Nowhere is the crisis in our democracy clearer than in the battle over public schools.
In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s attack on teachers’ unions ushered in an era of “divide and conquer” politics that turned the state red and helped elect Donald Trump.
Today, Walker and other Republican policymakers around the country, including Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, are pushing a combination of budget cuts and school privatization schemes that undermine the very foundations of public education, exacerbate inequality, and further divide people.
Public school advocates are scrambling to pull together and fight back.
On August 1, a brilliant, sunny day, cars filled the parking lot at Appleton North High School in Wisconsin. Teachers on summer break, parents of public school kids, and activists from around the state filled classrooms for the Wisconsin Public Education Network’s fourth annual Summer Summit.
Scott Walker is up for re-election this fall. Leading the field of possible Walker opponents in the Democratic primary is state superintendent of public instruction Tony Evers, who spoke at the summit, announcing his plan to dramatically increase state funding for public schools.
The activists gathered in Appleton were delighted. They had previously met with Evers and urged him to make a bolder plan than the one he started out with, one public-school advocate told me. By the time he announced his proposed budget, it had morphed from a modest increase for schools into one that would boldly restore the state’s public education funding to pre-Walker levels.
“We’re fighting to get back to where we were ten years ago.”
In a classroom down the hall from the main stage where Evers spoke, special guest Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association, showed slides of the massive statewide walkout from Arizona’s public schools that made headlines this spring. Thomas described how hundreds of thousands of community members got the Republican legislature to restore more than half a billion dollars in school funding in his red state.
Aerial photographs of the sea of protesters in red T-shirts surrounding Arizona’s state capitol building were reminiscent of Wisconsin’s historic protests against Walker in 2011. It was inspiring, but also a little sad, since, as Thomas put it, “We’re fighting to get back to where we were ten years ago”—to 2008 school budget levels.
Probably in anticipation of a race against the schools superintendent, Walker now claims to be the “education governor.” He spins his attack on the teachers’ union as a win for schools, saying that breaking the union gave them the “flexibility” to do a better job.
Walker says, truthfully, that his most recent budget included increases for schools—but it’s not nearly enough to make up for the massive cuts he had already made. Public schools around the state are suffering, and a $300 million cut to University of Wisconsin in 2015 led to layoffs, tuition hikes, and an exodus of distinguished researchers who left for greener pastures with their research grants.
As times get harder, there is a “consensus of pain,” said University of Wisconsin professor Julie Underwood, a member of the state’s blue ribbon commission on school funding. She finds it notable that school administrators who testified before the commission were willing to admit that their districts are strapped for cash and hurting. In the past, she said, administrators might have been afraid of scaring away parents by telling the truth—that there’s not enough money to run the high-quality programs they used to have.
Underwood was sitting in front of a red velvet curtain on stage in Appleton North High School’s modern, spacious auditorium with state representative Joel Kitchens, a Republican from northern Wisconsin and co-chair of the blue ribbon commission.
Kitchens, an affable farm-animal veterinarian from Sturgeon Bay, appealed for bipartisanship in Wisconsin’s hyper-partisan political atmosphere. Everyone is concerned about the schools, he said. We ought to be able to come together.
Budget cuts and a statewide school-voucher program that siphons money out of strapped public-school districts to cover private-school tuition has put historically divided groups in the same boat. White families in rural towns with low enrollment face the same threats of underfunding and school closures as black parents in Milwaukee, where the school-voucher program started twenty-five years ago, and where the state has enacted policies allowing the takeover of schools that fail a state-imposed school report card.
But the inequities are also getting starker.
In more than half of Wisconsin’s school districts, communities have voted “yes” on referenda to raise taxes on themselves to make up for the shortfall as the state cut its education budget.
Even as these communities circle the wagons, there is still a long way to go in building a statewide, united front against the politics of divide-and-conquer. Wisconsin has the largest racial achievement gap in the country. White flight, resentment between urban and rural districts, and political support for get-tough measures that specifically target Milwaukee remain.
Wisconsin has the largest racial achievement gap in the country. There’s a long way to go in building a statewide, united front against the politics of divide-and-conquer.
Kids who go to schools like Appleton North—with state-of-the-art classroom technology, manicured playing fields, and the beautiful auditorium—score well on the state’s school report card. And, as one teacher pointed out, schools and communities take great pride in these scores. Never mind research showing that the wealth of a school district alone is the single greatest predictor of high test scores.
Low-performing schools are, predictably, in low-income districts, where kids are beset by all kinds of problems, including job loss, hunger, and homelessness.
“We are being punitive to our neediest communities,” said Angelina Cruz, a teacher and union leader from Racine. “Instead of giving kids what they need, we are talking about taking away everything they have.”
Instead of get-tough measures that try to threaten poor schools into raising test scores, we should offer wrap-around services to help kids overcome disadvantages, said Mandela Barnes, a former state legislator from Milwaukee who is running for lieutenant governor in the fall election.
The threat of shutting down and taking over schools is a “lazy” solution to problems in poor communities, Barnes added. “It’s easy to say someone else should take care of the problem,” he said. “But it’s much deeper than just handing the keys over to somebody else. Schools are reflective of their communities.”
If Wisconsin’s urban and rural communities could unite around a shared set of goals to defend public education, and a shared vision for the future, it would be a dramatic rebuff of divide and conquer politics.
Barnes, one of the most promising young faces in Wisconsin politics, is upbeat about that possibility.
The son of a public school teacher and a factory worker, he comes from Milwaukee’s union-made African American middle class. In a campaign video introducing himself, Barnes features one of his former high school teachers at John Marshall High in Milwaukee, and his mom, who retired from the Milwaukee Public Schools.
“We can be a state that provides quality education to every child, regardless of their zip code,” he says in the video.
Sitting in the school cafeteria in Appleton, he spins out his optimistic ideas for improving life for everyone in Wisconsin.
To address the kids in so-called failing schools, he says, you’ve got to look at all the needs of the community.
Barnes takes out his phone to call up the website for the LeBron James school in Akron, Ohio, where the basketball star is working with the school district to create a public school with free food, health care, and college scholarships for at-risk kids.
“In all of these conversations about education, we never talk about root causes,” he says. “If we’re not investing in these communities, it’s not a real conversation.”
Barnes’s grandfather worked at A.O. Smith corporation in Milwaukee making water heaters for forty years, he says, and his dad was a union auto worker at Delphi for thirty years. “That track to the middle class doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. Still, “we have to be a state that provides opportunity.”
Despite low unemployment numbers, the state’s poverty rate is high—nearly 12 percent, he points out. “The job growth that has happened is not in good-paying jobs.”
Barnes believes Democrats have fallen short when it comes to offering specific solutions to the frustrated, working-class voters who helped elect Walker and Trump.
It’s not enough to be against Scott Walker, he says. “We’ve got to run on ideas.”
So what are his ideas?
Barnes reels them off, starting with education. He proposes community schools for disadvantaged kids, free two-year technical college, and debt-free education at the university.
On health care, he wants Wisconsin to accept the federal Medicaid expansion, and go after drug companies for price-gouging and also for their role in the opioid crisis.
Finally, he sees a future in good jobs in renewable energy through a Green New Deal.
“We should make Wisconsin a guaranteed jobs state,” he says. “Shoot for the moon. Be bold. No one wants milquetoast leadership. Let’s change direction. Let’s go somewhere.”
It sounds like a message that could bring people together.