MPS Is Still a Capitol Football

The latest move in the Capitol to reform Milwaukee Public Schools — where a state report says only 67% of students were “on track” last year to graduate and 85% lived in poverty — comes after decades of frustration. No past efforts by governors, legislators and mayors to improve how MPS teaches students have succeeded. They followed the controversial court-ordered busing to desegregate Milwaukee schools in the 1970s, which reshaped MPS.

And this year’s attempt is also likely to fail. It is being led by Republican legislators whose changes, if they pass the Legislature, will probably be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent of public instruction. MPS Board President Bob Peterson called a forced breakup “a losing proposal that is similar in different ways to past efforts to dissolve the largest school district in the state – the district that has the most students of color.”

“It’s one more attempt to get rid of MPS and get rid of the democratically-elected school board,” Peterson added.

Nonetheless, key Republicans — led by state Sens. Alberta Darling and Roger Roth and Reps. Jeremy Thiesfeldt and Robert Wittke — want to break up MPS and remove income limits on the statewide School Choice program, which lets students attend private schools with tax-funded vouchers. Choice got its start in Milwaukee.

Darling said the package “promotes school performance transparency and accountability [and] reasserts parental choice and rights.” She blamed “failed school leadership” for “eliminating educational opportunities in our schools.”

Their bill would dissolve MPS by July 1, 2024, and create four to eight smaller districts in Milwaukee. The boundaries of those districts would be determined by an MPS “redistricting and implementation commission” whose members would be appointed by the governor, Milwaukee mayor and state superintendent of public instruction by Oct. 1 of this year.

The Department of Public Instruction’s “report card” for MPS for the 2020-21 school year, when all Wisconsin school districts struggled with on-line learning forced by the Covid pandemic, documented these problems:

-50% of MPS students were African-Americans and 66% of these students had “below basic” skills in English Language Arts and 79% had “below basic” skills in math.

-33% of all MPS schools overall were rated as having “met few expectations” or “failed to meet expectations.”

-20% of all MPS students had disabilities.

This year, general state aid to MPS will total $603 million, or about 12% of statewide school aid, according to a December report from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. It is hard to see how up to eight local Milwaukee districts would cost less.

It’s not the first attempt by Republicans to break up MPS, and it probably won’t be the last. Four-term Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson suggested breaking up MPS in a budget speech, but Democrats who controlled the Legislature didn’t consider the idea.

Now president of the University of Wisconsin System, Thompson wouldn’t answer a question last week about whether he still thinks breaking up MPS is a good idea. “While president of the UW System, Tommy is focused on higher education and is not wading into such issues,” said Thompson spokesman Mark Pitsch.

But, in a 2018 book on Thompson’s career, Tommy: My Journey of a Lifetime, he said as governor he once seriously considered breaking up MPS into “four separate and more manageable districts, each with its own board and localized control.”

“I still think the idea has considerable merit,” Thompson added.

In the book, Thompson also noted one of the most controversial reforms — creating a nearly all-Black school district in Milwaukee’s central city — was suggested in 1987 by Democratic Rep. Annette Polly Williams, of Milwaukee.

“It would be called the North Division district” because it would include North Division High School, Thompson wrote. “Williams – and she was not alone – felt that a black school district under black authority couldn’t help but improve the education of black kids.”

Thompson wrote that he wanted to reform MPS, but couldn’t back her plan. “I was also leery of the state funding that would be required for a district that didn’t have much of a property tax base,” Thompson wrote, adding: “We had been shoveling money into MPS for years…[I]t had done little good other than empower an education bureaucracy run by powerful – and, to my mind, arrogant – teachers’ unions that resisted all change.”

Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) noted that, in 2009, former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle suggested a mayoral takeover of the district. Business leaders were supportive; Republican lawmakers balked.

But that same year, WPR added, former Republican state lawmakers Ted Kanavas and Leah Vukmir wanted to dissolve MPS and replace it with eight smaller districts.

That also went nowhere. Sound familiar?

Steven Walters started covering the Capitol in 1988. Contact him at stevenscotwalters@gmail.com