Milwaukee Has Made A Faustian Bargain

 

Ah, Milwaukee.

I love my city. It's grown and prospered greatly over the last quarter-century in ways I couldn't have imagined. I've been looking forward to contributing to that growth in helping to make Milwaukee a hub for sci fi authors, filmmakers and artists.

But beneath the outward expansion of the city skyline and riverfront, there's been a looming financial cliff.

Our new mayor, Chevy Johnson, has been tirelessly working to avoid that cliff, and it seems he's succeeded. A deal has been worked out with Governor Evers and Republicans in Madison to grant Milwaukee a greater share of revenue sharing, along with giving it the right to raise taxes within the city and the county (finally!).

In exchange, Republicans get to expand school vouchers and charter schools.

Okay, look, I know the city has it's back to the wall. Mayor Johnson had to compromise somewhere. But this deal essentially mortgages our city's children in order to pay for the present.

Do charter schools work? Sort of. Do vouchers work? Again, sort of. The numbers are comparable, and the charter and voucher schools don't seem to be producing scores that notably outpace traditional public schools. This report from US News & World Report shows that, as late as 2019, charter/voucher schools did not show themselves to be the magic bullet that advocates said they would be. And 2019 still applies to today, since Covid disrupted everything between 2020 and 2022.

So, if charter and voucher schools aren't delivering the goods, why are Republicans continuing the big push?

The obvious reason is because it shuffles public money into the pockets of private religious schools. Why simply teach kids creationism when it can be done on the public dime?

But more importantly than that, charter schools get to pretend that they do better with the "three-and-out" trick. Students that need extra help can get booted after three weeks, usually on trumped-up disciplinary grounds. The school's overall scores improve at the expense of the kids they kick out. And what happens to those kids then? Why, they get sent to the only place left for them - the traditional public schools, which now have even more kids and fewer resources.

That was bad enough before Covid. But after Covid hit, so many more kids got left behind in the system. An entire generation has been lost because many schools would rather expel kids who are behind than educate them. 

And when some of them finally get expelled even by the public schools? What then?

The answer is all the bullshit you saw on YouTube in 2021 with the "Kia Boys." These are the kids left without a school, and without a future. They have little else to do with their time except steal cars, and wait for the system to give them their permanent jail-time-careers as inmates.

Milwaukee needed a financial boon. It got one. But it also needed at least two or three boarding schools for boys where troubled kids way behind in their education would finally get a fighting chance at life.

What they got instead, thanks to Republicans from White Suburbia, is more of the same. Because raising kids as Christians on the public dime is more important than actually educating them.

Milwaukee has avoided a fiscal cliff. Hooray. Yet it has gone over a different cliff. The educational one. We've already lost almost an entire generation of kids, no thanks to Covid and Trump's mis-management of it. Now we're about to lose another one. We're going to have to cross our fingers and hope that institutions like the Milwaukee Area Technical College system can make up the difference.

If Republicans don't want to slash funding for that, too.

What's that? They're already trying to do so?

Well, shit.

Eric

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