“Scott Walker should watch out. Pretty soon they’re going to start calling him Scott Waukesha.”
This classic line came from Steve Filmanowicz, at the time an aide to then-Mayor John Norquist. Filmanowicz was responding to a proposal from Walker, early in his tenure as Milwaukee County executive, that seemed to have more benefit for Waukesha than Milwaukee County. Walker had a track record by then: In his days as assembly representative from Wauwatosa, he had frequently voted in favor of legislation that hurt the city of Milwaukee.
Still, he was reelected twice in non-partisan races for County Executive and had every reason to think he might do reasonably well there. But voters clearly preferred Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker was humiliated in this county, getting just 38 percent of the county’s vote and an abysmal 25 percent of the vote in the city. And now Walker and the Republicans are proposing a budget and other laws that almost seem intended to punish the state’s biggest city.
You could go back half a century and you wouldn’t find a more destructive budget for Milwaukee. The combined impact of Walker’s various proposals could destroy Milwaukee Public Schools and replace the system with the most poorly funded system of education in the state, meaning Wisconsin would spend the least on the poorest, most academically handicapped students.
Walker and the GOP want to eliminate the cap on voucher schools, make vouchers available to all families regardless of income and allow them to attend private schools outside the city. This might be good for a select number of students and for private schools outside the city, but those schools may pick and choose which students to enroll. Year after year, as choice schools have grown, an ever higher percentage of Milwaukee Public Schools students are special education students because those students rarely choose or are accepted at choice schools. Year after year, as open enrollment to the suburbs has grown, more and more middle class students have left MPS for suburban public schools. Walker’s plan will increase both trends.
The Walker approach will assure MPS becomes an academic ghetto: 100 percent low-income, all minority, with high percentages of academically challenged, emotionally disturbed and difficult-to-teach students. It will then leave MPS with far less money to handle these challenges: As I noted in a past column, MPS already has to absorb a loss of $36.5 million in state aid because of a flaw in how school choice money is awarded to Milwaukee. In addition, the Walker budget will cut some $74 million in school funding for MPS. And as the school choice program expands, MPS will have to eat another loss of $33 million for every increase of 10,000 students enrolling in school choice.
Meanwhile the continued expansion of school choice has created the second biggest school district in Wisconsin, some 20,000 Milwaukee voucher students, but with the least per-pupil spending: about $6,500 per pupil, or about $5,000 less than the statewide per-pupil average. Many choice schools struggle and go out business because their funding is so low. For this and other reasons, MPS must regularly enroll (or re-enroll) students who transfer out of choice schools. MPS can’t refuse any student because it is a public school. Yet its funding is being decimated, even as it asked to handle an ever-more challenging student body. (Meanwhile, the growth of choice means ever-fewer union teachers and less clout for teachers unions who typically oppose Republican candidates.)
Walker is also eliminating the residency requirement for teachers, arguing this will help MPS by allowing it to hire better teachers. But the system won’t be hiring more teachers, it will be slashing the number of schools and teachers, and that trend is likely to continue for years to come. Walker’s theory, moreover, was disproven by the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, whose 2006 study found that a mere 5 percent of the 4,699 teachers who had left MPS since 1992 did so because of the residency requirements. It has never been a major factor in recruitment. (Ironically, it was the teachers union that pushed for state legislation in past years to eliminate residency.)
The only certain result of ending residency for teachers, police and firefighters, as Republicans have proposed, is to encourage an exodus of middle-class taxpayers from Milwaukee. A study by Milwaukee’s Legislative Reference Bureau found that after residency requirements ended, 60 percent of city workers in Baltimore, 45 percent in Detroit, 70 percent in Minneapolis and 75 percent of police and firefighters in St. Louis left the city.
“If you want the tax base of Milwaukee to resemble the tax base of Detroit, this is the way to go about doing it,” says Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
The ending of the residency requirement looks like a payback to the Milwaukee police union, which backed Walker in the election. If not, why isn’t the legislature ending residency requirements in Green Bay and La Crosse?
A few other ways the Walker budget punishes Milwaukee and urban areas: It increases highway funding while cutting funding for local roads by 10 percent while barring any increases in property taxes to make up the difference. Expect a big increase in potholes. It ends state funding for recycling but still requires residents to recycle, adding a new unfunded mandate. It slashes the earned income tax credit, meaning the working poor will be left all the poorer, and more of the working poor are in cities. (So much for encouraging poor people to work.)
And that doesn’t even begin to address cuts in state funding for state-mandated programs that are locally administered by Milwaukee County. This budget is a disaster for the state’s biggest city.
Open Season on Chris Abele
Back when Scott Walker first ran for county executive in 2002, I wrote about the fact that he hadn’t graduated from college (I was then a blogger for milwaukeeworld.com), suggesting this was a relevant issue in the race. But I was hooted down by talk radio while the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel made nothing of the issue.
But last week the same newspaper that found this issue irrelevant was chasing county executive candidate Chris Abele for an explanation as to why he hadn’t graduated from college. Abele must have been stunned by the repeated questions; surely, he must have thought, this was an irrelevant issue given that the past county exec – and current governor – had no college degree.
Walker, moreover, had his problems during his college career, as a Marquette Tribune story documented. When he ran for president of student government, he “was accused of violating campaign guidelines on multiple occasions,” the paper reported. The Tribune also noted that Walker’s campaign workers were reportedly throwing away copies of the newspaper after it endorsed his opponent. (Walker said he had no knowledge of what his supporters did.)
So how is that Abele deserves a grilling regarding his college career but Walker doesn’t?
It reminds me of how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the 2004 race for Milwaukee mayor between Marvin Pratt and Tom Barrett. I worked for the paper then, and it got stuck on one narrative, the financial irregularities in Pratt’s campaign, and it soon had trouble writing about anything else. (I speak from personal experience, as I spent weeks trying to sell the editors on a story with a different spin; I finally succeeded, and the story ran on Page 1, but boy, was it difficult to persuade them.)
This time the newspaper is locked into a narrative of Abele as the rich boy who doesn’t pay parking tickets and blows off a drunk driving ticket and other citations. Abele has certainly made it easy to construct this narrative, given his generally lame answers. (This is the first thing a good campaign consultant asks: What do you have in your background that we have to worry about? And then the campaign prepares its answers. Somehow Abele and his handlers neglected this due diligence.)
Journalists are heartless folks who pounce on any sign of phoniness, and Abele has opened the door to this sort of scrutiny. But meanwhile, it’s just as important to grill the candidates on the issues. Abele’s opponent Jeff Stone has voted for a long list of measures that will be absolutely devastating to the city of Milwaukee, which happens to be about 60 percent of the county he wants to lead. It's almost as though Stone is still operating as the sort of suburban state representative who likes to stick it to Milwaukee. That is surely just as deserving of a thorough grilling – and repeated questions – as the fact that Abele, like Walker, didn’t graduate from college.
The Buzz
-I’ve rarely seen a worse campaign sign than Abele’s. You can barely read it.
-The county wants to spend $1.2 million for aluminum panels to make the disastrous O’Donnell Park look nicer after its repaired? Here’s a prediction: it will look cheap and silly. Because both Abele and Stone oppose the idea, it would behoove the county board to wait a few weeks for the election and then involve the new executive in the decision-making.
-Prediction: The new JS editorial board, which seems to be tilting more to the right under new editorial page editor David Haynes, will reverse its primary endorsement of Abele and choose Stone. Talk radio is of course promoting Stone, and the liberal Shepherd Express, which is no fan of Abele (since he took away the weekly’s annual film festival), will probably choose not to endorse. Not good news for Abele.
-Is the media misleading readers as to the impact of union political contributions? Pressroom Buzz considers.