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Public schools bus
Decade after decade, Wisconsin keeps waking up on Groundhog Day to hear Republican candidates attacking public schools and the professional educators who have devoted their lives to teaching children, a noble calling if there ever was one.
The racist attacks aimed at defunding urban school districts like Milwaukee Public Schools that educate black and brown children are nothing new. But Republicans think public energy is on their side now because of all those angry parents threatening the lives of school board members. They’re wrong.
Rebecca Kleefisch and Kevin Nicholson, the current Republican candidates for governor, are mistakenly confusing their own party’s most dangerous extremists with the public. Most parents are far more concerned about their children attending safe, well-funded schools than they are about mask mandates.
Rolling out tired old Republican proposals to destroy MPS and increase taxpayer-funded vouchers for children attending private schools only helps to promote the political importance of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers as the protector of public education. The strong support of Evers, a career educator and state Superintendent of Schools, for increased state funding for education at every level was the winning issue for him in 2018 in defeating education-defunding Gov. Scott Walker, a far more popular Republican than either Kleefisch or Nicholson.
False Impression
Republicans are under the impression attacking public schools is popular again because Virginia, a blue state that voted for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, narrowly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in November’s low-turnout off-year election after he advocated for parental control of schools. Republicans elsewhere probably haven’t heard more than half of Virginia’s school districts are defying Youngkin’s ban on school mask mandates and suing him for violating state health laws.
Youngkin also banned the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, a university graduate school topic that has never been taught in any elementary or high school anywhere. Youngkin added an evil twist by setting up a telephone tip line for parents and students to report teachers discussing any “divisive” topics in their classrooms so those teachers can be “rooted out.” Remember when debates about divisive topics were considered education?
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Evers vetoed Wisconsin Republicans’ own version of such legislation “because I object to creating new censorship rules that restrict schools and educators from teaching honest, complete facts about important historical topics like the Civil War and civil rights.”
Racism? In America?
Parents don’t really have to worry that their children will learn about their country’s history of racism. Their children see it for themselves every day in America. The kids are alright. That’s why they’re way ahead of their parents on climate change and keeping guns out of their schools. They’re even testifying at school board meetings against removing Toni Morrison and other books dealing with important and, yes, divisive issues from their school libraries.
After tearing apart the public school systems that educate the overwhelming majority of Wisconsin’s children, the only Republican plan to improve education is to keep increasing taxpayer-funded vouchers allowing a few public school parents to send their children to private schools.
Private voucher schools are an overpriced alternative doing little to replace the educational services of public schools. Wisconsin’s 32-year-old voucher system has grown into a $350 million program educating about 10,000 students in more than 250 private schools statewide. Those hundreds of millions of dollars are a constant drain of the budgets of public schools educating more than 850,000 students. About 80% of students receiving vouchers to attend private schools have never attended public schools, but taxpayers are now paying for their education primarily in religious schools they have no control over.
Targeting Cities
The reason Republican legislators and candidates for governor are once again targeting urban school districts like MPS for destruction is the increasingly open racism of the Republican party. It’s also not just a coincidence the current Milwaukee School Board is one of the most racially diverse and socially progressive in its history. In 1986 President Bob Peterson founded Rethinking Schools, a Milwaukee-based publisher of a regular magazine, books and teaching materials for progressive teachers nationally promoting racial and social justice in public education.
Peterson accurately describes the latest attempt by Republicans to blow up MPS as denying “choice” for families to attend successful schools anywhere in the city including college preparatory schools on the north and south sides, language immersion schools, Montessori schools, an arts school and other popular specialty programs.
Gov. Evers calls it treating children like political pawns. “If Republicans are successful in bringing their radical agenda into our schools, we’d have loaded guns on school grounds, our state’s largest school district would be thrown into chaos and we’d spend money responding to lawsuits that could better be spent in the classroom,” his spokeswoman said.
By doubling down on their extremism, Republicans are taking their attempts to destroy public education that lost the last governor’s race into the next one as well.
