder. MPS needs an additional 200 teachers. I met Michael Harris for a conversation about the teacher shortage and other issues. He is senior director of talent management at MPS. His job is to recruit teachers and staff, and it’s a crucial job. There are over 8,000 MPS employees. 

Harris looks like a confident businessman. He wears horn-rimmed eyeglasses over a starched white shirt, tie and vest. He is 54, a father and a grandfather, but he could pass for 34. His personality brims with boyish enthusiasm, but he commands mature respect. He has devoted his adult life to public education, and he likes to talk about helping young people to achieve their goals and aspirations.

Tell me about your personal history.

I grew up on 12th and Burleigh, heart of zip code 53206. Youngest of five children in a single mom family. My mom served as the certified dietitian kitchen manager for the St. Thomas School on 35th and Brown and later as the manager at Lakeside Children’s Center on the East Side. My dad was a semi-truck driver in Chicago. We lived in a middle- class Black neighborhood where people got along and watched out for each other. I attended elementary and middle school in that neighborhood and then Riverside High School on Locust. Good school for kids who planned to go to college. Various tracks to get there. I chose the business track. While in high school, I worked part time at a Downtown bank to gain on-the-job experience. I learned how to dress for business and how a business operates.

After I graduated from high school, I got married and had two beautiful children, Brooklyn and Brittney. I attended MATC, then transferred to Lakeland University where I earned my bachelor’s degree. Through all this, I was working full time as a manager at various restaurants in the Milwaukee area to support my young family.”

How did your career path into education begin?

After I got out of college in 1997, I became a teacher in the Milwaukee Public Schools at Lincoln Center of the Arts middle school. Eventually, I got into school administration as an associate principal in the Menomonee Falls District. Then, I became the principal at Lakeshore Middle School in Mequon-Thiensville. In 2013, I got my dream job as the principal at Riverside University High School, my alma mater.

Those three plus years were the most rewarding years of my career. During my time there, I was recruited for the job of executive director of secondary teaching and learning in the Clarke County School District in Athens, Georgia. Later on, I became the executive director of talent management there. About a year and a half ago, I returned to Milwaukee during the pandemic to serve as the MPS senior director of talent management, my job now.

Nationally, there is a teacher shortage, and the situation in MPS is no different. Currently, the district has a significant shortage of teachers and paraprofessionals.

We are looking to fill more than 100 teaching positions in our elementary schools and nearly 100 positions in high schools. So it’s been a challenge. We’ve been quite aggressive in our recruitment efforts locally and even internationally. We’ve made recruiting trips to Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Nigeria, and we were pleased to find teachers in those places. The general problem has been a huge decline in the number of college students enrolling in the schools of education because the cost has gone up, but the wages for public and private teachers has not. The starting teaching salary in MPS for a newly licensed Wisconsin teacher is $46,979.”

To become qualified to teach in Wisconsin, you need to go through a tough process. Besides earning a college degree, you have to earn your state of Wisconsin license. One of the newer programs you oversee is the Milwaukee Public Schools University (MPSU)—a different way to become licensed?

MPSU is a non-credit bearing educator program approved by the State of Wisconsin to accept bachelor degreed MPS employees who don’t have a teaching license but want to become licensed teachers. Physical education is one of the subject areas where we’ve gotten approval. This program includes only employees of MPS and is not open to external candidates. I oversee the MPSU program. However, there is a manager who facilitates the programming and enrollment to make sure we align with all of the requirements for teacher licensure by the state. If we have a need, in this case for phys ed teachers, we have to be creative in how we address that need. The MPSU program is one way.  

One of the complaints I hear from inner city residents and community organizers is there are so few courses in the trades, for example, electricians, carpenters, mechanics and culinary. There is also a lack of tech courses such as computer programming and coding.

I understand. We don’t offer as many courses in the trades as we once did. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum because post-secondary education became geared to college preparation. Some inner-city kids of color don’t want to go to college and do not qualify for college.

I’d like to see more courses in trades come back at MPS. The trade jobs pay very well in this current job market. We are trying to recruit skilled trades people from the private sector and place them in the public salary schedule as teachers. This is very difficult because they are making a lot more money in the private sector.”

Ninety percent of MPS students are Black or brown. The central city has significant issues including broken families, high crime, low incomes and poverty. Many Black community leaders I’ve talked to—from community organizers to elected officials and appointed bureaucrats—think the best way to improve the inner city is to build up the infrastructure. By that, they mean new stores and businesses, quality housing, and better schools.

My field is education, and I can only answer from that point of view. My feeling is that with so many schools in our city and not just MPS, we lose a sense of place, a sense of neighborhood. And like you said, it takes community leaders, elected leaders, and next-door neighbors to rebuild our sense of community. Like schools, neighborhoods with strong community involvement are safer, connect people to services and jobs, and provide a better quality of life.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, MPS students have an average math proficiency score of 15% versus the Wisconsin public school average of 42% and reading proficiency score of 19% versus the 41% statewide average.

I think we need to get away from evaluating school children only based on standardized testing. Kids are more than just test scores. Children have multiple ways of demonstrating what they know and what they’ve learned. Standardized tests do not measure all of it. A young person might have a skill in the arts or in mechanics or carpentry. What does a standardized test tell you about that person? We need to find a better way to evaluate our children and encourage them on their own journeys.”

Do we expect too much from our teachers? After all, it is the families who raise and are responsible for their children.

Raising responsible children is a combined effort. Take me. I may be an educator, but I’m also a parent and a grandparent. I know teachers in MPS are working incredibly hard. They need parents and everyone in our community to support them and to rally around our schools and our kids.