End Game

Numbers can be serious business. Educators in particular have a lot at stake in statistics. And so it was last fall when I reported that Milwaukee Public Schools were on the short end of the budgetary stick when it came to public vs. private school enrollment counts. As I wrote in the November issue of this magazine, the former principal of MPS’ Sherman Elementary claimed that a flood of students had shown up on Sherman’s doorstep from choice and charter schools following the enrollment head count in late September. Many of the students had “special needs,” said Erma Cannon, severely…

You’re walking along the lakefront on a sunny afternoon with a friend from out of town. You decide you’d like a drink and a bite to eat, maybe sit along the glistening waters and watch the boats glide by as you munch on appetizers and sip a cocktail. You ponder your choices. Summerfest? Sorry, the festival grounds are only open part time, only for a fee and only on select days from June through September. The cafe in the Milwaukee Art Museum? Again, pay at the door. And they’ve never gotten around to putting tables outside on that perfect lakeside…

There was a lot of hoopla recently when Children’s Rights Inc. and the Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union settled their decade-old suit alleging that the state “failed to protect the health and safety of the abused, neglected and abandoned children in its care.” Not that things had improved. In fact, days earlier, lead attorney Eric E. Thompson called Milwaukee’s child welfare system “one of the worst” in the country. “In more than half the cases, federal law is being violated,” he said. Now there’s a court agreement requiring the Milwaukee Bureau of Child Welfare to get closer to following the federal…

Jeff and I crossed paths for the last time one year ago. His smile was wide and his skin was lobster red, burned by the sun. He had been living at McKinley Marina, squatting, I guess you’d say, on a boat he said he intended to buy whenever his business partner could get his finances together. This was typical of Jeff. He was prone to outlandish acts – stunts and schemes that were sometimes hard to fathom. It was an outlandish act that took him out of this world in April, his most outlandish stunt of all, an act of…

Change comes in baby steps. And when tradition meets the unfamiliar, change can slow to a crawl. Take the case of the Boy Scouts and gay America. In the early 1990s, gay activists made a lot of noise when the Scouts announced that homosexuals were not welcome around the campfire. The proclamation – decidedly unfriendly, uncourteous and unkind – was made after the club booted out a New Jersey eagle scout when leaders discovered he was gay. The young man, an assistant scoutmaster with 30 merit badges, sued for discrimination. In Milwaukee, the activist group Queer Nation pressured one of…

Wisconsin Works is a masterpiece of public relations. Visitors from Britain, New Zealand, the Netherlands and nearly every state in the union have come here to study W-2. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government gave Wisconsin a national award for “Innovations in American Government.” The program has been tirelessly promoted by our ever ebullient governor, Tommy Thompson, who calls W-2 “by far the biggest change in American social policy in 60 years.” W-2, after all, was supposed to “make work pay,” to free AFDC mothers from the trap of welfare, to replace a “broken” system of dreaded dependency with “an environment…

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In this corner, you have state Sen. Lena Taylor. The Milwaukee Democrat announced her plan to unseat Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker last October, not with a rousing campaign rally, but with a one-page press release. For weeks after, her contact with voters came largely through MySpace and Facebook appearances on her Web site. With little more than two months left before the April 1 election, the challenger had barely lifted her gloves. In the other corner is Walker, the incumbent, willing at least to duke it out, but not very interested in the prize. Over and over, he’s signaled…

I last visited the Dominican Sisters of the Perpetual Rosary five years ago to find out how a handful of nuns viewed the world from inside a cloistered monastery. Mother Miriam Leonard, the leader of this West Side monastery, was patient as I posed my skeptical reporter’s questions about her life of solitude and prayer. And as our conversation drifted from religion to politics to the woes of society, I was struck by her insightfulness. For a woman cloistered inside the same building since 1950, with furloughs only for doctor visits, she had a far-reaching sensibility about the world outside,…

For 36 years, E. Michael McCannhas been the conscience of the community. McCann has been Milwaukee County district attorney since 1969, serving so long that most voters can remember no one else holding that position. The one-time seminary student has had a reputation as a rock of morality. McCann was the conservative Irish Catholic who fiercely opposed abortion and favored anti-obscenity legislation. But he was also the liberal who spoke out in favor of integrating neighborhoods and helping the homeless. He was, in short, a complex man of strong convictions. But in recent years, the halo has begun to disappear…