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On Tuesday, April 7, residents of the North and West Sides of Milwaukee, including Washington Heights and Sherman Park, will be able to vote for their representative on the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) Board of Directors—longtime incumbent Jeff Spence or community activist Wendell Harris. The two men faced off eight years ago.
The election comes amid much fast-paced “reform” efforts in the state Capitol. Although Gov. Scott Walker hasn’t specifically targeted MPS, he has delivered a $126 million cut to public schools around the state, which means a $12 million cut for MPS next year. Walker’s budget also includes making the Common Core standards optional, eliminating Chapter 220, SAGE and STEM programs and no longer funding school breakfast. Also up for debate is allowing a state-run board to oversee charter schools and changing the state’s report cards to make direct comparisons more difficult.
Harris and Spence spoke to the Shepherd about why they’re running for the MPS board and how they’d handle the district’s challenges.
Wendell Harris
Harris, an A.O Smith retiree and community activist, said he’s running for the same reason he ran eight years ago.
“I’m convinced that first of all I’m the best person to represent the district in the Milwaukee Public Schools system and my commitment to maintain a strong, viable public school system is, I would say, second to none,” Harris said. “And that the person I’m running against, eight years ago I was not convinced that he had the same commitment and I’m still not convinced of that today.”
Harris said his top priority is to maintain local control of MPS, despite efforts in the Legislature to expand charter schools via a state-run board and, potentially, impose additional sanctions on struggling schools.
“This is the second administration that’s going to be looking to take control of the district,” Harris said. “And we’re going to fight that fight together, working to improve educational opportunities for our children while we have this control.”
Harris is a very strong opponent of schools privatization efforts, saying that private schools that receive public dollars don’t provide equal access to all kids. But at MPS, no child is turned away.
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“My concern is what is this privatization going to lead to?” Harris questioned. “Is it leading us to not have a public school system? What will be left is the shell of a public school system. Who would have access to it?”
He said that once schools become privatized they no longer are accountable the public.
“For years I chaired the education committee for the Milwaukee NAACP and when I challenged some of the private institutions about some of the practices they have, and the parents would come to me with concerns about their children, I have been told on more than one occasion that we are a private institution and you have no standing with us,” Harris said. “And that is something that we cannot afford to have across the board in a democratic society.”
He said he disagreed with the Republican reform efforts in the Legislature, including Gov. Scott Walker’s opposition to Common Core standards, as a way to curry favor with right-wing voters.
“This is a political decision looking for political gain,” Harris said.
Pointing to things that the MPS board can do no matter what happens in Madison, Harris said that he wants to ensure that kids arrive at school ready to learn and that they have a safe environment in which to learn. He’s very active in restorative justice efforts for teens, which help them resolve conflicts peacefully.
Jeff Spence
Jeff Spence, the director of agency services at Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage District, has served on the board since 1999, having served two terms as president. Despite being on the board for 16 years, he said that he still has much to offer the district.
“I feel that I can still add value from a policy-making perspective,” Spence said.
He said his goals have remained the same over his tenure on the board.
“Improving education outcomes for young people, that’s really what it’s all about,” Spence said. “Finding ways to make sure that that happens for kids along the entire socioeconomic continuum.”
But, he acknowledged, MPS has a long way to go in achieving those goals.
“If you take a look at the results, it hasn’t been done,” Spence said. “And that’s the challenge for urban school systems. I think you see pockets of success but when you take a look at it for the entire populace, whether you’re choice or charter or traditional, there is no magic bullet to that.”
He said MPS schools are succeeding when they have a strong leadership team, experienced educators and high student attendance. Spence said that the district has lost a lot of professionals in the past few years and that MPS administrators and the board need to build up the ranks of strong leaders.
“It’s our responsibility, or the administration’s responsibility, to make sure they’re helping those professionals to grow so that they can be great at delivering curriculum and managing a complex organization like a school,” Spence said.
Spence said he wanted to ensure that parents could easily find the student performance of voucher and public schools. Walker, however, wants to allow voucher schools to choose from a variety of exams and therefore make accountability more difficult.
“I would want to make sure that the comparisons are clear,” Spence said. “We’ve always had private schools and there’s always been this argument that private schools deliver better education than public schools. But the public or families have never really had a way to measure in a consistent fashion the outcomes in an apples-to-apples fashion.”
He said he supports the Common Core standards, which MPS is working to implement, and doesn’t understand why Walker and some Republican legislators have targeted it.
“When I look at Common Core, I see it as we’re trying to give young people a sense of what we expect them to attain from an educational perspective as they mature through the K-12 system,” Spence said. “That’s all it is. That gives teachers and school systems an opportunity to align the resources to achieve those goals. I don’t understand this whole notion of people seeing this tool as something that will wreck the state.”
