The good news is that the latest attempt by white, suburban Republicans to wrest control of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) from the racially diverse school board that was democratically elected by Milwaukeeans, whose children actually attend those schools, seems to be disappearing into thin air.
The bad news is that decades of dishonest attacks on Milwaukee Public Schools to try to peddle a vicious, right-wing political agenda has so poisoned the educational debate that school officials rejected what appeared to be a sincere attempt to use an ill-conceived state law to provide Milwaukee students with some badly needed support services.
Supporters of Milwaukee’s public schools are right to be skeptical of so-called reforms that anti-Milwaukee Republicans in Madison claim will improve education in Milwaukee.
Every one of them since Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s 1990 voucher program, which diverted tax funds to private and religious schools, has resulted in less funding for public education.
Republicans even invented a preposterous, insulting theory to pretend that slashing financial resources for Milwaukee schools would actually improve those schools: If public schools have to compete with private schools and profit-making charter schools for students and taxpayer funding, public schools will be forced to stop being bad and become good schools to attract more students and more money.
But that’s just a cover for the real Republican agenda of slashing taxes for education and destroying the power of teachers’ unions to improve pay and benefits to attract talented teachers. That’s the driving force behind Gov. Scott Walker’s scorched-earth education cuts and Act 10’s destruction of collective bargaining for public employees.
OSPP Wasn’t Intended to Help MPS
There’s little question the latest phony Republican reform, called the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program, was never really intended to benefit Milwaukee schools.
Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills and state Rep. Dale Kooyenga of Brookfield introduced it without any input from Milwaukee school officials, parents or, frankly, anyone who knew anything at all about the needs and challenges of urban school districts that serve large numbers of students living in poverty.
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The obvious priority was to begin piecemeal removal of control over the city’s public schools from Milwaukee’s own democratically elected school board.
Republicans start with the unfair assumption that Milwaukee’s education leadership can’t possibly succeed because the city’s schools are experiencing the same academic difficulties as every other urban school district in the country.
Never mind that the current school board continues to move the quality of education forward, despite horrendous state budget cuts, by hiring strong, impressive superintendents in Darienne Driver and her predecessor, Gregory Thornton.
Darling and Kooyenga’s contribution was to decree that three to five of the lowest performing schools should be removed from school board control each year and handed over to, surprise, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele.
Why choose Abele, since he had no known expertise or interest in public education?
Apparently, Abele was the only Milwaukee Democrat who Republicans expected do their bidding, since he’d worked with Republican legislators to pass a similar law to destroy the democratically elected County Board’s authority over his office by reducing supervisors’ jobs to part-time.
But Abele, who really doesn’t like to be told what to do, wasn’t so eager to roll over. The law authorized Abele to appoint an education commissioner to turn over targeted schools to those nice, non-union, profit-making charter school operators Republicans love so much.
That didn’t happen because Abele chose Demond Means, superintendent of the Mequon-Thiensville School District, as his education commissioner.
Means, an African American graduate of Riverside High School, is a respected Wisconsin educator who has never made any secret of his dream to one day become superintendent of his hometown school district.
That’s why Means developed a real school partnership plan for Abele that was actually designed to try to improve low-performing MPS schools. Needless to say, it bore little resemblance to the anti-Milwaukee vision of Darling and Kooyenga.
Means would serve as consultant to the targeted schools, which would remain part of MPS. MPS teachers and staff would retain their jobs, benefits and union membership. MPS would receive per-pupil state funding at the charter school rate. The poorly drafted state law provided no specific funding at all for the schools or even the commissioner’s job.
The most significant innovation in the partnership is that students and their families would receive privately funded, wraparound social services such as health care, housing assistance and job training.
Anyone examining why many impoverished students perform poorly in school knows it has much more to do with everything else going in those children’s lives than with schools, teachers or administrators.
Which is why it’s a crying shame the well-intentioned plan was flatly rejected by MPS as just another Republican threat. If Means succeeded with his holistic approach, it could have become a model for urban education around the country.
It’s too bad real educational innovation dies in the poisonous atmosphere created by decades of attacks on public schools passed off as education reform.
