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 plight--as is true in so many other American cities--is 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 Wisconsin--ironically, 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 colleges--the 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? Excerpted from Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City by Barbara Miner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
