School vouchers: Time to demand common-sense reforms

By Barbara J. Miner

Accountability and achievement are two of the biggest buzzwords in education today.

So why are Milwaukee’s voucher schools allowed to sidestep mandates that other publicly funded schools must follow?

Gov. Scott Walker wants to further expand the voucher program, under which public tax dollars are funneled to private schools. Even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board has problems with this agenda.

Criticizing Walker’s plans, the newspaper calls for an emphasis on achievement and accountability, two legitimate concerns. But vague admonitions are not enough. Without specific demands, such pleas will have little impact.

Fortunately, there are two specific and reasonable demands that can — and should — be made of voucher schools.

First, that the voucher schools adhere to Wisconsin’s open meetings and records laws.

Second, that the voucher schools agree to educate all children, in particular those with special educational needs.

VOUCHERS NO LONGER AN ‘EXPERIMENT’


When the voucher program began in 1990, it was billed as a small, experimental initiative to help a few hundred poor children in seven community schools. But even then, the voucher movement had its eye on its prize: replacing our system of public schools with a voucherized, privatized system of every-consumer-for-themselves. Bit by bit, the program was expanded and the focus on poor children was abandoned.

Today there are almost 25,000 students from Milwaukee receiving vouchers to attend a private school. Based on size, the voucher program is now the state’s third largest school district, just behind Madison. 

It’s long past time to demand serious reforms.

Calls for increased accountability from the voucher schools are meaningless unless they acknowledge the essential importance of Wisconsin’s open meetings and records laws. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago, underlining the importance of making information available to the public, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

All public schools must follow the state’s open meetings and records requirements. Why should the private voucher schools be exempt? This is especially worrisome because a number of voucher schools are phoney private schools; all their students receive a publicly funded voucher and there is not a single student privately paying tuition.

If the voucher schools want to truly be accountable, they should release their data to the public — whether racial demographics, suspension rates, admission policies, staff pay, or the names and contact information of their boards of directors. Likewise, their meetings should be open to the public.

As for achievement, if the voucher schools want to be seriously address this problem, they should agree to educate all children.

Public school districts, by law, must meet the special educational needs of all their students. Voucher schools, because by are defined as private, are not required to meet a student’s special needs beyond what can be provided with minor adjustments, for example helping with reading or speech impairments.

In Milwaukee, the voucher movement has openly and unabashedly created a system of separate and unequal schools. The education of special ed students is the prime example. The percentage of special ed students in Milwaukee’s public schools is about 20 percent. At the private voucher schools, the comparable figure is less than 2 percent.

“All together, the 102 voucher schools are serving a special education population that is equal to what the Milwaukee Public Schools serves in just one of its district schools: Hamilton High School,” Milwaukee superintendent Gregory Thornton noted last year.

Yes, by all means demand increased accountability and achievement. But make the demands mean something. Otherwise, it’s just feel-good rhetoric.

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This blog is cross-posted at my blog, “View from the Heartland: Honoring the Wisconsin tradition of common decency and progressive politics.” At the blog, you can also sign up for email notifications.

Coney Island: a month after Sandy, still in need

 By Barbara J. Miner

Having lived almost 10 years in New York City, much of it in Brooklyn, I’ve always had a soft spot for Coney Island. So when my daughter suggested that the day after our Thanksgiving dinner in New York City we volunteer at a Coney Island relief site, I was willing. Somewhat ambivalent, but wholeheartedly willing.

The New York Times, as part of its Hurricane Sandy coverage, has had several articles and letters-to-the-editors on the social complexities of relief efforts. At what point, for instance, might volunteer efforts do more to assuage the guilt of the volunteer than to help those in need? What is the best way for people of privilege to become involved without exacerbating long-standing race and class divisions?

There are no easy answers. At the same time, such questions are not a rationale to do nothing. So on Friday morning, my husband Bob and my daughter Caitlin and I got on the B train and rode to its final stop at Coney Island and Stillwell Avenue at the southern tip of Brooklyn.

I knew that the Rockaways beach community in Queens had been devastated by Sandy’s trifecta of water, wind and fire. But I was unprepared for the still-momentous devastation on Coney Island almost a month after Sandy’s fury had abated.

We were volunteering at a food and donation distribution center at Coney Island Gospel Assembly — one of about 10 relief sites within the ConeyRecovers network.

Pastor Connie, head of Coney Island Gospel Assembly

Coney Island is known most famously for its amusement park and boardwalk, but its prime was almost a half-century ago. (A former barrier island, Coney Island became connected to the mainland via land fill.) Today, the Coney Island neighborhood is home to about 60,000 people, about 45 percent of whom live at or below the poverty level. Some 20 percent of its residents are African American, 28 percent are Latino, 24 percent are white, and 15 percent are Asian.

Some 23 days after Sandy hit shore, a number of buildings in the area remain only marginally habitable. Most first floors are filled with mold and rotting wood; some second floors are not much better. Forget about basement-level living areas. Those with the necessary resources and inclination are gutting their homes and rebuilding. Many are not sure what their future holds, and the necessities of life are in short supply.

A home along Neptune Avenue, as owners try to salvage what they can.

A basement level home, now abandoned.

Mold — an ever present problem in hurricane-ravaged homes.

Our volunteer location, Coney Island Gospel Assembly, is on a corner lot. After the hurricane, its location was ideal as a center for free hot food, medical assistance, and disbursement of donations of clothing, food, toiletries, cleaning supplies and bottled water. The parking lot became an outdoor warehouse; areas near the street became centers for social services and hot meals.

The backbone of the volunteer efforts consisted of church-based volunteers, Americorps members from throughout the country who were staying at a union hall in Queens, and local organizations such as the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able initiative that is a transitional work program for those with a history of homelessness or substance abuse. They are there for the long haul.

The long-term volunteers and residents of Coney Island deserve a few words and photos in a far-away newspaper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They should know that they are not forgotten.

— — — 
For more information on relief efforts in the Coney Island area, go to ConeyRecovers, an initiative of the non-profit Alliance for Coney Island.

Workers from Ready, Willing & Able organize donations.

Many of which arrive at random times and in random quantities.

Neighborhood residents wait in line — for hours —  for the church to begin distributing necessities.

After three hours of organizing boxes, the pastor's son, Jack, is able to explain to volunteers how the distribution line 

will be organized.

The distribution begins and residents explain what they need most — whether diapers, bottled water, food or toiletries.

Knowing it may be a long walk home, residents come prepared with the carts that are now ubiquitous throughout the neighborhood.

A young man whose tattoo stands for "clarity of focus" and which, he says, helps him understand what's important in life.

As we walk back to the subway, we traverse mounds of sand that, during the hurricane, traveled a mile-and-a-half from the beach and settled in homes and on sidewalks.

We travel back to Manhattan. Coney Island residents continue with their lives.

Lincoln and Walker: Why they do—and don't—belong in the same headline

By Barbara J. Miner

Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln deserve its many accolades. It powerfully reminds us that race is central to both our history and our future, and that our democracy is a work in formation.

Watching the movie it’s hard to imagine — and yet impossible to forget — that 150 years after a bitter civil war that left 618,000-750,000 men dead, and after more than a century of Jim Crow laws eviscerating the Black vote, a Black man was elected and then re-elected President of the United States. All Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, can be proud of that.

Lincoln is also a reminder of what has not changed. Then, as now, one political party catered to the views of white males. Then, as now, the other party was identified with ending white supremacist views, but had an equivocal record on doing so. Then, as now, politics was blood sport.

Change the names — the movie’s Democrats are this era’s Republicans, and vice versa — and it’s clear that our political divides have not significantly changed.

Political personalities aside, Lincoln underscores how the civil war and the end of slavery were seminal events in our nation’s history. Likewise, Black labor before, during and after slavery has been essential to our country’s economic development.

Add that all up and it’s clear: there is no way to understand the United States without acknowledging both the role of African Americans and of racialized politics in shaping our country. Yes, our views of race have evolved and are undeniably complicated, but race is still an ever-present subtext.

Which brings us to today’s Republican Party and our very own Scott Walker.

POST-ELECTION ANALYSES

One of the strongest post-election messages from Republicans who realize they are living in the 21st Century is that the GOP must move beyond its obsessive focus on a dwindling base of white males.

In post-election pronouncements, forward-minded Republicans have been tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to appeal to new constituencies, in particular Latinos and women. Their top solutions thus far: help reform immigration and cool-it on the anti-contraception, pro-rape messages.

But there’s been a stunning lack of GOP comments about reaching out to African Americans. Which is telling.

First, it shows that, above all else, the GOP is still fixated on partisan politics of figuring out how to defeat Democrats. Forget leadership. Forget doing what’s right. Forget the fate of this country’s 41 million African Americans.

The post-election silence about African Americans joining the GOP is deafening, notes writer, blogger and radio/TV host Elon James White. “Why are us Negroes not even in the thought processes of many of the Republican leaders? Women? Hispanics? Asians? Sure. Blacks? Eh ...”

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune on a “Facing Race” conference offered several interesting perspectives on the challenges not just for Republicans but also for Democrats.

Michael Omi, a scholar on U.S. racial politics at the University of California, Berkeley, “said it was still unclear if Asian-Americans and Latinos would be increasingly accepted as ‘honorary whites,’ which could align them more closely with the Republican party while perpetuating a black-white divide, or if the country would move toward a new, more multi-faceted view of race,” the Tribune noted.

The “honorary white” possibility is a provocative but not entirely implausible perspective on the future. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the apartheid regime in South Africa granted “honorary whites” status to immigrants from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Or, as the children’s rhyme goes, “If you’re white you’re all right. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, get back!”



At the “Facing Race” conference, writer Junot Diaz noted the historic yet fragile nature of the multiracial coalition that helped propel Obama to re-election.

"People of color have for the first time in the history of the United States attained a strategic plurality that, when coordinated, allowed us to decisively alter the outcome of the presidential campaign in Obama's favor," noted Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But, the Tribune writes in paraphrasing Diaz, maintaining the new alliances “could be tough given long-standing tensions among various groups, deeply internalized images of white supremacy among minorities and vast economic disparities still in place 50 years after the civil rights movement.”

“Who knows,” Diaz is quoted as saying, “if the coalition will hold, splinter, collapse or mutate.”
Amid such uncertainties, Republican politicians are already positioning themselves for the 2016 election. Including our very own Scott Walker.

WALKER'S BAGGAGE

Gov. Walker has distanced himself — and least publicly — from the Romney/Ryan ticket’s nostalgia for the past.

The Associated Press is one of many news outlets which has Walker on the short list of possible GOP contenders for 2016. “I think it’s not that our beliefs are wrong,” Walker is quoted as saying. “I don’t think we do an effective enough job of articulating those beliefs and what it means in people’s lives.”



But there are glaring problems with Walker’s view. First, it puts him out on a shaky limb of saying that the GOP’s problems are not based on its politics but on its messaging. 



Second, Walker has shown little ability to win over voters now coveted by the GOP: young people and women, in particular. And he’s got a horrific record with African Americans.



In the recall race Walker is so proud of winning, he relied on the Romney/Ryan base that didn’t cut it on a national level. Last June, Walker won only 5% of the African American vote, only 47% of women, only 47% of those aged 18-29, and only 43% of those earning less than $50,000 a year, according to exit polls. (Figures for Latinos and Asians were not available because of their small voting numbers statewide.) His strongest base, 62%, was with white men.



As far as Latinos, Walker has had the luxury of sidestepping immigration issues. But his 2011 budget mean-spiritedly eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students at public universities. 



Not to be forgotten, Walker signed into law one of the most restrictive Voter ID bills in the country, a measure that is now before the courts. Nationally, voter suppression attempts have been recognized as an anti-democratic embarrassment and a low point of the presidential election. Walker’s Voter ID stance will not be forgotten.



Most significantly, Walker apparently has no intention of straying from the GOP agenda. He waited less than two weeks after the election to move forward with the Republican dream of suppressing the vote by those deemed Democratic Party sympathizers. Knowing he has right-wing Republican leadership at the state legislature that will back such efforts, Walker said last Friday that he would like to end Wisconsin’s same-day voter registration law. 



Not coincidentally, such a change would significantly impact Milwaukee, where the Obama/Biden ticket won 79.27% of the vote. Overall, about 17% of those who voted in Milwaukee registered on the day of the vote, propelling the city’s 87% voter turnout. 



As for women, the Walker agenda is a disaster. As governor, Walker has signed legislation that prohibits local legislation on paid sick days, repealed an employment discrimination law, mandated “abstinence-only” sex education that does not call for teaching about the proper use of contraceptives, and banned almost all abortion coverage in any policies set up as part of Obamacare. 



And does Walker really think that his education record — he cut education funding more than any governor in state history and is decimating the budget of one of the best public university systems in the country — will earn him national accolades?

And what about climate chaos and Walker’s love-affair with cars and his hatred of mass transit? How many votes will that win him four years from now? 



One of the lessons of the 2012 election is that demographics and one’s political vision matter. Yes, Wisconsin’s Republicans control state-level politics, in large part due to the Republican’s redistricting maps. But nationally, Walker’s demographic base and political vision are not a winning combination.

Will Walker change his stripes in order to woo a national audience? He certainly may try. But can he deny his record?

In the long run, Walker’s attack on public sector unions may be the least of his problems.

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This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project. 

Life in the trenches of democracy — reflections from a Milwaukee polling site

It was 6:10 a.m., cold and dark on a dimly lit street. “Who are you?” an obviously harried woman asked as I stepped out of my car. I told her I was there to work at the polls.

“Good,” she said. “Two of my people have had their phone numbers changed and another two aren’t answering.”

I had signed up to be a bilingual election worker for the City of Milwaukee. My assignment was at a small, one-room pavilion at a South Side park that seemed little more than a glorified playground.

The pavilion’s outside light wasn’t working, bolstering my sense that this particular electoral machine was not well oiled. My husband, who had an hour before he had to be at work, came in with me.

The one-room polling station was jammed — seemingly haphazardly — with tables, folding chairs and assorted park-related equipment, including a huge Weber grill. The polls were to open in less than an hour.

The polling station’s two chief inspectors were frantically calling missing workers and figuring out how to bring order to the chaos. My husband was pressed into service to help move the tables. I was handed thumbtacks and tape to put up necessary notices in English and Spanish.

“Welcome to the bowels of democracy,” I joked to my husband.

Within the hour, the pavilion was transformed. There were still a few rough edges but it had become a functioning polling station with all the necessary stations, forms and signs. All the poll workers had arrived.

“Hear Ye, Here Ye, The Polls Are Now Open,” the election chief proclaimed on the dot at 7 a.m. Lines had already formed. People were anxious to vote. Our day’s work began.

More than 15 hours later, at 9:45 p.m., I finally left the polling station.

I can’t remember the last time I worked so hard for so long.

I can’t remember the last time I worked with such a fascinating, humble, inspiring, and diverse group of people.


LIFE IN THE TRENCHES OF DEMOCRACY


Starting at about 9 p.m., my daughter had started sending rapid-fire text messages from a New York City sports bar that had five big-screens, each one tuned to a different network.

“MSNBC is calling it for Obama!” she texted at one point.

“Elizabeth Warren won! Tammy Baldwin won!” another text read. “And all the ‘rape’ apologists lost!”

Cell phones were not allowed in the polling stations, so I had had no clue what was going on with the elections. Nor had I received those heartening text messages as they came in. As my husband and I drove home from the polling station, I called my daughter.

“Mahalia, life in the trenches of democracy is fascinating,” I explained. “But I feel like a soldier in a World War 2 foxhole, slogging away with no clue if the good guys are winning or losing. Tell me more.”

I don’t like war analogies, but I felt this one was appropriate.

What’s more, I was proud to have been a foot soldier. Reading analyses in the New York Times and following Nate Silver’s blogs had been a part of my life for weeks. But in the end, I learned much more about the workings of democracy at this little known, off-the-radar polling site on Milwaukee’s near South Side.

Above all, I learned how deeply people believe in the right to vote. They may not always exercise that right. But they want to protect it.

MY FELLOW POLL WORKERS


My fellow poll workers were a diverse group. There were several older women (including me, with my grey hair) some black, some white, some Latino. There was the bilingual election chief who wore a sports jacket and the coolest silver-toed cowboy boots I have seen in a long time.

A middle-aged mother and her twenty-something daughter worked side by side, both of them fulfilling the South Side stereotype of white working-class women who won’t take gruff from anyone and who speak in one volume: loud. An older black man dealt with the pavilion’s minimal heat by wearing his Green Bay Packers jacket and hat the entire day. A bilingual young woman who had graduated from Pulaski High School worked with me at a crazy-busy table for voters who had a change of address or who had never voted before.

Not to be forgotten: the white guy who had lived in the neighborhood for more than 30 years and knew it so well that he could immediately tell people, based on their address, which of the three ward tables they should vote at.

We were slammed with non-stop work the minute the polls opened. We barely had time to go to the bathroom, let alone eat decently or take a break and relax. Never once did I hear anyone complain.

In many ways, our little polling site was a microcosm of Milwaukee. Whites were in the minority of voters, but still a significant percentage. About a third were African American — a fascinating development in a neighborhood that 40 years ago was a center of white resistance to open housing. A number of voters spoke Spanish, such as the gentleman who came in and explained that, at 60 years of age, he had decided to vote for the first time in his life. No one looked like they had much extra money to spend at the end of the week. 

There were as many fascinating stories that day as there were voters. One woman impressed me the most.

Sometime in the early afternoon, at a point when I was feeling like a factory line worker and people were becoming a blur, a thirty-something African-American woman sat quietly in front of me. Without a word, she handed me information explaining her situation. I quickly looked it over.

It suddenly dawned me: the woman was a victim of domestic abuse. By law, she had the right to a confidential voter address, and she had taken the necessary steps. To be on the safe side, she had brought in a letter from a transitional housing center documenting necessary information. I looked at the letter’s date: Nov. 5, 2012.

“You went and got this letter yesterday?” I asked the woman, buying time as my mind processed the various hoops she must have gone through.

“Yes,” she said, pride and dignity in her voice. “I wanted to make sure I would be able to vote today.”

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This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project

Why can't felons vote? The question is long overdue

By Barbara J. Miner

I grew up believing that the United States is an unparalleled beacon of democracy — the home of the free and the land of the brave.

So I find it disturbing that when it comes to a fundamental democratic right — the right to vote — the United States has a dismal record.

In fact, the United States has more restrictions on voting rights than any other democratic nation in the world, according to Marc Mauer of the highly respected Sentencing Project. 

Even South Africa is more enlightened.

In South Africa, all prisoners have the right to vote. In a 1999 ruling that eloquently speaks to issue, the constitutional court of South Africa declared: “The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts.” 

In the United States, meanwhile, an estimated 5.8 million people are ineligible to vote as a result of current or previous felony convictions, even non-violent offenses such as writing bad checks or embezzling money. Or, in the case of Kelly Rindfleisch, doing campaign work on county time when an aide to then Milwaukee County Exec and now Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

(In the plea agreement with Rindfleisch this October, the judge denied a request to delay matters until after the Nov. 6 elections so Rindfleisch could vote. Circuit Judge David Hansher said that if he made an exception for Rindfleisch, he’d have to also do so for every defendant up to election day, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)


Disenfranchisement Growing


In the four most restrictive states — Iowa, Florida, Kentucky and Virginia — felons permanently lose the right to vote, even after they have served their sentence. The can regain the vote only through a cumbersome process of applying for a pardon from the governor or a decree by a clemency board. 

Equally troubling, the number of disenfranchised felons is growing, as are the racial disparities in the loss of voting rights.

Largely due to the mis-named War on Drugs, the U.S. prison population has skyrocketed, growing from about 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million three decades later. A disproportionate number of those imprisoned are blacks and Latinos.

As a result, almost 7.7 percent of blacks of voting age cannot do so because of their criminal records, compared to 1.8 percent of non-African Americans.

In three states — Florida, Kentucky and Virginia — one out of five African Americans is not allowed to vote. (For these and other disturbing statistics, see the July 2012 report by The Sentencing Project: “Voting Behind Bars: An Argument for Voting by Prisoners.”) 

The issue of prisoners voting not only raises moral and ethical concerns, but also has a clear impact on electoral outcomes. It’s hard not to wonder whether felon disenfranchisement is a modern-day reincarnation of Jim Crow restrictions on voting.

A look at Florida is enlightening.

In the historic Bush versus Gore 2000 election, the Florida vote was decided by only 537 ballots. Due to Florida’s prohibitions on voting, on the day of the 2000 election an estimated 600,000 ex-felons — in other words, not including those still in prison, on parole or on probation —were ineligible to vote. 

“If disenfranchised felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Democrat Gore would certainly have carried the state, and the election,” concluded Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggens in their article in the American Sociological Review.

Lessons from History


The United States experiment in democracy has always been a work in formation. During the Colonial period when our democratic institutions were first developed, only about 6 percent of the population could vote. Women, African Americans, Native Americans, those who couldn’t read, those who did not own property and people with felony convictions — all were excluded.

Over time, and through popular struggle, the right to vote has expanded. Today, all those Colonial era restrictions are gone — except one.

African Americans and Native Americans can vote. Women can vote. Poor people can vote. Illiterates can vote. But, by and large, felons cannot.

The right to vote, even in federal elections, is determined at the state level. And it’s a hodge-podge of laws.

In 12 states, convicted felons may permanently lose their right to vote, with exceptions depending on the crime committed, time since their sentence was completed and other variables. In this group, the four most restrictive states are Iowa, Florida, Kentucky and Virginia.

In the two least restrictive states — Maine and Vermont — felons do not lose the right to vote and may cast absentee ballots while in prison.

In 13 states and the District of Columbia, felons can vote after they leave prison. In another four states, felons can vote after they finish their prison sentence and parole. In another 19 states, including Wisconsin, convicted felons may vote after they complete their entire sentence (prison, parole and probation).

In 10 states, restrictions may apply to some people with a misdemeanor conviction.

In Canada, meanwhile, in 2002 that country’s Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a ban on federal prisoners voting. “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy and the rule of law and cannot be lightly set aside,” the court ruled. “… denying penitentiary inmates the right to vote is more likely to send messages that undermine respect for the law and democracy than messages that enhance those values.”

The international human rights community has taken a similar view.

Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe (with 47 member states), has argued strongly that prisoners should have the right to vote. “Prisoners, though deprived of physical liberty, have human rights,” he has argued. “Measures should be taken to ensure that imprisonment does not undermine rights which are unconnected to the intention of the punishment. Indeed, authorities should ensure, for instance, that a prisoner can receive health care and have contact with his or her family. The right to study, to be informed and to vote belongs to this same category of rights which should be protected.” 

In the United States, there is little talk of the rights of prisoners; lock ‘em up rhetoric holds the day.

But fundamentally, this is an issue of voting rights, not law and order. If there is a silver lining to the rash of voter ID and voter suppression efforts in the last few years, it is the growing awareness that protecting the right to vote is fundamental to protecting our democracy.

After Nov. 6, with the heat of the presidential election over, there’s no reason not to ask the question: why can’t felons vote?

If that’s too big a step for you, ask this question: why not allow the vote for felons on probation or parole, or those who have completed their sentence” According to public opinion polls, most Americans favor such reforms.

As The Sentencing Project notes, “How much difference would it make if state laws were changed to reflect the principles most Americans endorse? The answer is straightforward: Voting rights would be restored to well over 4 million of the 5.85 million people currently disenfranchised.” 

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This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project. 

Jim Crow, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration: Issues that need to be discussed

By Barbara J. Miner

"More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began."
— Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The Derek Williams homicide is no longer front-page news. But that doesn’t mean that all-important issues have disappeared about the role of the police and our criminal justice system in communities of color.

Those concerns need to be discussed, even as the federal investigations continue of Williams’ death and possible patterns of civil rights violations.

The police serve an undeniable and all-important function: to serve the community and to protect citizens from crime. But it would be naïve to ignore problems in our criminal justice system that beset not just Milwaukee but urban areas across the country.

What does it mean that more African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War?

Has our criminal justice system, particularly in urban areas, become a sophisticated form of control rather than protection? To what extent might our criminal justice system contribute to, rather than ameliorate, neighborhood dysfunction in poor communities of color?

These are uncomfortable and disturbing realities, and go far beyond the behavior of any single police office or police chief, or indeed of any one city. They involve much deeper and broader policy decisions at the federal, state and local level.

A national discussion is needed, but one that also reaches into every neighborhood of every city. Including Milwaukee.

JIM CROW AND MASS INCARCERATION


If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read Michelle Alexander’s book: The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Whether you agree with her or not, her perspective cannot be ignored.

As Alexander notes in her introduction:

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of foot stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Among other things, Alexander’s book dissects the repercussions of the painfully misnamed War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s — a war that fueled a rise in imprisonment unmatched in human history. By the 21st Century, it became impossible to ignore that the War on Drugs had also morphed into a war on urban communities of color.

By 2005, the United States held roughly 25 percent of the world’s inmates, with an incarceration rate that dwarfed all other country. As Alexander notes in her book, most of the drug users and dealers in the United States are white. Yet roughly two-thirds of those imprisoned for drug offenses have been Black or Latino.

A year ago, former President Jimmy Carter called for an end to the global drug war. In a New York Times opinion, he noted that just before he left office in 1980, there 500,000 people incarcerated in America. “At the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million,” he wrote. 

Milwaukee has not been immune to these national realities, and has become a leader in Black incarceration. In 2005, for instance, Wisconsin had the second highest rate of Black incarceration in the country, fueled by Milwaukee statistics. The rate was more than ten times the rate for whites.

The rise of mass incarceration has significantly impacted Milwaukee’s most-impoverished families and neighborhoods. A 2009 report from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute notes that most of the jailed adults in Milwaukee County are in their 20s and 30s — prime working years. African American males particularly affected.

“The absence of many males of prime workforce age and the numbers of men incarcerated and released from state correctional facilities each year have tremendous impact on the earnings and stability of families,” the report states.

The non-profit, non-partisan Sentencing Project notes that changes in sentencing law and policy, not increases in crime rates, explain most of the increase in the prison population in recent decades.

The realities of our criminal justice system “raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid,” argues Glenn C. Loury, a professor of social sciences at Brown University, in his book Race, Incarceration, and American Values. “…We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens — even those who break our laws?”

Regardless of what happens in the Derek Williams case, such questions won’t go away

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This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project. 

Romney's disastrous education agenda: Lessons from Milwaukee

By Barbara J. Miner

When I hear Mitt Romney’s seductive rhetoric about school choice, I think back to the beginning of Milwaukee’s voucher program — the country’s largest and oldest voucher initiative.

In particular, I remember Nov. 14, 1990. On that day, I learned an important lesson on the difference between rhetoric and reality.

I dropped my two daughters off at day care and began my job at the Milwaukee Journal. The city editor, a gray-haired Irishman who filled every stereotype of the gruff newshound, called me over. I was to do an on-the-scenes report at a private school receiving publicly funded tuition vouchers.

Like most people, I hadn’t given much thought to this new and unique initiative. Vouchers had been promoted as “school choice” for poor black kids, and seemed a worthwhile experiment.

I grabbed my reporter’s notebook and headed to the school. I sat in on some classes, which seemed little different than at schools across the city. But teachers approached me in the hallways with vague stories of turmoil and advised I attend a parent meeting the following evening.

I went to the meeting, only to be blocked by a somewhat beefy lawyer. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was a private school and I would not be allowed to attend the meeting.

I huffed and I puffed, but the lawyer was right. Private schools do not have to follow Wisconsin’s open meetings and records laws.

I never found out what happened at the meeting, although within a few weeks the teaching staff was slashed by a third and the principal was gone.

I did, however, learn the first of many lessons about school vouchers. In essence, vouchers are a mechanism to funnel public dollars into private schools. They are an abandonment of both public education and our country’s democratic ideals.

And now we have Romney promising a national voucher plan to save American education.

Romney knows the term “voucher” is politically toxic, so instead he uses the rhetoric of “choice.” The heart of Romney’s agenda: students will be able to use federal education dollars to attend any school—public or private, religious or non-sectarian, charter or digital.

“I want the kids that are getting federal dollars … to be able to go to the school of their choice,” Romney said at the first presidential debate. It was not a new position, first outlined in his education white paper last May. At the GOP convention, school choice was the only K-12 education reform mentioned in Romney’s acceptance speech.

Romney’s plan would launch an unprecedented shift of federal dollars into private schools. It would also be an about face from demands for increased accountability. By their very nature, private schools do not have to follow the same requirements as public schools in releasing information.

FALSE PROMISES

Milwaukee’s program has long been a model for other cities and state programs, from Cleveland, to New Orleans, Florida, and Indiana. Beginning in 1990 with 300 students in seven non-sectarian schools, by 2012 vouchers had expanded to almost 23,000 students in more than 100 private schools, most of them religious-based. In size, the voucher program now rivals Wisconsin’s largest school districts, but with minimal public accountability or oversight.

For more than twenty years, supporters of vouchers for private schools have had a chance to prove their assertion that the marketplace and parental choice are the bedrocks of educational success, that unions and government bureaucracy are the enemies of reform, and that vouchers will lead to increased academic achievement.

After two decades and more than $1.27 billion in public funding, however, the Milwaukee voucher program’s enticing promises have not materialized.

The first apples-to-apples comparison between Milwaukee’s private voucher and public schools wasn’t until 2010, a testament to how difficult it is to demand public transparency from private schools. State test results showed that students in private voucher schools performed significantly worse in math and about the same in reading as their public school counterparts. Recent results have been similar.

Nor has Milwaukee’s voucher program met the promise of increased parental satisfaction. A longitudinal study on achievement, in its final report, noted that only17.5 percent of the voucher students remained in a voucher school after five years. The comparable figure for the public schools was 43.5 percent.

Fundamentally, however, the issue of school vouchers goes beyond education achievement and parent preference. Above all, vouchers are an abandonment of this country’s commitment to public schools—a commitment rooted in an understanding that strong democratic institutions require a citizenry educated not just in the three Rs but also in their civic responsibilities.

Every state constitution in the country enshrines the right to a free and public education for all children—an honor that is not bestowed on other requisites for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whether housing or employment or healthcare.

In the current debates on vouchers, there is strikingly little discussion of the relationship between democratic values, civic responsibility, and public education. Instead, education is treated as a mere commodity, with parents and children reduced to mere consumers.

Do our urban public school systems have deep-seated problems? Without a doubt. But at the end of the day, they are the only institutions with the commitment, capacity, and legal obligation to teach all children.

In Milwaukee, vouchers have created separate and unequal school systems. The education of students with special educational needs is just one example. The percentage of special ed students in Milwaukee’s public schools is about 20 percent. At the private voucher schools, the comparable figure is less than 2 percent.

“All together, the 102 voucher schools are serving a special education population that is equal to what the Milwaukee Public Schools serves in just one of its district schools: Hamilton High School,” Milwaukee superintendent Gregory Thornton noted last year.

Vouchers were promoted in the 1990s as a way to help poor black children escape failing schools. But that rhetoric has disappeared in Milwaukee. Voucher supporters have expanded vouchers to middle-income families and have made clear they want to make vouchers available to all, including millionaires. Vouchers for poor children was just a first step.

For more than twenty years, I have listened to the voucher movement’s seductive rhetoric of “choice” and “parent power.” If I didn’t know better, I might proclaim, “Sign me up today!”

Milwaukee, however, has more than two decades of reality-based vouchers. The lesson from this heartland city?

Vouchers are a vehicle to funnel tax dollars into private schools. Using the false promise of “choice,” they are an unabashed abandonment of public education and of our hopes for a vibrant democracy.

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This opinion originally appeared on Common Dreams, a web-based, non-profit news center created in 1997 to promote the common good.