Political Clout and the Lack Thereof

It’s a basic tenet of American political systems that there are checks and balances, with each branch of a government unit  operating with powers that are not controlled by other branches.

Consider what is about to unfold in the Wisconsin Legislature a particularly vivid lesson in that.

Gov. Jim Doyle has called a special session of the Legislature for Wednesday to consider two proposals, one of them dealing with control of Milwaukee Public Schools, giving almost all of that control to the mayor of Milwaukee, and one dealing with what to do about chronically low performing schools in the state, giving broad power to the state superintendent of public instruction to take control of such schools and change them.  

A month ago, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Madison to make an appearance that had a strong subtext of urging that these proposals be supported. Doyle strongly backs them, as does Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

So you have the president, the secretary of education, the governor and the mayor of the state’s largest city, all of them Democrats, asking the Democratically-controlled Legislature to take up and approve these ideas.

And what’s most likely to happen? Nothing, at least for now.

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Learning (At Last) to Value Water

welIn 1774, Ben Franklin said, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of the well.”

“He was wrong,” author Robert Glennon told an audience of about 100 Tuesday at the Alumni Memorial Union at Marquette University.  Even as  wells and water supplies move ominously closer to dry in parts of the United States, the public and many policy makers are not responding in ways that could avert major impacts, warned  Glennon, whose books include Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It, published last spring.

“We don’t value water in the United States,” Glennon told the session, part of the “On the Issues” series hosted by Mike Gousha, Marquette Law School Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy.

Wisconsin is not standing at the precipice of a water crisis to the same degree as  metropolitan Atlanta and much of the western United States, but it would still be wise to undertake public education efforts here and to make more effective water use decisions, Glennon said. 

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Leading More Parents to Be Teachers’ Allies

teacherEvery now and then someone says something that really sticks with you. About a year ago, I had a conversation with Harriet Sanford, president and CEO of the NEA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the huge, nationwide teachers union. The foundation has made Milwaukee a major focus in recent years, giving more than $2 million to Milwaukee Public Schools, generally for developing the skills of teachers in low-performing schools.

Sanford was describing how things were going in other cities where the foundation was involved. She was enthusiastic about the impact in Seattle of a program in which teachers worked to get parents more involved in schools.  It was having documentable positive effects on how kids were doing.

I said that I thought a lot of teachers do what they can in school to meet kids’ needs, but basically throw up their hands when it comes to doing something about kids’ lives at home or motivating parents to do a better job of being allies of their children’s success in school.

Sanford said she was convinced that things could be done, that they didn’t cost a lot, and they could be as simple as having teachers pay visits to children’s homes, just to establish rapport and give some tips on what helps get a kid ready for school.

It may make me sound naive, but this really had an impact on my thinking about teacher-parent relations. I just had kind of written that off. But maybe we don’t need to despair about this, and maybe schools in Milwaukee that have been too passive about reaching out positively and firmly to parents.

All of which is to say I was very pleased to see the Journal Sentinel series this week, “Beyond the Bell: Making the Home-School Connection.”

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