After the Braves’ Chicago-based owners announced their plans to move to Atlanta, Georgia for the 1966 season, a criminal complaint was filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court alleging that the Braves and the other nine teams in the National League had conspired to deprive the city of Milwaukee of Major League Baseball, and, moreover, had agreed that no replacement team would be permitted for the city. As such, the complaint alleged, the defendants were in violation of the Wisconsin Antitrust Act.

The defendants initially removed the lawsuit to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, but on December 9, 1965, District Court Judge Robert Tehan remanded the case to the state circuit court where trial was conducted by Circuit Court Judge and former Marquette Law School professor, Elmer W. Roller.

On April 14, 1966, only hours before the Braves opened the season with a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Atlanta, Judge Roller ruled that the owners of the Braves and the other National League teams had acted in “restraint of trade” and thus were in violation of the Wisconsin Antitrust Act.

As a consequence, Roller fined the defendants $55,000, plus costs, and enjoined the Braves from playing their 1966 home games anywhere other than Milwaukee, unless the National League agreed to place a new team in Milwaukee in 1967. To give the National League time to make arrangements for an expansion team for 1967, Roller stayed his judgment until mid-June, an act that allowed the Braves to continue playing in Atlanta.

The Braves owners immediately appealed Roller’s decision to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the court agreed to hear the case on an expedited basis. On June 9, 1966, the appeal was argued on a day on which the Braves, who never had a losing season while in Milwaukee, sat in 6th place in the National League with a record of 25-30.

With the stay extended, the Braves continued to play in Atlanta, and six weeks later, on July 27, a day that would end with the Braves having slumped all the way down to 8th place, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned Roller’s lower court ruling by a narrow vote of 4-3. (Interesting to note is the fact that Supreme Court Justice E. Harold Hallows, who was also a law professor at Marquette, was one of the three dissenters who would have allowed Roller to enjoin the move to Atlanta.)

The Court’s majority’s opinion was based on two different rationales, and while not all of the four justices that made up the majority embraced both theories, each embraced at least one of the two. The first conclusion was that Organized Baseball’s exemption from the federal antitrust laws most recently upheld in Toolson v. New York Yankees (1953), extended to state antitrust rules as well. In the alternative, the majority opinion found that even if Organized Baseball was not exempt from state antitrust regulation generally, the portion of the remedy imposed by Judge Roller that ordered the National League either to return the Braves to Milwaukee or else give the city a new team ran afoul of the United States Constitution’s Commerce Clause and constituted an unenforceable interference with interstate commerce. The majority did, however, confirm Roller’s finding of facts concerning the monopolization of baseball in Milwaukee.

The three dissenters disagreed with both of the majority theories and concluded instead that Congress should be presumed to have left the regulation of Organized Baseball to the states until such time that it explicitly exercised its own regulatory authority. They also maintained that the legitimate interests of the state of Wisconsin in this case took priority over the “restrictive effect on interstate commerce that might result from the enforcement of Wisconsin’s laws.”

Not willing to concede defeat after such a narrow loss, the state of Wisconsin appealed the majority’s decision to the United States Supreme Court. However, pending a decision on the state’s petition for a writ of certiorari, Judge Roller’s lower court order was dissolved, and the Braves were free to play out the season in their new southern home.

Although the Braves lost again on July 28, to fall into 9th place, 14 ½ games behind the first place Pittsburgh Pirates, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision seemed to clear away the cloud of bad play that had hung over the team all season. After falling to 45-55 on the 28th, the “Atlanta” Braves played inspired baseball the rest of the season, and ended up with a record of 85-77, good for 5th place (out of ten teams), and within 10 games of the pennant-winning Los Angeles Dodgers who overtook the Pirates.

(The year before the Milwaukee Braves had similarly finished in 5th place with a record of 86-76, eleven games behind the Dodgers. However, the previous season had played out in a quite different manner, as the Braves were in first place as late as August 18, before finishing in a 17-27 downward spiral.)

Milwaukeeans had to wait until December 12 to learn that the United States Supreme Court had denied the state’s petition for certiorari. However, in an uncharacteristic move, the Court revealed that it was badly divided on whether or not to hear the case. Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and William Brennan, it turns out, were in favor of hearing the case, but the cert. petition was opposed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justices Potter Stewart, John Marshall Harlan II, Byron White, and Tom Clark.

Although he had taken the oath of office as a Supreme Court justice on October 4, recently appointed Justice Abe Fortas, according to the Court’s announcement, “took no part in the review of the petition.” Consequently, the attempt to involve the nation’s highest court died as a result of the failure of a fourth justice to support the petition.

In another unusual development, Wisconsin filed a petition requesting that the Court rehear the petition for certiorari, perhaps in hopes that Fortas might be now willing to support the petition, but this request was also denied. On January 23, 1967, the litigation over the Braves departure finally came to an end when the Court simply announced that the rehearing petition had been denied and that Justice Fortas had not participated in the review.

Thus, by late January it was clear that the city of Milwaukee would be without major league baseball for 1967. When the National League announced in November 1967, that it would be adding two additional teams for the 1969 season, Milwaukee applied for one of the franchises, as did groups from Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Buffalo, San Diego, Toronto, and Montreal.

However, when the two new franchises were awarded in May of 1968, the National League ignored Milwaukee and awarded teams to San Diego and Montreal. (In the minds of many Milwaukeeans, the 1968 rejection was a form of retribution for the city’s filing suit against the league back in 1965.) As a result, except for 20 Chicago White Sox games played in County Stadium in 1968 and 1969, Milwaukee remained without Major League Baseball until 1970, when Bud Selig and his associates bought the bankrupt Seattle Pilots shortly before Opening Day and moved the one year old team to Milwaukee, where they were renamed the Brewers.

The most interesting question arising out of the Milwaukee Braves litigation is why the Braves were so anxious to leave Milwaukee in the mid-1960’s. After relocating to Milwaukee in 1953 (from Boston, where the team had played since 1871), the Braves were for the rest of the decade one of the showpiece franchises of all of baseball. In a decade in which attendance at major league baseball games steadily eroded, the Braves set one National League attendance record after another.

Part of the answer to the question lies in the fact that in the mid-1960’s Atlanta simply held much greater potential than Milwaukee as a source of revenue for a Major League baseball team. Not only was it based in a larger and still rapidly growing metropolitan area, but it was also located in an area (the Southeast) without Major League Baseball. In contrast, Milwaukee was bounded by the Chicago Cubs and White Sox to the South, the Minnesota Twins to the West, Lake Michigan to the East, and the under-populated wasteland of Northern Wisconsin to the north.

In other words, Atlanta’s superior location provided greater opportunities both for live attendance and for the sale of increasingly important broadcasting rights.

However, after the wave of team relocations between 1953 and 1961, Major League owners had become clearly reluctant to permit additional teams to change cities in search of greater revenues, particularly if it would leave the vacated city without a team. The proposals of Kansas City Athletics owner Charlie Finley to move his struggling team to various cities, including Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, Louisville, and Oakland had been regularly rebuffed in the years between 1962 and 1966. It was highly unlikely that the other owners would have approved the Braves relocation to Atlanta in 1966, had the only reason to move been a desire to make greater profits.

The sad reality was that between the mid-1950’s and the mid-1960’s, Milwaukee appeared to have gone from being a hotbed of baseball attendance to a city in which the citizenry seemed no longer willing to go to the ballpark to support their team, even if the team was still a pennant contender. Although this was something of a misperception, it is easy to understand why many observers in the 1960’s adopted that view.

The following are the attendance totals for Milwaukee between 1953 and 1965, with the team’s rank among major league teams in parentheses. The totals for 1953, 1954, and 1957 represented new National League attendance records.

YEAR ATTEND. RANK

1953 1,826,397 (1st of 16)

1954 2,131,388 (1)

1955 2,005,836 (1)

1956 2,046,331 (1)

1957 2,215,404 (1)

1958 1,971,101 (1)

1959 1,749,112 (2)

1960 1,497,799 (6)

1961 1,101,441 (9 of 18)

1962 766,921 (14 of 20)

1963 773,018 (16)

1964 910,911 (10)

1965 555,584 (19)

The reasons for the fall off in attendance after 1957 are complicated, especially given the fact that the team had a winning record during each of the thirteen seasons that it played in Milwaukee.

Fan exhaustion may have been a factor. This was certainly a much mentioned explanation in the press in the early 1960’s. The Braves were located in one of the smallest markets in major league baseball, and Milwaukee’s attendance totals represented a much higher percentage of the metropolitan population than that of any other major league team in the 1950’s.

For example, in 1960, which was not one of the Braves better years attendance-wise, the team’s attendance amounted to 130% of the population of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. In contrast, the attendance of the two league champions in 1960, the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees, amounted to 81% and 11% (!), respectively. For the major league attendance leader, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the ratio was 33%. For several years in the mid-1950’s, the Braves’ annual attendance was essentially double the population of the Milwaukee metropolitan area, a phenomenon achieved nowhere else in baseball history.

Of course, not all of those who attended Braves game came from the Milwaukee area. The team, in fact, regularly drew fans from throughout the state of Wisconsin, and the establishment of the Twin Cities-based Minnesota Twins may have cost the team fans from the western and central part of the state. (The Twins drew 1.5 million fans in 1961, and a significant portion of them came from Wisconsin.)

However, the drop in attendance was also related to the team’s perceived declining performance beginning in 1960. By one measure, the Milwaukee Braves were the most consistently successful team in major league baseball history, finishing, as already mentioned, with winning records in each of their 13 seasons in Milwaukee. On the other hand, the Braves were significantly more successful relative to their competition in their first eight seasons than in their last five.

After finishing second in the National League in 1953 and third in 1954, the Braves went on a remarkable run. In 1955 and 1956, they finished second behind the Brooklyn Dodgers, and by only one game in the latter year. They then won National League championships in 1957 and 1958 (and the World Series in 1957), and then finished in a tie for first place in 1959 with the now Los Angeles Dodgers. (Unfortunately, they lost the 1959 play-off series, and thus missed a third straight World Series.)

In 1960, the Braves were in first place as late as July 24, but a 36-30 record over the remainder of the season left them in second place, seven games behind the surprising Pittsburgh Pirates. Although the Braves actually won more games in 1960 than they did in 1959, baseball fans, then as now, were much more attuned to a team’s place in the standings than to its actual win-loss record. Accordingly, attendance at Braves games began to decline noticeably in August and September 1950, especially once it became clear that the Braves were not likely to catch the first place Pirates.

Although most Braves fans expected Milwaukee to return to the top of the National League in 1961, the team finished a disappointing fourth, its lowest finish since arriving from Boston in 1953. Once again, the decline was not as steep as the standings suggested. Even though the Braves lost all-star catcher Del Crandall with a shoulder injury shortly after the season began and number three starter Bob Buhl suffered a noticeable loss of efficiency as he struggled to a 9-10 season record, the team’s win total for the season declined only by five games. Offensively, the 1961 Braves scored 712 runs, compared to 724 in 1960, and the number of runs allowed by Brave pitchers actually improved ever so slightly from 658 to 656.

The situation appeared even worse in subsequent years as the Braves finished fifth, sixth, fifth, and fifth again in their final four years in Milwaukee (even while each year winning between 84 and 88 games in a 162-game season). Attendance plummeted steadily throughout the period even though the team was usually in the pennant chase for the better part of the season.

Accustomed to having a team at the top of the standings, Milwaukeeans seemed much less interested in a team in the middle of the pack, even if the team had a winning record and continued to feature star players like Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn (through 1964), and Joe Torre.

There is little reason to blame the Braves for allowing the team to decline by ignoring the team’s roster. Although some of the Braves stars of the 1950’s, like Red Schoendienst, Wes Covington, Johnny Logan, and Billy Bruton, disappeared from the team’s roster in the early 1960’s, the Braves roster remained a talented one. The 1962 National League All-Star team, for example, featured six Milwaukee Braves among its 25 man roster.

When necessary, the Braves were willing to take on the contracts of established players to fortify the line-up. For the 1961 season, for example, they acquired all-star infielders Frank Bolling and Roy McMillan and power hitting outfielder Frank Thomas, each of whom was a regular on that year’s team, and, with Bolling and McMillan, for several years after that. Although the team’s focus shifted to the use of players from its successful farm system after 1961, when necessary, the team was willing to acquire established Major League players like Ed Bailey, Gene Oliver, Johnny Blanchard, Billy O’Dell, Ken Johnson, and Felipe Alou.

The Braves also continued to be one of the better franchises in developing young players and by mid-decade, the team’s roster included new stars like pitchers Tony Cloninger and Denny Lemaster, shortstop Denis Menke, and outfielder Rico Carty, who just missed being the 1964 Rookie of the Year after batting .330. (Perhaps the least significant personnel move of the era was the decision to promote minor league catcher and Milwaukee native Bob Uecker to the major league team in 1962.)

The real problem for the Braves in the early 1960’s was that they had to compete against teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and St. Louis Cardinals of that era. Baseball talent was concentrated in the National League in the early 1960’s, and an impressive number of future Hall-of-Famers were entering the prime of their careers during the Braves’ final years in Milwaukee.

The Dodgers in those years were led by pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, who shattered existing strikeout records, and by shortstop Maury Wills who broke Ty Cobb’s supposedly unbreakable stolen base record. The Giants, in contrast, relied on power rather than speed, with a line-up that featured Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, who combined for 541 home runs between 1961 and 1965 (including 226 by Mays alone), and by the three Alou Brothers, and by pitcher Juan Marichal.

The Reds of this era featured Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Pete Rose, and a pitching staff that produced six 20-game winners between 1961 and 1965. The Cardinals who finished the five year period from 1961 to 1965 with a combined record seven games better than Braves included players like the aging Stan Musial and younger stars of the caliber of Ken Boyer, Bill White, Dick Groat, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and the incomparable Bob Gibson.

The Braves experience in the 1960’s of sharply declining attendance in spite of a successful team on the field was not without recent precedent. Between 1948 and 1950, the American League’s Cleveland Indians saw their total attendance decline from 2.6 million to 1.7 million, in spite of having winning seasons each year. Moreover, in spite of never finishing lower than second place between 1951 and 1956, the Indians saw their attendance further decline from 1.7 million to 900,000. The following table illustrated the decline in attendance in the face of consistent winning seasons that occurred in Cleveland in the late 1940’s and early to mid-1950’s.

YEAR FINISH ATTN.

1947 4th 1.5m

1948 1st 2.6

1949 3rd 2.3

1950 4th 1.7

1951 2nd 1.7

1952 2nd 1.4

1953 2nd 1.1

1954 1st 1.3 (best won-lost record in American League history)

1955 2nd 1.2

1956 2nd 0.9

The conventional explanation for the decline in Indian attendance was the Cleveland fan’s frustration at the inability of his team to overcome their hated rivals, the New York Yankees, who won the American League pennant in each of the above years, except for 1948 and 1954 when the Tribe finished ahead of the Bronx Bombers.

Although the Milwaukee Braves 1961 season was hardly a failure in terms of either on the field performance or attendance, it was the first year since arriving from Boston that the team failed to turn a profit. The team’s attendance dropped by almost 400,000 fans, and the decline in attendance revenue, combined with the fact that the Braves probably had the highest payroll in the Major Leagues, converted a $500,000 profit in 1960 into an $80,000 loss in 1961. (The decision to shore up the team with veterans like Roy McMillan, Frank Bolling, Frank Thomas, and Johnny Antonelli , acquired before or during the 1961 season, had greatly inflated the team payroll, but obviously did not lead to a rebound in attendance.)

Some observers attributed the decline in attendance to a new city ordinance that took effect for the 1961 season which prohibited fans from bringing their own beer into the park. Although a number of contemporary newspaper stories report how unpopular this ordinance was with Braves fans, it is hard to believe that this explains the decline in attendance. Throughout the 1950’s, the Braves had been credited with having the “highest per capita concessions sales in the major leagues,” so it seems unlikely that having to pay for beer at the ballpark would alone cause such a steep drop in attendance.

Another explanation for the decline in attendance in 1961 was the appearance in the upper Midwest of the transplanted Washington Senators, now playing as the Minnesota Twins. Throughout the 1950’s, the Braves had been popular in western Wisconsin and Minnesota and excursion baseball buses running across the state had been a regular summer feature. The Twins did draw a million and a half fans in their inaugural season, but, again, it is hard to believe that competition from the Twins explains the substantial drop in attendance, any more than does the new restrictions on bringing beer into County Stadium.

This sudden decline in profitability led owner Lou Perini to make a number of changes after the 1961 season. To cut his payroll, the team sold the contracts of recent acquisitions Frank Thomas and Johnny Antonelli to the expansion New York Mets. (Antonelli was washed up and never pitched again, but Thomas hit 34 homeruns for the Mets the following year.) The team also introduced a new slogan “Something new in ‘62” as a way of highlighting its plans to make greater use of players from the team’s farm system, other than bringing in stars from other teams, which had been the apparent strategy in 1961.

Perini also raised ticket prices (as he had before the 1961 season) and for the first time agreed to permit the broadcast of a limited number of Braves games on television. In 1961, the Braves were the only major league baseball team that did not allow any of its games to be televised into its home market, but in 1962, Perini permitted the broadcast of fifteen road games on local television. He also made plans to install an escalator at County Stadium to make it easier for fans to reach the upper deck.

None of this worked to revive fan interest, and in spite of Perini’s increased spending on publicity, the team sold only 6,000 season tickets for the 1962 season, a total which represented a 50% decline since 1959. When the attendance dropped by another 330,000 that year, Perini in frustration agreed to sell the team to a Chicago-based group of investors for a purchase price of $5.5m. Perini, who never personally moved from Boston to Milwaukee, cited the wide-spread operation of his construction company as a reason for the sale.

There is some evidence that suggests that the new owners purchased the team with plans to move it to Atlanta already formulated. However, Atlanta’s planned new municipal stadium would not be ready until 1964 or 1965, so it was necessary to continue to play in Milwaukee whatever their intentions.

In 1963, the new owners sought to recoup part of the purchase price by expanding the number of Brave games on television, agreeing to broadcast five home games during the upcoming season, as well as another package of away games. In addition, the new owners issued and sold stock in the team, but sales were extremely disappointing.

More importantly, rumors of the new owners plans to move the team to Atlanta began to spread almost immediately, a fact that could hardly have helped attendance. Whatever the impact of such rumors, attendance was basically stable in 1963, and the Chicago-group reportedly lost another $60,000.

The situation improved slightly the following year. The 1964 Braves were one of the great offensive teams of that era, scoring over 800 runs and averaging just under five runs per game, which was better than a half run more than the eventual champion Cardinals. Unfortunately, 1964 was the year that the seemingly ageless Warren Spahn ran out of gas at age 43, and Brave pitchers compiled the second highest ERA in the National League. While they were in contention during the early part of the season, sitting in third place, one and a half games back of first place, on May 29, the team slumped in June and spent most of the season in the second division.

A last gasp effort saw the club win 14 of its final 17 games to pull within five games of the first place Cardinals (although still in 5th place). Attendance went up about 200,000 people in 1964, but the season’s total fell below the one million mark.

Throughout 1963 and 1964, rumors were rampant that the new owners planned to move the team to Atlanta. Even with increased attendance and more games on television the team incurred further losses in 1964, totaling a reported $500,000 (!). In light of continued losses, the decision was finally made to relocate the team to Atlanta in time for the 1965 season, and initially the other National League teams supported the move.

However, the Milwaukee County Board threatened to sue to enjoin the relocation of the team unless it complied with the terms of its lease which ran through the 1965 season. A team offer to buy out the lease was rejected by the Board, and in the face of a potential lawsuit, the other National League owners refused to approve the 1965 relocation plan after all. However, they did declare that it was in the best interests of the National League to permit the Braves to move to Atlanta in 1966, essentially confirming the lame duck status of the Milwaukee Braves of 1965.

Fan reaction to this resolution was one of unrepressed anger. Although the Braves were in first place for most of the 1965 season, after opening day, the 1965 season was played under a fan boycott, and barely a half million people showed up for the Braves home games that year. When the Braves did in fact depart after the 1965 season, the case of Wisconsin v. Milwaukee Braves began.

Was there anything that could have been done to prevent the situation that resulted in the Braves departure? In 1965, as a last ditch effort, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire introduced a bill in the Senate that would have required major league teams to pool all of their radio and television income in a way similar to the then current practice in the National Football League. The bill never got out of committee in the United States Senate, but such a requirement might have reduced the lure of relocating to new territory and perhaps kept the Braves in Milwaukee.

However, short of a structural change of that nature, it is difficult to see how the situation might have been different. The real aberration in Milwaukee baseball history was the attendance figures of 1953-1959, not those for 1960 to 1965. Given its population, Major League Baseball attendance in Milwaukee in the early 1960’s, at least through 1964, was actually pretty good. Selling the team to owners with no commitment to Milwaukee in 1962, probably made it inevitable that the team would soon be relocated to a larger, more lucrative market.

On the other hand, what the Braves really lacked after 1960 was exceptional pitching. In December 1960, fearing that long-time shortstop Johnny Logan was nearing the end of the line and believing that neither of his back-ups, Felix Mantilla and Andre Rodgers (acquired from the Giants earlier in the off-season) were ready to be full-time major league shortstops, the Braves traded pitchers Juan Pizarro and Joey Jay to the Cincinnati Reds for all-star shortstop and Gold Glove winner Roy McMillan.

Although not a strong hitter, McMillan was widely regarded as the best defensive shortstop in baseball, and, teamed with newly acquired second baseman Frank Bolling (obtained in a trade with Detroit for centerfielder Billy Bruton), he gave the Braves the best defensive infield in the National League.

However, the two pitchers the Braves traded for McMillan both blossomed in 1961. Joey Jay had first appeared for the Braves in a major league game in 1953 as a 17-year old bonus baby, but had been a disappointment for most of his time with the team. Consequently, even though he had pitched well when inserted in the starting rotation at the end of the 1960 season, he was deemed expendable. Unfortunately for the Braves, Jay won 21 games with the pennant-winning Reds in 1961, tying Spahn for the most wins in the National League and finishing 5th in the National League MVP voting.

Pizarro, who was subsequently traded by the Reds to the White Sox, had shown great promise with the Braves in 1958 and 1959, but had a disappointing season in 1960. However, in 1961, given a chance to start for the White Sox, the left-hander went 14-7 with a 3.05 ERA and led the American League in strikeouts per nine innings.

In 1961, the Braves starting pitching was at best mediocre behind staff aces Warren Spahn (21-13) and Lew Burdette (18-11). Bob Buhl, with Spahn and Burdette the anchor of the staff during the World Series years, slumped to 9-10 with a 4.11 ERA and fourth starter Carl Willey finished only 6-12. Highly regarded rookie pitchers Bob Hendley and Don Nottebart combined for a disappointing 11-14 record, and mid-season call up Tony Cloninger, while posting an impressive 7-2 won-lost log, had an unimpressive 5.25 ERA.

One can never say for certain, but had the 1961 Braves featured a starting rotation of Spahn (21-13), Jay (21-10), Burdette (18-11); and Pizarro (14-7), and a shortstop parlay of Logan, Mantilla, and Rodgers, the chances are good that the Braves, not the Jay-less Reds, would have won the National League pennant that year. Even more importantly, Milwaukeeans would have returned to the ballpark at 1957 and 1958 levels; Parini would have not sold the team to the Chicago investors; and the Braves would still be playing in the Cream City.

At least it’s fun to think that that might have happened.

The saga of the Braves in the 1960’s does raise a number of questions that are beyond the scope of this essay. Why, for example, were Major League Baseball teams in the 1950’s and 1960’s so slow to exploit the economic advantages of local television broadcasting in their own immediate markets? This is particularly interesting in light of the importance of such rights in the modern era. (New York Yankee dominance is currently built on the team’s local cable contract.) Although the Braves were extreme in their refusal before 1962 to allow any of their games to be broadcast into Milwaukee, several teams, including the highly successful Los Angeles Dodgers, refused to allow the broadcast of their home games in that same era.

Finally, what would have happened if the Supreme Court had granted certiorari in Wisconsin v. Milwaukee Braves? One can only guess, but it seems likely that two of the three justices who voted to hear the case—Douglas and Brennan–wanted an opportunity to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1953 case, Toolson v. New York Yankees (1953), in which the exemption of Organized Baseball from the antitrust laws was upheld. Six years later, in their dissents in Flood v. Kuhn (1972), the two said as much. What Justice Black was thinking in 1966 is less clear, particularly given that he, with a last minute contribution from Warren, had written the court’s per curiam opinion in Toolson.

Of course, a decision overturning Toolson would have been of no immediate benefit to Milwaukee, since if the federal antitrust laws were to be applied to Organized Baseball, that would almost surely mean that they would preempt any application of the Wisconsin Antitrust Act.

The more interesting question is whether it possible that there were five justices on the court in 1967 that would have accepted the broad leeway given to state power by the opinion of the dissenting justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court? One can never answer such questions with absolute confidence, but if such justices existed, why wouldn’t they have voted to hear the case? Moreover, as constitutional historian Michael Belknap demonstrated in his The Supreme Court Under Earl Warren, the Warren Court was generally hostile to state efforts to regulate the instrumentalities of interstate commerce.

On the other hand, the voting patterns of United States Supreme Court justices in cases involving the sports industry have been notoriously difficult to predict.

In any event, the Braves left town, but life, and baseball, managed to go on in Milwaukee without them.

Author’s note: Growing up in Pearisburg, Virginia, I became a fan of the Milwaukee Braves in 1961 for three reasons. (1) My youth league team, from which I was cut in 1961 but rejoined the following year, was called the Braves. Although our uniforms were green, I associated the Pearisburg Braves with the Milwaukee Braves from the very beginning; (2) My Great-Uncle Kester, “Ket,” Hoke was from Nitro, West Virginia, the home town of Braves star pitcher Lew Burdette, and he was a member of a group of men who went squirrel hunting with Burdette in the off-season; and (3) my oldest baseball card, which dated all the way back to 1959, was of Braves first baseman Joe Adcock who I thought looked a little bit like my Dad.

I followed the Braves intently every year in the 1960’s, and having read about the glory days of 1957 and 1958, I fully expecting them to return to the top of the National League standings. I was not particularly disappointed with the move to Atlanta in 1966 for a couple of reasons. First of all, Atlanta seemed much closer to my home town than Milwaukee, and the arrival of the Braves in Milwaukee allowed for the transfer of the Braves top minor league to Richmond, Virginia, where my cousins lived and where the top Brave farmhands would play for the next forty years.

I have only the vaguest recollection of the lawsuit Milwaukee filed against the Braves, but I do remember much better how widely the fan boycott of 1965 was covered by the press, even in the local Virginia newspapers. Consistent with “following” the Braves to Atlanta, I felt no affinity for the Brewers when they arrived in Milwaukee in 1970. Hence, my years as a Brewer fan only began when I joined the Marquette faculty in 1995. However, when I attended the special ceremony at County Stadium in 1997 honoring the 1957 World Champion Braves, I felt like I was paying tribute to a part of my childhood.

As hoped, crime has indeed gone down considerably since 2007: violent crime is down 24%, and property crime is down 21%. Whether and to what extent the increased-stops strategy has caused the crime drop is uncertain — the MPD has also made some other significant changes in the past four years, and, in any event, crime has been dropping nationwide — but the causal claim strikes me as at least facially plausible. Providing some additional support is a month-by-month breakdown of auto theft and robbery data: in general, in months when stops have lagged, auto thefts and robberies have gone up; in months when stops have increased, auto thefts and robberies have dropped.

But safety has a cost.

Citizens are being stopped by the police tens of thousands more times now per year than they were in 2007. The great majority of these stops do not result in an arrest, suggesting that most who suffer the inconvenience and embarassment of a stop are not guilty in any substantial way. Moreover, because of the racial demographics of the high-crime neighborhoods in which stops are concentrated, African-Americans bear a greatly disproportionate share of the inconvenience and embarrassment relative to their share of the general population.

There is some risk that such racial disparities may prove counterproductive to the goal of enhancing police legitimacy and decreasing crime in the targeted neighborhoods. (See, for instance, this post, which discusses concerns about the potential impact of racial profiling on police effectiveness.)

Yet, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be any significant backlash against the disparities or the underlying strategic choices.

This brings me to what may be the most surprising aspect of the MPD data: despite the huge increase in the number of coercive police-citizen contacts, the number of citizen complaints is down by more than 44%.

What gives?

The cynical hypothesis would be that the MPD is doing something to discourage or impede complaints. However, I’m not aware of any evidence of this, and, in fact, I understand that steps have been taken in recent years to facilitate complaint-filing.

Another possbility is better training and supervision of the officers in the street. As noted above, improving police-community relations has been a major priority of the current MPD leadership, and some of that must be filtering down the ranks, which could result in greater restraint and more respectful treatment during stops.

Still another possibility is that the innocent people targeted for stops are actually willing to accept the inconvenience in view of the benefits of the MPD’s strategy. As the MPD data demonstrate, African-Americans are disproportionately victimized by crime in the city, and African-Americans are disproportionately identified as suspects. African-Americans might thus see the increased number of stops in their neighborhoods as a rational and even reassuring response to the high rates of victimization they experience. In turn, this positive perspective on the strategy might lead to greater tolerance of tactics that might otherwise lead to complaints.

One final possibility that I find particularly fascinating is framing effects. The numbers are not included in the data I linked to above, but I have seen elsewhere that the number of tickets written by the MPD has stayed relatively constant, even as the number of traffic stops has increased so dramatically. Most stopped motorists get off with a warning. For many, this must profoundly color their emotional response to the stop (I know it would for me). Instead of “I’m so irritated with this cop who interrupted my day because I was going a few miles per hour over the limit,” the dominant feeling is “I’m so relieved that this nice cop gave me a break.” Whatever else is going on, routinely showing lenience to stopped motorists must surely contribute in some measure to public acceptance of the increased-stops strategy. It must also help to defuse some of the anger that might otherwise lead to complaints.

Disclaimer: I serve as a member of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, which is a civilian oversight agency for the MPD. However, I did not have any role in the development of the increased-stops strategy.

A lengthy video of MPD Chief Ed Flynn explaining the strategy and responding to racial disparity concerns is here.

Cross posted at Prawfs.

But stirring the pot can move the cooking process forward. Spreading important and provocative thoughts can get people thinking along lines they might not have considered previously. Bringing a wide range of committed people together can lead to conversations – informal, as well as formal – that start something rolling.

I hope, and I’m even a bit optimistic, that we served some of those purposes at the conference, sponsored by Marquette Law School and the Marquette College of Education and attended by almost 200 people. The audience included key education policy figures across the spectrum, from union leaders to an advisor to Gov. Scott Walker.

I thought of the conference as a musical piece in four movements: What can be learned from what has been done in developing a new school system in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; getting a handle on the rapidly developing movement nationwide to overhaul teacher evaluations as a key to improving teacher effectiveness; a look at community efforts to improve educational outcomes overall in Milwaukee; and general assessments of what is needed in educational thinking to move Wisconsin forward. That meant we had three keynote speakers, all of them figures of national standing who were fresh faces to Wisconsin’s educational debate, and more than a dozen panelists, including important  figures in state and local education policy.

Feel free to sample the nearly five hours of video that we have posted online from the conference. And let me share with you a few moments that stick out for me:

Paul Pastorek, the former superintendent of Louisiana schools who was one of the architects of what has happened in New Orleans, railing against conventional school systems that he said are broken when it comes to giving many kids a chance to succeed. Pastorek said, “My argument is not against unions, it’s not against teachers, it’s not against administrators, it’s not against legislators, it’s against the damn system. If people work in a broken system, the system designed to achieve the results we’re getting, they cannot be successful.” He called for systems that support strong leadership of individual schools, with strong accountability for results.

Pastorek and Sarah Carr, an education reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, touching nerves in the debate over the impact of high levels of poverty in shaping educational outcomes. They were joined by Marquette’s Howard Fuller, who has also worked extensively in New Orleans, and Prof. Brian Beabout of the University of New Orleans. (If you’re going to watch one thing from the video, go to this exchange, starting at 1hour and 23 minutes.)

Carr said, “I do think the leaders in New Orleans have made a mistake in viewing school change in isolation from broader societal change.” She said poverty cannot be used as an excuse for why children don’t succeed in school, but issues such as early childhood education, criminal justice, and mental health services need to be addressed as part of “a broader revisioning” for New Orleans.

With some heat, Pastorek responded, “I would argue that as far as educating kids is concerned, what comes first in getting success with kids is getting success with the classroom. . . . Educate the kids first in the classroom successfully and then the dynamics in the outer environment change.” 

Fuller said, “There’s a difference between saying you got to end poverty before you can improve schools and saying ending poverty is a critical factor in our overall effort to improve schools.” He said if people such as Pastorek and himself don’t listen to what Carr is saying, many people won’t regard them “as real.” And he drew applause when he added, “You can’t support stuff that says, I’m all for the kids in schools, but I’m going to take away health care, I’m going to take away jobs, I’m going to take away housing, I’m going to take away every single thing those kids need — but I’m with you.”

Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality for the Washington-based Education Trust, pointing to places around the country, as close by as Illinois, that are making major strides in improving the way teachers are evaluated and using the results to spur more effective teaching. Mike Thompson, deputy Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction, followed by describing how Wisconsin is joining that effort, and Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, said a joint management-union initiative in Milwaukee Public Schools is well ahead of what the state is doing.

Republican State Sen. Luther Olsen, a key figure in legislative action around education, saying that the goal is to improve teaching and not to be vindictive against teachers, as many teachers fear. “The most important thing in teacher evaluation is the professional development that comes afterward,” Olsen said. (But, so far, seeing that this happens is a question that hasn’t been addressed.)

Dan McKinley, executive director of PAVE, an organization that primarily has assisted private and charter schools in Milwaukee, invoking the Dalai Lama, with a simple prescription for improving the overall scene: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. 

Bill Raabe, director of the National Education Association’s Center for Great Public Schools, calling for teachers to be given an important voice they often haven’t had in figuring out how to accomplish better results for children. He said that beyond disputes over collective bargaining, there need to be ways to use the knowledge of those who know the most about what is going on in classrooms.

The conference certainly filled a central goal for public policy programming in Eckstein Hall: to provide a forum for intelligent, fair-minded discussion of important issues. And maybe it did more. At a time when Wisconsin’s educational landscape has changed dramatically and every educator and advocate is trying to figure out how to move forward, maybe we gave the pot a useful stir.

“I think it’s huge” that people who weren’t part of past events are now stepping into key roles, Ellen Gilligan, president and CEO of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, told Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy in the last “On the Issues” session for this semester.

Gilligan is the key figure behind the recent launching of Milwaukee Succeeds, an effort that has brought together more than 40 key leaders and organizations with the goal of improving Milwaukee’s record in moving children successfully “from cradle to career,” to use the effort’s subtitle.

Asked by Gousha how she responds to those who have been skeptical of what the effort can accomplish, Gilligan said she shows them “a lot of optimism.”

“Timing is everything,” she said. “Sometimes the stars align. Sometimes there are opportunities for certain things to happen that might not have happened 20 years ago.” She thought Milwaukee was ready for an effort such as this one. One of the reasons? The election of Gov. Scott Walker and the aftermath of that election, which, for better or worse, she said, created a climate in which working together had a stronger draw to more people.

And then there’s the new-leader factor. Gilligan came to Milwaukee a year ago from Cincinnati, where she was a top figure in that city’s community foundation and where she was deeply involved in launching the Strive Partnership, an effort that is a model for Milwaukee Succeeds. She is one of several relatively new figures in major positions in Milwaukee.  

“I am an eternal optimist and I don’t think we have a choice,” Gilligan said. “That’s part of sending in new troops. You have fresh blood who view this situation differently, who are not beaten down by past history. I am not beaten down by the past history. I am optimistic that we can make a difference and that we have to make a difference. We don’t have a choice.”

Gilligan said she was not very interested in taking part between advocates for Milwaukee Public Schools and advocates for Milwaukee’s private school voucher program. “I’m not sure it’s terribly productive,” she said. “I’d rather focus on the children.”

She said the concerns underlying Milwaukee Succeeds are matter such as whether third graders can read on grade-level, not whether they went to schools in MPS or charter or voucher schools.

She told Gousha Milwaukee Succeeds is “a process” and not “a program.” No new initiatives were announced in launching the effort. Instead, participants are working on creating a list of key, measurable indicators that can show whether Milwaukee is making progress. Then, the focus will be on how to align efforts throughout the city to improve outcomes. She said it is an effort that will take years.

She said she views herself as “a collaborative leader.” But she clearly is determined to  push forward

To watch the video of the “On the Issues” session, click here.

But in an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Allen went beyond his own life and his pioneering work on urban agriculture to a broader and intriguing matter: His vision for creating a major economic base in Milwaukee around urban agriculture, and particularly commercial growth of fish in industrial sized tanks. 

“I think we’re going to create thousands of jobs,” Allen told Gousha, Marquette Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy. “We’re the leading city in the nation in terms of food and water.” He added, “Fish today, that’s a huge opportunity.” 

Allen said two commercial aquaculture firms are planning to develop operations in the city and Growing Power, the urban agriculture operation he heads, is including tanks for cultivating fish in an unusual  five-story building it is planning for its home base along W. Silver Spring Dr., west of N. 51^st St. 

Allen said if he had a million pounds of lake perch fillets today, he could sell them all by tomorrow.  

Allen started out with a small operation at the Silver Spring site in 1993. “I looked at it as a great opportunity to sell my farm produce,” he said. But the operation began to grow quickly, including through partnerships with several Milwaukee Public Schools that gave students experience with raising food.

 In 2008, he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and, in 2010, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He travels extensively and is frequently involved in healthy-food events with First Lady Michelle Obama.

 But his view of himself is literally down to earth. “The main thing is, I’m a farmer,” Allen said. “I try to touch the soil every day.”  

He advocates healthy eating for all, but his priority is low-income and minority communities, many of them “food deserts” with no major grocery stores and too many people who have bad eating habits.  

“It’s really about social justice and food justice,” Allen told Gousha. “There isn’t enough healthy food in our communities.” 

But he expects things to get better, and urban agriculture to be a key component of doing that, both in terms of the food that can be grown and the jobs that can be generated.

“I see change coming, and it’s going to be led by the next generation,” Allen said. 

A video of the session can be viewed by clicking here.  

But down the road and even now in places other than eastern Wisconsin? Cutbacks in federal spending could and sometimes are translating into decisions not to prosecute cases, Santelle said. 

Speaking Tuesday at an “On the Issues” session at Eckstein Hall, Santelle told Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, that the staff he oversees in offices in Milwaukee and Green Bay, has been reduced from about 80 several years ago to about 70 now. More cuts may lie ahead, he said.

But so far, the reduction has been accomplished without affecting decisions on who to prosecute, Santelle said. That hasn’t been true in offices of US Attorneys in some places around the country, where decisions on matters such as “smaller” drug cases or white collar financial crimes are being shaped by whether the office has adequate resources. He said a $1 million bank fraud in some instances may be below the threshold a prosecutor has set for bringing a case to court, given practical limits on how much can get done.

Santelle said the annual budget of his office is about $8 million – and prosecutions generate about 10 times that each year in penalties, fines, or repayment to the government for improper spending. Santelle said that while politicians understand that the US Attorney’s Office is actually a money-maker for the government, it is hard to expect prosecutors will be spared from across the board cuts.

Santelle’s hour-long session before about 75 people touched on a wide-range of issues, from the high priority put on national security work, even in eastern Wisconsin, where there have, fortunately, been no terrorism episodes, to the positive sides of a legal career in federal service. Santelle has worked for the Justice Department since1985 and has been US Attorney for eastern Wisconsin since 2010.

Santelle was appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and, in an era of strong political partisanship, he agreed that there have been more matters brought to his office by political activists on either side of the spectrum who think people on the other side have done something wrong. But he had no hesitation in labeling the way prosecutors do their work as “apolitical.” He said he had never been involved in something such as a decision on a prosecution where partisan politics was a factor in how to proceed.

He said, though, that changes in the presidency can have an effect on priorities of the Justice Department, such as how much attention is given to enforcement of environmental regulations. 

Santelle said that a tighter supply of cocaine was driving up prices on the street. For prosecutors, that means more crimes being committed where the drugs involved are pills or other controlled substances. Gousha asked him his thoughts on public opinion polls that show wide support for decriminalizing marijuana use. Santelle said he should be counted on the side of those who oppose that. Marijuana is, in his view, not just a recreational drug. He said marijuana that is being sold today is often far more potent than what was available a generation ago and has more serious effects on users.

Overall, Santelle said, the level of cooperation among law enforcement officials has improved significantly from the past, when different federal agencies kept information from each other and there was limited cooperation between federal and local prosecutors or officers. He said there is generally good communication between law enforcement representatives working in the Milwaukee area, and he talks frequently to people such as Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. “You benefit tremendously from the fact that law enforcement talks to each other,” Santelle said.

The session with Santelle can be viewed by clicking here.

In an “On the Issues” session with Mike Gousha at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Ramirez described the work of Schools That Can Milwaukee, a year-old organization that has the goal of increasing the number of students in high-performing schools to 20,000 (more than twice the current total) by 2020. Ramirez is executive director of the organization.

“If you haven’t seen a high-performing school, go visit one because it will change your belief in what’s possible,” she told about 150 people at the session hosted by Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy. She said you can tell in such a visit that the program is different – more energetic, more focused, more committed to meeting ambitious goals – than in schools where there is an underlying belief that the students aren’t going to do well because of factors such as poverty.  

“Expectations are huge” as a factor in putting a school on the path to high levels of success, she said. She also said the leadership of the school is a crucial factor.

Ramirez said the organization, affiliated with a national Schools That Can effort, was founded around three high-performing schools in Milwaukee, St. Marcus Lutheran School, Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, and Milwaukee College Prep. It is now working with two dozen schools that meet or are working to meet the standards for academic success, attendance the group uses to define a high performing school.  The large majority of students at each of the schools are from low-income homes. The schools include five from Milwaukee Public Schools; the rest are either charter schools or private schools in the publicly-funded voucher program.

Ramirez said Schools That Can has three strategies for increasing the number of high performing schools: Expand the ones already here (both Milwaukee College Prep and St. Marcus have expanded substantially this year); bring up the achievement in existing schools that are willing to wade into the hard work the organization envisions; and recruit strong charter school operators from around the country to open in Milwaukee.

In dealing with the last route, Ramirez has been a central figure in efforts to bring Rocketship, Education, a San Jose, Calif., charter school operator, to Milwaukee. She told Gousha she hopes Rocketship will open in Milwaukee in 2013 and grow within several years to eight schools.

She urged people who want to help improve Milwaukee’s education picture to get involved in ways that focus on quality schooling and not on whether a school is a traditional public school, a charter school, or a voucher school. She suggested getting involved on the boards of schools, volunteering as mentors or in other roles at schools, making financial donations to schools, and advocating for quality education as part of political activity. “Make education your issue,” she said.     

The hour-long sessions can be viewed by clicking here.

The good news, participants in an “On the Issues” discussion Monday at Eckstein Hall generally agreed, is that the large majority of young people in the community are not involved in crime, that there are existing constructive programs involving thousands of youths , and those who went on highly-publicized sprees in the Riverwest neighborhood on July 3 and in and around the State Fair grounds on Aug. 4 are not typical.

The bad news is that it doesn’t take very many crimes to cause great harm, not only to the victims but to neighborhoods and the city as a whole, panel members agreed. Furthermore, criminals are getting younger and more violent, and the poverty which is so often the environment for criminals is getting broader and deeper in the city.  

The panel discussion, hosted by Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, before an audience of about 200, followed the showing Sunday night at the Milwaukee Film Festival of a documentary, “The Interrupters,” about efforts to reduce youth violence in Chicago.

“The violence is highly concentrated, but its results affect everybody,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. He said small percentages of repeat offenders and domestic abusers are responsible for a large portion of police calls in the city. He said progress has been made in fighting crime in Milwaukee and progress can be made through “consistent and persistent interventions” by police, working with the community.

The overall link between crime and poverty may be a complicated matter, but Flynn said it is pretty simple to describe in specific communities: “At the neighborhood level, crime causes poverty,” he said. “It destroys neighborhood capacity.” People leave, employers leave, and jobs leave when people don’t think they are safe.

Ron Johnson, who has been a leader in restorative justice efforts in Milwaukee, said, “It’s not all doom and gloom.” He described programs, such as one he was involved in last year at Milwaukee’s Pulaski High School, that helped reduce crime and gang problems, at least for the period while the program was being pursued actively. He said about 80% of youths who are brought into juvenile court don’t come back again. “The majority of our kids are resilient,” Johnson said. “There are so many positive stories about kids in our community that never get out.”

Barbara Notestein, executive director of Safe and Sound, said her organization works with 18,000 young people per year in the city and has had success in building social fabric many times. She said the group’s efforts focus on building the strength of communities, developing positive lifestyles among youth, and building collaboration between law enforcement and the community.

But such efforts clearly are not enough, given the impact violence is having on many neighborhoods. Judge Donald called for improved approaches to law enforcement to respond effectively – but differently —  to criminals who are dangerous and those who he labeled “annoying.”  Donald said, “We are spending an inordinate amount of money on just sequestration. “

Pedro Hernandez, a student at Marquette Law School who works with young people at the United Community Center on the south side, said he tries to understanding among those he is involved with that they have a future and that they should value their education. He said he comes from the same kind of background as many who have gotten into trouble. He said youths need to be listened to and more needs to be done to show them how to deal with the things that hurt them.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was among those in the audience and at the end of the discussion was asked his thoughts. Barrett praised the efforts of people such as Johnson, Notestein, and Hernandez as examples of what can be accomplished by those who regard all the city’s young people as “our children.”

But, he said, “I honestly don’t know whether the region considers them ‘our’ children.”   

He said 46% of Milwaukee children are growing up in poverty and, he asked, “What is the future we’re sending to them? . . . We have to find a way so young people in our community have hope in their lives.”

The 75-minute sessions can be viewed here.

Speaking during an “On the Issues” session with Mike Gousha, distinguished fellow in law and public policy, in the Law School’s Eckstein Hall, Pilarz described Marquette as one of the nation’s great universities. He said great universities successfully walk a tightrope in which student education and research are complementary, not competitive, interests.

Asked by Gousha what other universities he felt Marquette was competing with, he said, “I think we’re competing with Marquette to be the best Marquette we can be.” He said university leaders shouldn’t  spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders.  “We’re a major national university,” Pilarz said. The focus should simply be, “How do we improve Marquette?”

Pilarz took office as president on Aug. 1. Ceremonies to inaugurate him officially are scheduled for Thursday and Friday.

Gousha asked what the new president does best.  Pilarz answered, “Listening. Listening. And admitting what you don’t know. That’s really important.” He said it was important to listen to “not just the likely  suspects” and to not only the good news. “I think it’s really important for me to say, from time to time, ‘I don’t know. I need to learn that.’ And in order to learn, I need to listen to people.”

In addition, as president, Pilarz said, “I think you have to be the great story teller for the institution. . . . Let the world know what great things are happening at Marquette and why this is such an important and exciting place.”

Pilarz downplayed his own qualifications to tackle Milwaukee’s problems  (“If Milwaukee has a 16^th Century poetry problem, I’m your guy”), but talked up the role Marquette can, should, and already is playing. His role, he said, is help that occur.

“We have a responsibility as a Jesuit university to promote justice, and a big part of promoting justice is to attend to economic issues,” Pilarz told the audience of about 200.

He said other local college presidents look to Marquette for leadership on community engagement and respect Marquette’s faculty resources. “Think of the brain power we’ve got on this campus and the ways we can harness all that great intellectual power” in dealing with Milwaukee’s issues, Pilarz said. “I would love to see us move more in those directions.” He said Marquette students are doing “some amazing things” in community service.

In other matters, Pilarz said he had sent Marquette students  a firm message that the university has zero tolerance for sexual misbehavior; that student safety is his “baseline” concern when it comes to the future of the campus and that Marquette is “doing great” overall on that front; and that the university needs to do all it can to be affordable, especially for students who are the first in their families to go to a university.

Amid news about major changes in the membership of the Big East basketball conference, Pilarz said he was determined to keep Marquette competing at the highest level of college competition and that he is working with other Big East presidents on the issue.  Amid speculation that a basketball conference of Catholic universities might emerge, Pilarz said, “I don’t think we want to limit ourselves along sectarian lines when it comes to college athletics.”

The session with Father Pilarz may be viewed by clicking here.

Mabel Watson Raimey was the first African-American woman to attend Marquette University Law School. (117) She worked during the day and went to law school at night. (117) She was the first African American female lawyer in Wisconsin, entering the profession in 1927. (118)

Ms. Raimey went to law school a few years after she was fired from her job teaching elementary school in Milwaukee: she was let go on the third day of school after school officials learned of her race. (114-15) Ms. Raimey had been a distinguished student before entering the teaching profession. (116) She graduated from West Division High School at fourteen and obtained an English degree at the University of Wisconsin. (116-17)

Before entering law school, Ms. Raimey volunteered for the Milwaukee Urban League and ultimately became a member of the board. (117-18) She founded the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in Milwaukee, and she helped to start a YWCA branch in Milwaukee for African Americans (now called the Vel Phillips Center). (118)

Ms. Raimey practiced law in Milwaukee. (118) Three African-American lawyers practiced in Milwaukee in the 1930s through the 1940s. (118) Ms. Raimey served both African-American and white clients. (118) She represented individuals “’regardless of their race, color, creed, or economic ability . . . in a fair and just manner.’” (118)

The book recounts that when Ms. Raimey accepted an award later in life, she said

[i]f my acceptance and completion of law school at Marquette University in the 1920s has inspired or encouraged anyone to enter the field of law, I am pleased. If any accomplishment that I may have made has had any influence on any young people, I am pleased more. (121)

Ms. Raimey has been recognized by other Marquette faculty. Professor Phoebe Weaver Williams recounted Ms. Raimey’s life in A Black Woman’s Voice: The Story of Mabel Raimey, “Shero”, 74 Marq. L. Rev. 345 (1991).** A historical marker to Ms. Raimey also stands outside Sensenbrenner Hall on Wisconsin Avenue.

I admire Ms. Raimey for her desire to learn, her ability to push forward in the face of injustice and bigotry, her sense of fairness in representing her clients regardless of race, and her community activism.

Readers: what other Marquette women lawyers have made a difference in the legal profession and the broader community? Whom do you admire?

*Greta Anderson, More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Wisconsin Women, 113-21 (2004).

**In her book, Greta Anderson gratefully acknowledged Professor Williams’ assistance in writing the chapter on Ms. Raimey.

That’s certainly as good a way as I can think of to explain what is clearly an effort by Walker to move toward the middle on at least some issues, particularly education quality matters. In just over a half year in office, Walker has become an especially polarizing figure. Many on the right think he has changed the long-term future of Wisconsin for the better and praise him enthusiastically. Many on the left think he is so bad that they will succeed in bringing him to a re-call election next year. Some polls show that there are stronger feelings about Walker, both pro and con, with little middle ground, than is true for any other governor currently.  

But, ultimately, in a state that is as politically split as Wisconsin, it is valuable, if not essential, to have support among many of those in the middle. And Walker’s overall poll numbers are down in the light of the ferocious battle over the state budget.

So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when Walker took more moderate positions in an interview I did with him on July 1 on education issues. He referred several times to his desire to build consensus on some major issues and said it was “the Wisconsin way” to get a wide range of people together to work on issues. He talked about how he was building a strong relationship with Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, on matters such as a new school accountability system, new state tests, and an initiative aimed at increasing the overall quality of the work of principals and teachers. The generally-liberal Evers has been backed by teachers unions and was strongly critical of some major parts of the budget proposals from Walker, a conservative Republican.

Walker’s comments and subsequent conversations with him and Evers led to a story I wrote for the July 10 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a column I did on Walker’s education thoughts on July 17. The audio of my interview with Walker is availabkle on the latter Web page. 

Walker has also sent some other signals he is tacking toward the middle just ahead of recall elections for nine state senators. Those signals include dropping his support of repealing the state ban on smoking in public places and dropping efforts to keep Wisconsin from receiving federal funds for some health programs.

Is this more-moderate Walker here to stay? Will more middle-of-the-road stands help his polling numbers? My guess is that feelings on Walker are so strong in both directions that it will be hard to shake them. But I admit I’m glad to see Walker and Evers cooperating on some important education steps.

Several other items in the educational policy arena:

On the local front, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association is asking its members to vote on what they think the union should do in response to a request from the Milwaukee Public Schools board and Superintendent Gregory Thornton that members pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions in the two years remaining on the MPS labor contract. Management says it will recall about 200 teachers who have been laid off if teachers agree to the step. Including those 200 teachers, MPS is shedding almost 1,000 positions this fall.

Publicly, the union’s leaders have resisted making concessions, but the subject apparently has been the subject of a lot of discussion behind the scenes. The request to teachers to state their views by responding to a mailed questionnaire is a rare step by union leaders.

Thornton waded into the vote with an appeal posted on his blog Monday for teachers to support the concessions.  He wrote, “I make my personal pledge that the dollars the district would earn back from such concessions would be immediately used to bring back teachers we had to lay off in late June.  Every cent we get back will be used to bring back teachers. These are teachers who may have been in the classroom next door to yours.  They are teachers with whom you have shared break time, and whose children’s names you may know.  There are families on the line here.”

In national news, two development worth mentioning:

The Washington Post reports that District of Columbia school leaders have fired 206 teachers who got poor ratings on the groundbreaking evaluation system that was brought in while the controversial Michelle Rhee was chancellor of the system. Even with Rhee gone, her successor, Kaya Henderson, is continuing the system, known as IMPACT. And Mayor Vincent Gray has supported the step.

And New York City school officials are giving up on a system implemented there several years ago that gave the staffs of schools incentive bonuses if the schools met goals for improved student achievement. The system was intended to avoid the problem of giving some teachers bonuses but not others and it aimed to create a sense of staff unity in pursuing broader success. The program had come to be considered a failure.

Teacher evaluation systems, the idea of firing low performing teachers, and incentive or performance pay for teachers are all on the agenda in Wisconsin now. But effective ways of succeeding at all three remain hard to find.

Andrea and Natalie conclude as follows:

The opportunity to put years of writing and work in the field to use to help out the city, state, and court system was an honor and unique opportunity for the law school. Both professors and students witnessed law school teachings put to work and had a rewarding impact in their own backyard.  It also has given us, as designers, far greater insight into the local government and local community than we would have had without this collaboration. Most importantly, mediation has worked in exactly the way that we theorized. The communication between the parties is vastly improved through the program than it would be otherwise. Parties have control over the outcomes, not perfectly, but again, much more so than they would have in the alternatives. And the program provides for efficient solutions as the city continues to struggle with foreclosures. Moving forward, we have to map student availability and interest with the needs and opportunities presented by the program. But we have witnessed the putting of theory into practice in a wonderful way while recognizing that we would have all preferred that this particular need not exist.

Their paper, entitled “There’s No Place Like Home: Applying Dispute System Design Theory to Create a Foreclosure Mediation System,” will appear in the Nevada Law Journal.

According to the complaint (which can be viewed here), on March 10, 2010, MSP submitted a development application to construct 180 units of affordable housing in what is known as New Berlin’s “City Center.”  The proposal stated that the development would include 100 elderly units and 80 workforce housing units.  The development was intended to be financed in part by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, a program that allows a developer to sell tax credits to investors in exchange for the promise that the developer will rent the apartments for below-market rates to tenants who qualify.  For this specific development, MSP was going to rent to individuals who made 40 to 60 percent of the median household income in New Berlin.  In New Berlin, the median income as of 2000 was approximately $70,000, which means the proposed development would rent to individuals who made $28,000 to $42,000 a year.

On May 3, 2010, the New Berlin plan commission voted 4-3 to approve MSP’s application.  The next day, the local media reported the approval, and residents of New Berlin began to voice their disapproval, with protests culminating at a local town hall meeting.  (Some examples of the local opinions voiced at that meeting are here.)  According to the complaint, Mayor Chiovatero also received threatening phone calls at his home, and had a sign that read “n—-r lover” placed in his front yard.

The complaint alleges that these events eventually led the Mayor to move for reconsideration of the approval, and the plan commission unanimously approved the Mayor’s motion to reconsider on June 7, 2010.  This vote eventually led to a 90-day moratorium on any new development proposals, and effectively denied the MSP application.  Now, the government alleges that New Berlin’s action violated § 3604(a) insofar as the City denied housing to individuals on the basis of their race when it voted against the MSP project.

Although it may seem like the complaint is based on income level, a class that is not protected by the Fair Housing Act, the complaint points out that minority households make less income annually, on average, than white households do.  Further, minority households are more likely to be below the poverty line.  Thus, these statistics, taken together with the allegations of racially based comments, will lay the groundwork for the theory that citizens of New Berlin opposed the project based on the belief that it would attract more minority residents.  Liability might then extend to the City through the theory that the City denied the project to appease the citizens’ racially-based opposition.

Like the proposed development, the filing of this complaint has provoked feelings of strong opposition.  These feelings come with good measure.  The filing of the complaint implicitly calls New Berlin residents racist, and brings national attention to the City that is not favorable.  To be sure, this post is not endorsing the belief that all residents of New Berlin are racists, or that the government is trying to make that allegation; however, these are inferences that the public will make upon learning about this complaint.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that Milwaukee is the third-most segregated city, and the Milwaukee metro area is the most segregated metropolitan area, in the Country.  Census data show that Milwaukee County is only 54 percent white, whereas Waukesha County is approximately 90 percent white, Ozaukee is 93 percent white, Washington is 94.2 percent white, Racine is 74 percent white, and Kenosha is 78 percent white.

As problems of racial discrimination and separation continue on into 2011, perhaps the main question becomes whether integration will ever be an achievable goal for this country.  It may be possible that the legal fight against racial discrimination has grown similar to the legal fight against drugs; no matter how hard one tries, people will always engage in the illegal practice.  And no matter how hard one tries, perhaps racial integration is something that cannot be forced upon various communities in our society.

Housing discrimination and segregationist practices are problems that still plague the City of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee metropolitan area, and the United States as a whole.  Although there are many individuals who either applaud or bemoan this lawsuit, most do so for incorrect, politically charged reasons.  Segregation and racial discrimination are both issues that need to be addressed in Southeastern Wisconsin.  At the very least, perhaps this complaint can bring attention to these problems and provide an impetus for people to work toward a solution to fix them.

The two waves – and there will be at least a few more new principals before September – are both a major opportunity and a major concern. Principals are crucial to a school and, if the new batch has good impact overall, that will be a big plus for MPS. But the unusually large number of new principals means almost a quarter of all MPS schools will be under new leadership, which can be a stressful development for a school.

Assuming the committee and, next week, the full school board approve, the new group will include five current MPS principals who are being trasnferred to new assignments and 14 people who are being hired for or promoted to principal jobs. Among the newcomers to the ranks of MPS principals will be Peter Samaranayke at Rufus King High School, the most prestigious high school school in the system; Michael Cipriano at Hamilton High; and Brian Brzezinski at Pulaski. Cynthia Eastern, who has been principal of Pulaski the last several years, will become principal of the School of Career and Technical Education, which is being created as part of the overhaul of Custer High School.

A couple other education items of interest:

I admit I always think about the future of MPS when I read about developments in Detroit, which is widely regarded as the most troubled public school system in the country. In the latest of many changes in recent years (none of which have really put the brakes on the slide of Detroit public schools), Michigan officials announced Monday that they were going to create a public-private authority to take over 39 of the lowest performing schools in the city for the 2012-13 school year.

According to the Associated Press and Education Week, the schools will not have a central administration and principals will hire teachers directly.

It’s not on the table now and presumably wouldn’t be any time soon for MPS, but if the system breaks down under its many stresses or if Gov. Scott Walker and the legislature’s Republican leaders want to see it, could a similar authority end up overseeing some hunk, if not all, of a revamped MPS system of schools operating individually?

And from Florida, the news this week that Gerard Robinson, who has been the education chief in Virginia, has been hired by Florida’s state board of education as commissioner. The announcement said Robinson was a senior fellow at the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette from 2004 to 2006. He has been a close associate of Howard Fuller, the head of the institute. Robinson also served as president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national organization that Fuller co-founded. Robinson is known for his advocacy for charter schools and school choice programs.  Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who asked Robinson’s predecessor to leave over differences in philosophy, praised Robinson’s appointment in a statement.  

The first was that, due to langauge in the bill backed by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators, if the MTEA agreed to any changes in its contract, which goes through June 2013, the entire contract would be wiped out. The second was that the union had already made concessions when it settled in September 2010 and just wasn’t going to make any more. 

The first line of defense stands to be erased in the light of changes made by the legislature’s joint finance committee that would allow the MPS contract to be changed without bringing down the roof.

And the Milwaukee School Board, as described ina Journal Sentinel story,  put the question squarely to the union last week of whether it is going to stick by the second response. The board asked that the union to agree to have teachers pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions. Although that is technically the way the system works now (with MPS paying a matching amount), MPS and many other school districts have paid both shares of the pension payments for many years.

There is no indication I know of that the union is going to budge on this, even in the light of the School Board saying almost 200 teaching jobs could be saved with the expected savings (more than $19 million next year). 

I got a strongly worded e-mail from an elementary school teacher who said teachers had made big concessions already, saving MPS more money than the Walker plan for increased health insurance and pension payments would save. I’m not so sure about that claim, but even if true, the pension cut proposal is a major test of the union and of teachers. 

The teacher wrote, ”So essentially he (Walker) just wants to cut as many services to public school children (50% plus poor) and to take more of our salary. . . .  We have already signed a contract where it is not necessary to take that much from our salaries to save more. 

“No art, no gym, no music, no library, no nurse (I have a student who has severe diabetes and has to have his levels drawn 2x a day in school and given insulin as needed), no help running the school – one principal with NO support for 540 students, para professionals cut, no vice-principals anywhere, no math team leaders, no curriculum generalists, no literacy coach.  33 children in my class next year. And oh yeah, computerized tests for 4 YEAR OLDS and older.  4 YEAR OLDS.  Unbelievable.” 

I certainly understand what people, especially teachers, are saying when they look at what the cuts in the state budget mean to the daily life in their schools. It’s a bad climate right now. I also agree that what the board is asking  is a lot. The pension payments would mean more than $2,300 a year for any teacher making more than $40,000 a year.

That said, I’m also deeply concerned about the staff attrition the teacher described at her school and at many other schools. If agreeing to pay the pension share could mitigate that in a significant way, would it be worth doing? What would it mean to students? What would it do to teachers? In most school districts in Wisconsin, teachers are (not very willingly, I grant) going to make that concession, along with bigger contributions to health insurance costs than MPS teachers are going to pay, and, in some cases, along with zero increases in pay. There are pay increases built into the pay scacle in the MPS contract for next year, and a large number of teachers will also get “step” increases for having one more year experience on the salary chart.

Politically, where does it leave the MTEA if it refuses to make concessions that teachers statewide are making? I suspect many (maybe even some teachers elsewhere) will take it as proof that the Milwaukee union and its members place their pay and benefits above their students well-being. As much as the current circumstances are upsetting to many teachers, I kind of doubt that very many other people will see it as a rightful and wise response to what is going on. My guess is Scott Walker will think, if the union turns this down, that it’s proving his point. 

I’m not aware of many teachers who regard this as a good time for the profession. And I can’t think of any evidence to regard the current administration in Madison as friendly to MPS. It’s easy to believe they are looking for MPS to wither. 

What can teachers and the MTEA do to respond to that and to proceed in a way that is best for the students in MPS, as well as best, in the big picture, for themselves? That’s a pretty important question right now.

MTEA executive director is out: Stan Johnson, the executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, is out, continuing a period of difficulties and instability in leadership of the union.  Johnson resigned last week “for personal reasons,” according to a union spokesman who said there would be no further comment. But Johnson’s abrupt departure suggested it was not an amiable matter.

Johnson was previously president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the union organizations which has been at the heart of education politics in Wisconsin in recent decades. He was one of the most widely known teachers’ union figures in the state.

 In a period when all teachers’ unions have been facing a lot of challenges, the MTEA has had had the complication of continuing leadership issues.  Tom Morgan was named executive director in 2007, succeeding long-term union leader Sam Carmen. But Morgan died of a heart attack while on a vacation cruise in March 2010. Since then, the union went through several interim directors and a search for a new executive director that ended with no candidate being selected Carmen came out of retirement for  several months and it was during Carmen’s return that the MTEA reached a four-year contract agreement with the Milwaukee School Board. Johnson was hired after Carmen returned to retirement last fall.

With Johnson gone,  long-time union staffer Sid Hatch has been named acting executive director. Separately, the union is installing a new president this week. Mike Langyel, who was president the last two years (and was president from 1991 to 1993 as well), has retired and Bob Peterson, a veteran teacher who is nationally known for his work on social justice issues and his founding of the Rethinking Schools education publication, is the new president.

Testing for voucher students:  One of the unpublicized aspects of the voucher proposal approved last week by the legislature’s joint finance committee was a plan for students who use publicly-funded vouchers to attend private schools to continue to take the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, the tests taken by public school students. But there is a twist to the decision that will make it a little tricky to compare the results from voucher schools and public schools.

Last fall, for the first time,  thousands of voucher students in Milwaukee took the WKCEs and the overall scores of the private schools were made public this spring. The results showed that there were no big differences in how students in Milwaukee Public Schools and voucher students rated. In fact, MPS outscored the voucher schools in some instances.

In his budget proposal, Gov. Scott Walker came out for lifting the WKCE requirement for the voucher schools, although each private school would have had to administer a different nationally recognized test. That led to concerns that the private schools would not be subject to the degree of accountability that goes with having test scores that can be compared with public schools.

The Republican-controlled finance committee agreed to keep the WKCE requirement, but said the results for each voucher school would be presented based on only the students who took the test. What does that mean? In some private schools, such as Downtown Montessori, a large number of parents used their legal option to withdraw their children from testing. But the overall results for those schools were presented as if those students had scored zeroes, which made the schools look pretty weak. Now, the results will be presented based on only those who take the tests, which will mean much better looking results for a school where a significant number of students opt out.

But public schools are required to report the results based ion all students, including the kids who opt out. (In general, very few do that). Therefore, there might be an issue of comparability between schools where all students are in the results pool and schools where only those who take the test are included.   

Old faces at new schools:  A brief note about plans to turn around two of MPS’ most troubled high schools, North and Custer. Work has been underway for months to select an organization to run the new North. Mosaica Turnaround Partners, a national school operator, was selected after submitting the only bid, but trepidations about Mosaica were substantial, based in large part on problems the company has had in other places. Mosaica has now withdrawn, and the Milwaukee School Board decided recently to turn North into a charter school with teachers who are MPS employees. Rogers Onick, who retired after many years as principal of Morse Middle School for the Gifted and Talented, has agreed to oversee the launching of the new operation.

Custer High School is also undergoing an overhaul of its programs (and is losing that name). What will be called the School of Career and Technical Education will now occupy much of the building at 5075 N. Sherman Blvd. Plans call for it to serve sixth through twelfth graders. It also will be a charter school where the teachers are MPS employee. And overseeing the new program will be Gloria Erkins, retired principal of Vincent High School.

Also in the Custer building will be the former 35^th Street School. No longer on 35h Street, plans call for it to be named after President Barack Obama.

Extra funding for special ed students?  In a recent opinion column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, two of the key researchers who have studied Milwaukee’s schools, particularly the private voucher schools, wrote, “Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.”

The two were addressing the issue of why students identified as needing special educations services are found so much more frequently in MPS schools (about 19% of all students), compared to the voucher schools (some say under 2%, some say the number is more like 8%, except many of them are not officially labeled as special ed students).

That raised the hackles of MPS Superintendent Greg Thornton. He wrote on his blog, “Really? Can they honestly believe that?” He said it is not true that MPS has strong incentives to classify kids as needing special ed. “Due to low and declining levels of reimbursement from the federal and state levels, the costs associated with providing needed services to students with disabilities far outpace any so-called ‘extra funding,’ Thornton wrote. “ In the 2009-10 school year, using the most conservative method of calculating special education funding, Milwaukee Public Schools incurred unreimbursed special education costs of $42.2 million.”

Michael Bonds’ bankruptcy: Is it a big deal that Michael Bonds, president of the Milwaukee School Board, has filed for personal bankruptcy? In many ways, no. It’s his personal business and most likely won’t affect what he does as board president. But  I suspect the matter is going to stick in people’s minds for a long time and become part of the general climate of doubtfulness about the competency of the School Board to manage MPS. Is that fair? You’re welcome to your own opinion. But I suspect it is reality.

One: Legally and politically, this is almost surely idle thinking, but what if the private schools that are in Milwaukee’s voucher program had to face the same kind of consequences for getting weak results that charter schools and, of late, conventional public schools face?

Charter schools, which are independently operated, publicly funded schools, are generally given five-year contracts by a government body. (In Milwaukee, charter contracts are granted by the School Board, city government, or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.) It is not unusual for a charter school to be closed if it is not getting good results at the end of five years, or sometimes sooner.

In the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system, school closings are becoming common. Tightening finances and declining enrollments are key reasons, but getting bad results is also a factor. And a list of schools, including several major high schools, are under orders, based on federal policies, to take steps such as overhauling their programs and staffs and getting new principals because of low student success.

Although the regulatory climate around voucher schools has gained significant muscle over the last decade, the accountability tools are still much different than those for the other kinds of schools. Basically, if a private school runs a relatively competent operation and parents decide to enroll their children and keep them there, the school can keep operating, no matter how poor its outcomes are. And, based on test scores released recently, some of them have very poor outcomes. But it is after all, a parental choice program and if parents choose to send their child to a lousy school, so be it.  

Evers argued in his memo that many of the voucher schools are really public schools in the sense that almost all of their money comes from public dollars. This year, in half of the 100-plus schools involved in the voucher program, 94% or more of the students were on vouchers that generally bring $6,442 per child to the school.    

Evers’ memo said, “A significant number of choice schools perform below the MPS average in reading and math. While this is also true for MPS schools, those schools are subject to federal and state sanctions and turnaround requirements. In light of this, the state may need to impose improvements requirements on consistently low-performing choice schools.”

He also wrote, “If the choice schools are really some kind of quasi-public schools, then in keeping with national efforts to turnaround struggling schools, it may be necessary to subject low-performing schools to financial sanctions, turnaround efforts or even closure.”

So what if a voucher school, every five years or so, had to get reauthorization to get public money, based on demonstrating it was operating a quality program? That would be interesting – and, frankly, some of them would definitely not survive.

There is such a screening operation now for private schools that want to join the voucher program, and it has effectively cut the flow of new choice schools to a trickle.

But politically, at least as of now, the Republican control of the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature has put all the momentum on the side of broadening the voucher program, not putting some clamps on it. Furthermore – I should warn you that I am not a lawyer, despite being employed by the Law School – there could be a complicated legal dispute if the state tried to impose orders on voucher schools to change their academic ways. In 1998, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court approved inclusion of religious schools in the voucher program, one of the keys to the prevailing decision was the argument that the state would not become entangled in overseeing private schools in a program built around parent choice.

All this said, it is interesting to wonder what would happen if the heat was put on some of the weakest private schools the way heat is being put on conventional schools and charter schools.

Two: You could have a long discussion about the reasons and the exact data, but it is indisputable that MPS has a far larger share of Milwaukee’s special education students than the private schools do. Evers’ report put forward some figures I had not seen before.

“The data shows a significant enrollment decline in MPS among regular education students, but not corresponding change among special education students,” he said. Specifically, over nine years, the number of special education students in MPS rose slightly – from 15,912 in 2001-02 to 16,078 this year, an increase of 166. But the  number of MPS students overall fell during that period from 97,762 to 80,923, a decline of 16,839.

From 2001-02 to this year, the percentage of MPS students who disabilities rose from 16.3% to 19.9%. For private schools in the city, Evers’ data put the total at less than 1% of enrollment. Voucher school advocates say the real figure is higher than that, but that often students in private schools are not given the special education label.

Even if you think MPS calls too many kids special ed students and the voucher schools have more than the official figures, it is inescapable to see how much special education is increasingly influencing what goes on in MPS, and how big a difference there is on that score between the voucher schools and MPS. 

Three: It’s worth noting that Evers is fighting the voucher expansion proposals so actively and openly. Such aggressive action hasn’t always been the practice of state school superintendents. With school aid being cut so strongly and with the war still raging over eliminating most of the collective bargaining power of teachers, sources have said Evers has been getting lobbied by public school advocates to take a stronger role in fighting Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans. It looks like he is taking that advice.

So say whatever you want about the specifics of what is going on, but look to the future with hope. It may well be a good approach to personal life. It’s just about a mandatory approach to political life.

That seems like a good perspective on one of the interesting exchanges at  “What Now, Milwaukee? A Forum on the Future of Wisconsin’s Largest City,” a discussion Wednesday at Eckstein Hall that brought together five power players in the city’s life. Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, moderated the 90-minute session before a capacity audience of over 200. The session was co-sponsored by the Law School and the Milwaukee Press Club.

The conversation quickly focused on the need to change the overall low rate of educational success in Milwaukee. There was discussion of budget cuts, rising class sizes, the chronic fighting between advocates for different streams of schools, the inability of the community to come together, and the need to give parents information on every school. Not much light was shed on how to turn the trends in  more positive directions.

But when Gousha asked if educational quality will be better in Milwaukee five years from now, Tim Sheehy, the president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, answered, “Dramatically.” Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele said yes. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett agreed. Milwaukee School Superintendent Gregory Thornton said, “Without question.” And Julia Taylor, president  of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, concurred.

In the course of the forum, the five touched on subjects including economic development, intergovernmental cooperation, ways of dealing with poverty, the failure for years to develop large stretches of the Park East land downtown, and the needs of employers. Sheehy triggered a front page story in Thursday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by suggesting that the community consider keeping the sales tax of a tenth of a per cent in effect when the period for paying for the Miller Park baseball stadium ends, in order to pay for a new arena where the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team could play. A separate story summarzing the session can be found here.

But amid the discussion of problems, some deeply entrenched,  there was at least some  tone of optimism. In fact, Abele listed that as a priority for Milwaukee.

“This sounds like a small thing, but actually I think it is a big thing,” he said. “This community, if we want to attract more talent, if we want to have more clout in Madison, if we want to be a desirable place to locate a business, we have to project the fact that we believe we’re a great community and we have value.”

He added, “There is never going to be a time where there aren’t things that we all on this panel are going to work hard to fix. But we just can’t, can’t, continue to be afraid to, with pride, tell our story. Anybody who doesn’t think that has a direct impact on our desirability as a place to live, to locate your business, and a direct impact on how we negotiate with Madison in the budget process — I think we have some opportunities there.”

Do we have problems or opportuunities? The panel clearly thought  both — and was willing to say so with a smile.

The full session can be viewed by clicking here.

The alleged crime is sadly familiar: a young man was arrested in connection with the death of his girlfriend’s two-year-old son, Karmari J. Curtis, whom the suspect was babysitting.  The boyfriend brought the toddler’s body to the emergency room and claimed that the child had drowned accidentally while in the bath.  Since the lifeless child was reportedly dry and completely dressed, medical personnel and the police doubted the story, and the medical examiner’s report on the cause of death is currently sealed pending charges.  At the time of the toddler’s death, the suspect, Corey Benson, was out on bail awaiting trial on charges of physical abuse of a child and child neglect.  The previous charges stem from an incident in October when Benson admitted to playing tackle football with the same child and doing elbow and leg drops to him afterwards.  The toddler suffered life-threatening injuries, including a lacerated liver, as the result of that incident.  Benson was under a court order to have no contact with the boy after the October charges.

Everything about this tragic incident is ghastly, but here I want to focus on one particularly chilling aspect of this situation: the suspect, Corey Benson, is a young man of great potential who seemed to have beaten the odds against him. 

One of six children, at the age of two he lost his father in a drug-related incident.  He was raised in a tough Milwaukee neighborhood by a single mother.  Although he was in and out of foster care, Benson excelled in school and was the valedictorian of his high school class.  He won a scholarship to Purdue University and graduated from there with an accounting degree.  He overcame the odds; he seemed to have such a bright future and now . . . this.

Research shows that people who were abused or neglected as children are at significantly higher risk of later becoming child abusers themselves, although contrary to popular belief the majority of abused children do not later become abusers.  Adults who were abused as children are also at significantly higher risk of experiencing other difficulties in life such as addiction, relationship problems, and depression.  Yet here, too, there are many formerly abused people who go on to live happy and productive lives.  Much research has attempted to identify why some formerly abused adults have happy life outcomes, while others lead tragic and unhappy lives rife with problems.  We hope that if we can discover the factors that save some abused children from an unhappy fate, we can reproduce those factors for other children and save them, too.

Essentially, child-saving factors can be either internal or external.  Internal factors are individual characteristics of the abused child, like intelligence, that make him more resilient and better able to seek out and get necessary help or affection. External factors are opportunities for the child to have essential developmental needs met by persons other than the maltreating parents.  School, counseling, and mentoring programs are examples of efforts that are thought to give maltreated kids some of the love and support that they have not been able to receive at home. 

We don’t know what happened to Corey Benson when he was growing up, but the fact that he was in and out of foster care suggests there were serious abuse or neglect issues in his family.  He clearly has some characteristics that would improve his chances of breaking the cycle of maltreatment, such as intelligence and a reportedly strong work ethic.  We don’t know what kind of services he received, or why they could not somehow have prevented the current tragedy.  Benson has not been convicted of either the beating or the killing, and he is innocent until proven guilty.  The evidence against him, though, is troubling.  Benson’s admissions in the police record about the October incident at the very least show a troubling lack of understanding about how to take care of a child, what with descriptions of tackle football and acting on “aggression and adrenaline” that built up as the suspect played with the toddler. 

Although our society has made some progress in identifying ways to help maltreated children live healthy and productive lives, the death of little Karmari reminds us that there is a lot we do not know about how and when to intervene.  We have the continual hope that if we get to maltreated children earlier we can save even more of them from harm.  But sometimes we can’t save them, and we do not yet fully know why not.

Because Holloway is an announced candidate for the office of County Executive recently vacated by Governor Scott Walker, Holloway’s violations of the housing code are indeed newsworthy.  What’s more, aspects of Holloway’s dilemma are suggestive of the problems related to municipal housing codes, the most serious of which is lack of enforcement.

Why are the codes in Milwaukee and most urban areas so ineffectively enforced?

Part of the answer has to do with bureaucratic delays and general bumbling by municipal officials.  In addition and on a deeper level, officials are hesitant to enforce the codes for fear of landlords boarding up their properties and taking them out of the low-end rental market.  The urban poor already have limited housing options, and aggressive code enforcement could make this bad situation even worse.

One solution to the problem might be a renewed governmental commitment to public housing.  However, government officials have in recent years have voiced no significant support for this idea, and, furthermore, the Supreme Court made clear years ago in Lindsey v. Normet, 405 U.S. 56, 74 (1972), that no fundamental right to housing exists under the United States Constitution.  As truly sorry as Holloway’s rental units appear to be, they might be better than nothing for the city’s poor.

Mayfair epitomizes the modern shopping complex.  It has more sales per square foot than any other shopping complex in the metropolitan area.  A staggering 16 million shoppers pass through the mall annually, making Mayfair the busiest mall in all of Wisconsin.  With its flashing signage, swooping escalators, and elaborate display windows, Mayfair is a striking shrine devoted to late capitalism’s excessive consumption.

The central belief at Mayfair and hundreds of comparable shrines is that the purchase of goods and experiences will lead to personal happiness.

However, this belief turns out to be fragile.  For starters, consumption or the possibility of consumption has a way of darkening the line between haves and have-nots.  Consumers who are teenagers, belong to minority groups, or come from the center-city often cannot find or afford what they want.  Then, too, purchases are frequently defective or do not last.  Even if the goods and experiences are what the consumers wanted, the resulting amount of happiness falls far short of was promoted and anticipated.  The harshest critics of consumer capitalism in fact go so far as to say the promise of happiness through consumption is fundamentally a lie.

Bearing in mind what a place like Mayfair is, what it promises, and how often promises are broken, should we be surprised that discontent festers within the shrine’s walls?  Should we be surprised that frustration can become anger and that this anger can in turn lead to tumult?

Payne started his political career in 1872 at the most grassroots level – the Young Men’s Republican Club of Milwaukee County – as a volunteer for President Grant’s reelection campaign.  As a reward for his party service, he was appointed postmaster of Milwaukee in 1876 – this before civil service laws protected such positions from political patronage.  At one point, he told the citizens of Milwaukee, “As long as I am postmaster, I shall employ only Republicans if I can find those that are competent.”   When Democrat Grover Cleveland won the presidency in 1884, he promptly fired Payne as postmaster, labeling him an “offensive partisan.” 

Between administrations, he served as an executive for various prominent Milwaukee companies.  During that time, he served as a member of the Republican National Committee from Wisconsin.  When he was recruited for RNC chairman in 1896, he passed on the opportunity because his company had just been through a significant labor dispute that would have been a source of controversy.  Though without the title chairman, he was the moving force behind the committee in that cycle, managing things from the Chicago headquarters.  Joseph Babcock, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and representative of Wisconsin’s third district, said of Payne’s work, “I was never able to broach a subject that he was not thoroughly posted on and he seemed to have as clear ideas as to matters coming under the jurisdiction of the Congressional Committee as he had of matters pertaining to his own committee.”

In 1900, following the successful presidential campaign of William McKinley, Payne took over as vice chairman of the RNC, where he led an effort to reapportion convention delegates based on Republican vote totals rather than congressional districts.  Two years later, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him Postmaster General, at the time a cabinet-level post, though he remained RNC vice chairman.

In February of 1904, the legendary Mark Hanna, then a U.S. senator from Ohio and chairman of the RNC, passed away unexpectedly.  Under the rules, Payne as vice chair ascended to the chairmanship, a position he held until June of 1904, when a National Convention was held in Chicago and a new chairman elected.  Sickly during those summer months, he passed away shortly thereafter, on October 4, 1904.  His remains were returned to Milwaukee, and he is buried in Forest Home Cemetery.

He was eulogized by many friends from both sides of the aisle, in Wisconsin and across the nation.  Many of these salutes are collected in a hagiographical volume composed for his widow and available in full on Google Books.  I will close by selecting just one of the many praises offered, this from U.S. Senator John Spooner of Wisconsin at the closer of his tenure as Milwaukee’s postmaster: “Payne is a born leader of men, possessed of superb ability as an organizer of tireless energy, unwavering in his devotion to the principles of his party, unselfish and self-sacrificing in the personal services he yields to the cause in which he believes.  He deserves the gratitude of every Republican, as he has won the respect of every Democrat who likes a fair fight, and admires an opponent who deals hard blows, and takes them in return like a man.”

As Reince Preibus begins his tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee, I look forward to seeing another Wisconsin man lead the party with energy, ability, and devotion.

To what extent are the troubling rankings and the patterns to which they point truly based on race?  American racism is hardly dead and buried, but in our society race often obscures the equally pernicious workings of socioeconomic class inequality. 

While blacks are concentrated in worn-out center-cities, their inability to move to the suburbs involves income and asset factors more than skin color.  Surely a black physician or business executive can take up residence with his or her family in a $400,000 home on a countrified suburban cul-de-sac, but the disproportionately impoverished blacks of American center-cities cannot afford this kind of housing.  Moderately priced rental housing is the only type of housing the urban poor can afford.

The realities regarding socioeconomic class stand behind the troubling statistics regarding residential segregation by race in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.  The poor – black, white, or Hispanic – live almost completely within the City of Milwaukee, while Ozaukee and Washington Counties rank among only nineteen counties in the entire country with poverty rates below five percent.  Second-ring suburbs and outlying towns like New Berlin and West Bend have been in the news lately because of efforts in those towns to prevent the construction of moderately priced rental housing.  If this kind of housing was built, some fear, the urban poor might relocate and try to build lives and raise their kids among the middle and upper classes.

And here’s one more depressing fact from still another study.  According to a report from the Eisenhower Foundation, the 10-15 percent of the contemporary population living below the poverty line is actually both growing in numbers and becoming more residentially concentrated.  The nation is taking baby steps to overcome its racial inequality, but the existence of a concentrated, urban sub-working class might actually be endemic to advanced capitalism.

First, thank you to the MULS community because without all of you I would not be where I am today. To my professors, thank you for challenging me even though there are days when I would prefer you did not! You all have instilled in me a deep appreciation for the law and for Marquette. Sometimes it goes unsaid but thank you for all that you do.

Second, thank you to my classmates. Although some I do not know, I will leave law school in a short while having made friends that I consider family. So, whether we were friends in class, competitors in moot court, or friends for life, thank you!

Third, thank you to the Milwaukee community. You all have provided endless opportunities in legal work, volunteer work, and fun! Thank you to all of the firms, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and others who employ MU law students. The experiences are priceless. I am happy to call Milwaukee home for many years to come!

Last, but definitely not least, thank you to my family. Without your patience, your support, and your love I would not be where I am today.

Thank you and Happy Holidays to everyone!