Impact on Segregation
Metro Milwaukee School Policy to Ignore?
May 25, 1999
Some Milwaukee legislators propose to redirect the funds currently
earmarked for transportation within the Milwaukee Public Schools for the
purpose of alleviating proven and intentional discrimination (Milwaukee
Journal, May 25, 1999).
They seek to use these funds to pay off $200 million in bonds that would
be used to build additional classroom space in MPS. The legislators, including
State Representatives Shirley Krug, Annette Polly Williams and Antonio
Riley, announced their proposal at a media
conference on Monday, May 24. Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist also spoke
in support, and today, the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel joined the chorus.
The legislators have not been clear about the impact of this change
on the segregation that exists in metro Milwaukee schools.
Some of them have not been clear about their intentions for the interdistrict
transportation plan that was instituted to remedy, in part, the hyper-segregation
that exists in metro Milwaukee's schools. (Rep. Williams clearly wants
to end interdistrict as well as intradistrict transfers for integration.)
State Representatives Williams and Riley as well as Mayor Norquist have
been dismissive of continuing efforts to alleviate the segregation in
metro Milwaukee. Rep. Williams has told those who question the plan, "maybe
you should stay quiet."
Rep. Riley, speaking on the Morning Magazine program (May 25, 1999)
on WMCS radio, said we should end, "this wild idea of racial integration."
Mayor Norquist in a misstatement of history reportedly said, "Parents
don't want to be part of some social experiment."
The ACLU of Wisconsin believes that reducing racial segregation is
neither "a wild idea" nor "a social experiment."
The U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954, 1955)
determined that segregation in education is "inherently unequal." Any
abandonment of the goal of reducing segregation in education as official
policy has serious legal and educational consequences.
If this "Neighborhood
Schools Initiative" has the effect of further segregating an already
segregated district, then the Legislature should reject it. Our leaders
should work to find ways that make the burden of change more equitable
for people of color, but they should not sanction the private and official
acts that have made progress extremely difficult.
The ACLU/WI would love to see $200 million for infrastructure in Milwaukee
Public Schools and it commends the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee
for allowing MPS to expand the number of classes with fewer students under
the SAGE program. However,
Can black Milwaukeeans count on the continued support of upstate legislators
to meet the funding needs of MPS?
In reviewing any proposal, can Milwaukeeans control enough resources
to provide a more than adequate education for all public school children?
Several suburban Milwaukee schools already spent vastly more per pupil
than does MPS. Is that fair to city students?
Will this proposal close the funding gap? Remember, this is a Legislature
dominated by Assembly Republicans who outrageously want to use the
surplus from the W-2 welfare reduction program for property tax relief.
White Milwaukeeans should ask themselves what role they want in a metropolitan
area that is hyper-segregated.
What impact will this proposal have on the little that exists of integrated
education in metro Milwaukee? Shouldn't we a least know, even if the proponents
don't care?
One likely consequence of this proposal will be the creation of all
white schools in segregated neighborhoods. Do white parents really want
their children to attend all white schools?
Why not, in the spirit of these legislators, just change the name Milwaukee
to Soweto and be done with it!
This proposal and the MPS board's recently changed positions on private
school choice and open enrollment represent a counter-revolution of breath-taking
magnitude. Hard questions about where we want our society and our children
to be in the future are ignored and derided.
What will metro Milwaukee look like in ten or twenty years? If our public
officials choose separatism now, Milwaukee will be a provincial backwater
with a social system that isolates it from progressive communities and
the global economy in much the same way that apartheid isolated South
Africa from the world community.
Chris Ahmuty
Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin
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