Is this the end of Milwaukee Public Schools?
I kind of doubt it, but the fact you can ask that question seriously says something about the depth of the crisis facing the state’s largest and most problem-filled school district. Put together the cuts outlined in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal with the end of federal stimulus spending, the continuing decline in enrollment, and the every-day run of severe problems that affect MPS and you have a really ugly picture.
School Board President Michael Bonds has used the word “devastating” repeatedly in recent days. State Rep. Tamara Grigsby, a Milwaukee Democrat who is an MPS graduate herself, called Walker’s proposals “an absolute annihilation” of public education, according to a story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Those are strong terms.
Layoffs of hundreds of teachers, the elimination of a list programs such as a math initiative in recent years (paid for by $10 million a year in state aid), and the possible closing of a substantial number of schools all seem likely. Will even those steps be enough to meet the financial problems? Will what results be a stable and functioning system? (I’m imagining simply the re-assignment and scheduling issues around a major wave of school closings, for example.)
The Walker proposals open the door for growth in charter and voucher schools. But there are major capacity issues that mean neither of those streams of local education can start flowing a lot more heavily, especially in the short term. There isn’t going to be a huge boom in enrollment in those schools by next September – it just doesn’t seem possible. So don’t count on those schools to bail out MPS, especially not quickly.
One important question is whether the MTEA teachers union will agree to re-open the contract that runs through June 2013. As I outlined in a recent blog item, that contract calls for a level of support for employee benefits that Walker and legislative Republicans are adamant about ending. While Republicans are almost certain to prevail as a matter of statewide policy, they can’t override a contract that is already in force. But if the union insists on sticking to the contract – and that seems very likely – job cuts in MPS will be all the more severe. State aid payments will be premised on benefits that are much svelter than MPS’s body.
But even if the union relents, it’s going to be ugly. The MPS system has been – and remains – based on having more money to feed it every year. MPS leaders were unhappy with the tentative budgets they worked on in January, which were based on spending per student (the state revenue cap) going up $200 for next year. That would be a smaller increase than any recent year. A few weeks ago, someone told me the cap was actually going to go down $100. I thought that was very serious business. In Walker’s budget proposal, the cap goes down, on average, $550. That’s a swing of $750 from the premise used in MPS budgeting just a few weeks ago.
If you want to say we should break the spending cycle and that MPS needs a fundamental restructuring because of its unsatisfactory results, that’s fine. But I’m not aware of anyone who has workable plan for what comes next, especially if we’re talking about a school year that starts six months from now.
Navigating this will require leaders of the system to be smart, quick, strong, and creative. Those aren’t words that have been associated with MPS leadership an awful lot. Protesting may be the preferred response of some MPS leaders. But I hope there are people, both inside MPS and in the broader community, who will be working on plans to provide for the 80,000 or so students of MPS. Even if the Walker proposals get moderated a bit in the legislative process, they are generally going to prevail, and they’re going to shape things for at least the next two years.
Systems have a way of weathering storms, which is why I suspect there will still be an MPS system come September, and all the students will have seats in a classroom where there is a teacher. It won’t be pretty, but it will probably be functional in some way.
But it really is time to wonder if the end of MPS as we have known it lies in front of us – and, more important, if so, what comes next.
In 2011, the average annual compensation for an MPS teacher will be $101,000. That is for only nine months of work. The superintendent of MPS makes $265,000/year in base salary alone. The question should be not whether MPS will survive but whether the public can afford it. With a 50% high school graduation rate, MPS in its current form can only be seen as a complete failure.
MPS is a top-heavy bureaucracy. MPS leaders have have failed the public by making jobs and wages a top priority. Schooling children is not a priority at MPS at all. If everyone at MPS would take a 10% wage cut, no jobs would be lost. That it will never do that proves jobs – and not teaching children – is what MPS is all about.
This school system has been a disaster for 20 years. Funding private schools with tax money does not help but MPS has caused its own problems. The tax base to support MPS in its current form has evaporated and is not coming back. It’s time remove the authority for teacher contracts from the MPS board and place it in the hands of taxpayers where it belongs.
In my opinion, Governor Walker’s animus toward MPS extends to the whole City of Milwaukee. I note in this regard that he wants to end the requirement that MPS teachers live in Milwaukee. I personally think that teachers in general should live in the communities in which they teach, but for Milwaukee there is also a special reason for the teachers to stay on board. Deindustrialization has left Milwaukee poor and plagued by severe working-class unemployment. Teachers can not only teach Milwaukee’s children but can also help Milwaukee maintain some semblance of a middle class. Sometimes, I think that Governor Walker would like Milwaukee to dry up and blow away, but that of course is not about to happen.
@ Professor Papke. I agree that governor Walker’s animus vis a vis Milwaukee. I suspect that he would like to completely privatize education statewide, starting in Milwaukee.
I somewhat disagree, though, about the requirement that teachers live in the city of Milwaukee. Though I agree that teachers and other public employees can and should be a strong middle class presence in the city (not to mention paying taxes and buying goods and services locally), in practice, the requirement may be hurting the recruitment and retention of teachers.
Most teachers also have spouses that work. If the spouse works elsewhere: Racine, Sheboygan, West Bend, wherever, it creates a hardship to requre living in the city itself. I would wager that many quality teachers will either decline to consider employment at MPS or leave within 5 years because of this problem.
I know it is more complicated than this but for simplicity: requiring a $750/student cut in an average MPS classroom means $25,500 less per classroom. Since the average MPS teacher salary is $56,000 that is close to doubling the present 34 student class size. Does anyone seriously think MPS will do a better job education our children with 60 students/class?
In fiscal 2011-2012 (beginning July 1, 2011),the average MPS teacher will receive total compensation of $101,091 – $59,500 in salary and $41,591 in benefits. Their benefits alone exceed the salaries of many people in Wisconsin. This is for only nine months work. This is unconscionable.
Put another way, if Marquette Law School graduated only half of each incoming class, as MPS does, people would say it was one of the worst law schools in the country. Money is not the problem at MPS – an excessive bureaucracy that cares more about protecting salaries and benefits than teaching children is. This incompetence is a threat to our State. Illiterate and uneducated children and teens are a time bomb waiting to explode. Until MPS proves it can do better, simply throwing money down the MPS rat-hole does no one any good. The fundamental issue is whether the public can afford to continue to pay for this and I say it cannot.
If we really cared about improving MPS or schools in general, we would offer teachers the sort of salaries we offer professional athletes or investment bankers; and we would let the people who get those salaries know that we are paying top dollar for world class teachers, but that we expect world class schools for our money.
I don’t think that the problem is so much with the teachers at MPS (though I could be wrong), because they pretty much all come from the same state teaching programs. Same pool of graduates, same training. So why the achievement gap in the inner city? I suspect that the problem is poverty, and a growing racial and economic segregation in our state where the haves go to public schools in affluent suburbs, or private schools, while the have-nots are trapped in the inner city. IMO, the only way to bring more middle class people with school age kids to MPS is to have real quality, and that would mean paying teachers a lot more than we do now, not less.
Absent that pipe dream, I am all in favor of teacher exchanges, where teachers from MPS can switch places with their suburban brethren for a year or two. For that matter, it doesn’t have to be limited to MPS, but could be implemented statewide.
Teachers make an OK, but not overly lavish amount of money. The benefit issue is, IMO, a red herring. A teacher with health care benefits is likely covering a spouse and a couple of kids, so not really so ridiculous when you think of it. If those partisans on the right who hate teachers for their health benefits, I would stand shoulder to shoulder with them for single payer government run health care, so the cost of health care is spread out fairly.
One more thought. You might want to think twice about your analogy to Marquette law school, not for graduation rates, but rather for employment. The state of the law profession in this State, and the prospects for decent law related jobs for new graduates who remain here is pretty bleak, and yet Marquette Law School expanded, building a shiny new building, presumably designed to attract, and graduate more bright young lawyers and put them into a market where a lot of lawyers can’t find a decent job. Though I have respect for Marquette Law School and its faculty, there is just as much, if not more institutional self interest in the Marquette Law School Bureaucracy as there is for MPS.
Interesting thoughts. I do not hate teachers and I do not support “school choice,” where tax money is used to support private schools. I have lived in Milwaukee for 25 years and seen MPS never change. It is simply an abysmal public school system.
The difference between MPS and Marquette University is the new law school was built entirely with private money. MPS exists solely on the back of taxpayers. Nobody was forced to pay for the new law school, everybody in Milwaukee is forced to pay for MPS. Three years into the worst economic crises in 80 years, MPS refuses to budge.