No sooner had Scott Walker become governor than the state’s largest teacher union, WEAC, proposed breaking up Milwaukee Public Schools into several districts. This put them at odds with its largest affiliate, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association. The division was quickly papered over when WEAC president, Mary Bell, dropped the proposal after Gov. Walker began stripping bargaining rights from public employees.
But WEAC’s proposal illustrated two points.
First, the teachers’ union was perfectly willing to throw Milwaukee under the yellow bus if it meant protecting education in the rest of the state. This “throwing red meat (Milwaukee) to the lions (Republicans)” has been largely discredited. If anything, we learned that Milwaukee is the canary in the coal mine. Vouchers and an open chartering system began in Milwaukee. Walker now wants to bring these innovations to the rest of the state. What starts in Milwaukee goes statewide.
Second, it shows how little the WEAC leadership understands big cities. Mary Bell comes from Wisconsin Rapids, and it is laughable that she believes MPS is too large to govern. There are a lot of school districts much larger than Milwaukee. MPS is the 33rd largest schools system in the country, and its mere 80 thousand students compare to New York City’s one million.
The opposite may be true, that Wisconsin has far too many small school districts which foster inefficiencies and fragmentation. A recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article pointed to the overlapping of governmental bodies in the Milwaukee-Chicago-Gary megacity as a chief impediment to economic development in this region.
This megacity has an astounding 2,155 governmental units, 453 of them school boards. Crazier still is that Wisconsin has K-8 school districts with their own school boards that feed into separate high school districts also with their own school boards. A Lake Geneva area school board director told me that they have tried to get several of these school boards to unify into a single K-12 district, but each time it has been placed on the ballot, the public has shot unification down.
As late as the 1930s, the number of school board members actually outnumbered the number of teachers in this county. A one room school would be its own district and that one teacher would be controlled by a nine or 11 member school board. Talk about micromanaging! The time is past when every little hamlet should have its own school board. Several states have countywide school districts such as Florida, Nevada, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina which make the list with the largest school districts in the country. (The whole state of Hawaii is a single school district.)
With the exception of West Allis-West Milwaukee, every Milwaukee county suburban district has a single high school. I have long advocated that St. Francis could save a lot of money if it merged with Cudahy. Other districts would see similar savings. But why stop there. Imagine what the conversation would be like if Milwaukee County were all one school district, if the city of Milwaukee would be ruled and taxed together with its suburban neighbors like Cudahy, Whitefish Bay and Greendale. How a countywide school district would be put together and govern is critical, but we should have the conversation.
For every study pointing out thatlarger districts are better, there is another study supporting smaller districts. In this community, the real issue may be psychological divisions between city and suburbs which fosters parochialism rather than cooperation. Metropolitan Milwaukee can only move forward if it moves together as single community.
