Helen Lovejoy is more than a minister’s wife. She is an icon, the yellow-faced bulldog behind one of society’s most enduringly annoying mantras:
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
In Milwaukee, this cry often falls on deaf ears. The Milwaukee Public School system is less an educational structure than it is a punch line on fail blog. Students are performing far below expected levels, resources are few, and ultimately too few people are thinking about the children.
Fortunately, Gov. Doyle decided to step in. Knowing there needed to be a change in MPS, and potentially motivated by a larger desire to make Wisconsin attractive for the Obama administration’s Race To The Top grants, Doyle announced a bill that would take significant authority away from the school board and put it in the hands of Milwaukee’s mayor. These powers, which include the ability to select the superintendent and set the annual tax levy, should not be taken lightly, and one would hope a busy mayor would find adequate time to thoroughly look at the city’s public school system. After all, if you have time to lose a fight at a state fair, you can budget a few days to deal with education.
The detractors on the proposal are relatively obvious. The school board doesn’t want to see their influence shrivel, and it’d be hard to blame them.
No one wants to sit on an effectively neutered committee. Even more, despite the grim purgatory MPS currently whimpers in, there are still a number of actively involved individuals and community groups working to improve the status quo. The problem, of course, is this is no time to sit back and watch the slow gears of change sputter into action; we need to take serious, decisive action.
The Coalition to Stop the MPS Takeover, a group that is — surprisingly — against Doyle’s plan, marched on the Capitol yesterday. In a statement leading up to the event, Jerry Ann Hamilton, a coalition member and Milwaukee NAACP president said “we have struggled for over 100 years to protect and sustain our right to vote and we are not going to allow our rights to be taken away from us now.” Typically, this would be an easy statement to agree with, but where exactly has this vote, as it relates to MPS, gotten us? The democratic process is a beautiful thing if people care, yet if it fails to promote positive change, we can’t allow ourselves to wallow in our own crapulence. This isn’t FDR packing the courts; this is the education of children in Wisconsin’s largest city.
If there is one legitimate counter to the governor’s proposal, it’s that a mayor isn’t the individual best suited to deal with these powers of appointment and levy setting. It’s true Milwaukee has no shortage of issues to deal with, and while education is definitely a white elephant, it’s hardly the only one — that town has enough pachyderms to open a circus.
But the majority of power still lies at the feet of the superintendent, so it’s not as if the Milwaukee mayor needs to learn the intricacies of the system. He’ll need to know how to pick the strongest candidate. No one’s sure whether that’ll happen, but it’s worth taking a chance.
As Bill Callahan said, “you’ve got to bust up a sidewalk sometimes if you want people to gather round.” While the heart of Doyle’s proposal is at effective change, it’s important that change come in the form of a dramatic power shift. MPS is dying, reforms are either non-existent or slow moving and something had to give. With any luck, centralizing these powers could lead to a brighter future for Milwaukee’s youth. And if nothing else, at least we’re thinking about them.
Sean Kittridge ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism.
