MPS School Board district 7

The daily today has profiles on the candidates for the Milwaukee Public Schools 7th district race, the one that may be most pivotal this year. There's the good guy, John Malloy Hagen, and the very, very bad guy, Danny Goldberg.

What makes Goldberg so very bad? Try this: "Until September, Goldberg worked for the Technical Assistance and Leadership Center [TALC], an organization he helped create. The center--and Goldberg, specifically--was instrumental in winning Milwaukee a multimillion-dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to reform its high schools by creating new, smaller ones, and breaking apart existing, large ones."

Yay, you might be saying, millions for MPS! Why is that wrong? Well, three things in particular:

1. The only big winner from the Gates grant is TALC itself:

   At first glance, the $17 million Gates grant sounds like a lot. But MPS is guaranteed only about $9 million, which, on an annual basis, is about $65 per MPS high school student.
   
   Financially, the only certainty is that the Gates grant is a bonanza for the Technical Assistance and Leadership Center of TransCenter for Youth. A little-known non-profit with strong ties to the voucher movement, the group will receive one-third, or $5.75 million, of the Gates money to provide training and support. (The grant's remaining $2.5 million goes toward forming 10 non-MPS voucher and charter schools.)

   
   
2. The big losers in this whole "small school redisign" fiasco are students, teachers, and parents. As much as you may hear that the new "multiplexed" high schools are doing so voluntarily, don't believe it. Several high schools--North Division and Marshall, among them--were given the ultimatum to change or close.
   
   Our MPS Superintendents have the habit of unilaterally making decisions that affect the entire city. The immediate past guy, Spence Korte, for example, snuck off to DC to claim, without one ounce of community support, that Milwaukee wanted to be the "charter school district." And witness, for example, the recent flap over the current guy's decision to change school start times, a decision which seemed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, to plop fully formed into committee. The committee meeting I wrote about a few weeks back only had community members attending because the lone board member opposed blast-faxed schools the day before with news of the hearing.
   
   This small-school baloney is no different. Take the story of the Advanced Language and Academic Studies High School, or ALAS. The idea behind ALAS is not so bad--a school dedicated to a high-standards bilingual education. But its implementation has been nothing short of embarrassing. It was originally slated to be housed at South Division High School--a school that already had a vibrant bilingual program--without the consent of South's staff or parent group. In addition, the students in ALAS would be siphoned from South, gutting the bilingual AP programs and costing South hundreds of thousands of dollars. What's worse, the planners exaggerated how much community support they had.
   
   After a compromise that delayed ALAS's opening for a year, the powers that be finally decided to stick ALAS at Kosciuszko Middle school, again without the consent of the Kozy community, whose students would be relegated to the basement while ALAS took the upper two floors. Expect more of the same as the "small school" crap continues.
   
   
3. Since we can expect more of the same, it is doubly important that we not continue to elect people to the school board whose loyalties lie with non-public schools. It boggles my mind--seriously, it's like scrambled eggs up there--how this city can put people on the public school board whose campaigns are funded by national voucher money and whose goal is to continue gutting Milwaukee's public schools in favor of ineffective and even dangerous private schools.
   
   John Malloy Hagen knows where success will come from. He is a detective with the Milwaukee Police Department, and he's worked school details before, and he knows that unless we can get kids into classrooms with quality teachers, we're doomed. And, using almost the same language I've used to describe the voucher fiasco, he says, "I don't like the idea of experimenting with children." Now, when we are at a serious crossroads, is not the time to turn over our children to unproved experimentation and start ramming through "reform" that serves only to tear communities apart. Danny Goldberg, pockets full of Gates money, campaign coffers full of voucher money, wants to keep doing just that.

So, if you live in district 7, Hagen is your guy. If you don't, tell everyone you know who does. At the very least, you still need to vote April 5 for Libby Burmaster--see what I wrote yesterday for more on why.