INTRODUCTION:
MILWAUKEE, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, AND THE FIGHT
FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner
In the grip of a national recession that hit rust belt states especially hard,
Milwaukee was used to bad news in the spring of 2010. Home foreclosures
continued unabated. Decent-paying manufacturing jobs kept disappearing.
The public schools were battered by one dismal report after another, from
truancy to dropouts and test scores.
On Wednesday, March 24, a report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
shocked even the most cynical. The state’s African American fourth graders
were at a lower reading level than their peers anywhere in the country.
Lower than black students in Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
and the District of Columbia. Worst of all, lower than Mississippi, a state that
in the Wisconsin psyche was forever trapped in a stereotype of outhouses
and illiteracy.
Although the results were statewide, they were an indictment of Milwaukee
in general and its public schools in particular. Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s
largest city, is home to about three-quarters of the state’s African American
population, and about 60 percent of the city’s public school students
are African American.
A few months earlier, Wisconsin had earned another worst in the nation”
recognition, this time for black joblessness. Although driven by
Milwaukee-area figures, the news failed to make major headlines in Milwaukee.
It was left to the Washington Post to do a Christmas Eve feature on how
Wisconsin’s official unemployment rate for African Americans surpassed
that of every other state, reaching an average of 22 percent for the past 12
months.” The jobless rate was even worse. Looking at those not in the labor
force for various reasons (including incarceration), 53.3 percent of
working-age black men in Milwaukee did not have a job in 2009. At the
time, it was the highest rate ever recorded in the city. A year later, the rate
was 55.3 percent.
In March 2011, meanwhile, Milwaukee gained notoriety as the most
segregated metropolitan region in the country. The designation, based on
U.S. Census data and compiled by social scientists from the University of
Michigan, was reported on Salon.com. Milwaukee’s mainstream media
chose not to report the findings.
A half century earlier, in the 1950s, Milwaukee was a symbol of industrial
power and a promised land of family-supporting jobs. Even as late as
1970, the black male employment rate was about 85 percent, just a shade
lower than the white percentage. No one would have predicted that within
a generation, Milwaukee would become a national symbol of joblessness,
decline, and racial disparity.
What’s more, few would have foreseen that the nation’s urban centers
would become synonymous with failing schools” surrounded by equally
hard- pressed neighborhoods. Or that at the beginning of the twenty-first
century the most segregated schools would be outside the South, with the
fifteen most segregated metropolitan regions in the Northeast and Midwest.6
Above all, no one would have predicted that Milwaukee’s educational
claim to fame would be its school voucher program, the country’s oldest
and largest and a conservative model for similar initiatives. An unabashed
abandonment of public education, Milwaukee’s voucher program has funneled
more than $1 billion in public money into private and religious schools
since 1990.
What happened? How did Milwaukee, the working-class but ever-optimistic
setting for Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, fall so far from its idealized 1950s image?
In this era of standardized tests, the tendency is to look for a single
correct” answer. But the lessons of Milwaukee cannot be approached as a
multiple-choice quiz. Milwaukee’s plightas is true in so many other
American citiesis rooted in complex and interdependent issues of
housing, jobs, and schools, all of which are shaped by race and class. One issue
may dominate at a particular moment: Milwaukee’s most sustained civil
rights protests, for instance, focused on housing discrimination. But over
time, housing, jobs, and schools have worked together as the most important
mechanisms for reproducing in equality, in particular racial inequities.
Among those issues, public education plays a unique role. It is fundamental
not only to the individual hopes and dreams of students and their
families but also to this country’s vision of an informed citizenry and a vibrant democracy.
As Justice William J. Brennan wrote in the 1982 Plyler v.
Doe decision upholding public schooling for undocumented children, public
education is not merely some governmental benefit’ indistinguishable
from other forms of social welfare legislation. Both the importance of education
in maintaining our basic institutions and the lasting impact of its
deprivation on the life of the child mark the distinction.”
Milwaukee and Wisconsin are symbols of middle America, and not just
because of their geographic location in the heartland. Wisconsin has long
been recognized as a political swing state, neither firmly Republican nor
Democratic. Like Milwaukee, it embodies working-class pride and values.
Like Milwaukee, it faces an uncertain future in the postindustrial world.
I began working on this book in 2009, disturbed by Milwaukee’s glaring
disparities and concerned by what passed for policy debate. Throughout
Wisconsin, meanwhile, power brokers had taken advantage of racial
stereotypes to foster the illusion that the state could prosper even
as Milwaukee,its largest city, declined. As for education, private voucher schools
and semiprivate charter schools seemed to be the only reform that policy
makers wanted to talk about.
In February 2011, newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker
made clear his willingness to abandon public schools and the public sector
across the state, not just in Milwaukee. Walker’s first assault involved
unprecedented legislation that eliminated collective bargaining rights for most
public sector workers in Wisconsinironically, the first state to allow
collective bargaining by public sector unions. In Wisconsin, elementary,
secondary, and higher education employees account for the majority of those
employed in the public sector. Teachers and students soon were in the forefront
opposing Walker’s antiunion agenda.
A few weeks later, Walker cut $840 million from funding of public elementary
and secondary schools, $250 million from the state university system,
and $72 million from the technical collegesthe biggest education cuts
in Wisconsin’s history. At the same time, Walker significantly expanded the
private school voucher program.
In response to Walker’s proposals in the spring of 2011, Wisconsin became
the scene of massive, round-the-clock protests unlike anything that
had ever happened in the state. Every day, for almost a month, demonstrations
at the state capitol in Madison linked the attack on the public sector
with a defense of democracy. Wisconsin’s sleeping giant of populist outrage
awakened.
Walker’s conservative agenda in Wisconsin was part of a national strategy.
Th e nation’s eyes were soon on Wisconsin, and We Are Wisconsin”
became a national battle cry in the growing movement to defend the middle
class and rebuild our country’s democracy. In the fall of 2011, taking a cue
from the Arab Spring and the round-the-clock sleepovers during the Madison
uprising, the Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York City. A
new chapter in the nation’s history unfolded.
All politics is local, but with national repercussions. The Milwaukee
story is the Wisconsin story is the nation’s story. And I keep returning to
the question: what happened?
How did Milwaukee fall so far from grace? Will it find redemption in the
twenty-first century? More important, what does this iconic city in America’s
heartland tell us about the future of public education in the United States
and our vision of democracy in our multicultural society?
