On paragraph really alarmed me (emphasis mine):
While [Mobley] said he would like to see MPS broken into smaller school districts, he criticized Fernandez's proposal of replacing Milwaukee's elected School Board with a "turnaround team" appointed by the state superintendent, Milwaukee mayor and Milwaukee county executive. He said involvement by three different elected officials would politicize any reform efforts.I have to wonder whether she is going for shock value, or if she just doesn't know what's been in happening in Milwaukee for the past several years.
City of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker have spend the last several years in a stand off regarding what to do with the $91.5 million dollars of federal money that has been languishing around. Even in these severely troubling economic troubling times, they haven't come any closer to any kind of compromise.
Heck, they can't even agree on who is responsible for shoveling the snow out of the bus shelters.
How does she expect that Walker and Barrett would be able to agree to anything about the public school system? Barrett, on the rare occasion anyone even sees him, is obviously very reluctant to take over the school system. Walker would only want to sell it off to someone and/or blame other people for his failure to even act on fixing it.
And that doesn't even take into the consideration of whether it would be legal for the County Executive to have that kind of influence over a municipality's school system.
But to be fair, I thought I'd go look at her website and found her YouTube video explaining her proposal. Instead of making more sense, she only gets scarier, stating that she believes she would turn around the whole system in only three years, and then dump it back on the City of Milwaukee.
If she doesn't have realistic expectations for MPS, then she wouldn't be able to have realistic expectations for the rest of the state either. If he doesn't want to give serious answers to a serious problem, she doesn't deserve our serious consideration.
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There is a misrepresentation in your piece. Her turnaround team is not designed to replace the school board, but to supersede them.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly, it is a more forceful or aggressive position, but MPS is almost hopeless in both performance and spending.
Fernandez is the only candidate offering something different, however, she is a major underdog here. She has almost no fund raising, so almost all of her campaigning has been through internet and "meet and greets."
ReplyDeleteSykes endorsed her (well, sort of), and a few other bloggers have as well, but she may have a chance given that the turnout for the February primaries is expected to be about 6% or slightly greater.
I personally like the fact that she's not endorsed by the Teacher's Union. Immediately, that signals to me that she cares about the education of our children, not about doing everything it takes to protect the benefits of teachers even at the expense of the students.
Think of her plan as "Stimulus" for MPS.
ReplyDeleteNo different in impact than nationalizing a few Banks for a few years.
See? Now you can be comfy.
To anon1,
ReplyDeleteFernandez indeed intents to replace the school board with the turnaround team in an effort to shake up MPS. It's a bolder approach and something I agree particularly with.
To the last poster,
The analogy doesn't stick [well, on some levels it does] because there is no "turnaround-ness" of nationalizing banks. Also, we are trying to save public sector education with private sector strategy, which is not like saving private sector banks with public sector strategy - unless of course strategy involves pouring endless amounts of money down the toilet, which is what MPS is already doing.
Actually, when one thinks about it, Rose Fernandez is applying free market approaches to the public sector. Turnaround teams are used by free-market corporations to fix problems that CEO's are too subjective about fixing.
However, I must admit that this is uncharted territory, but MPS is in uncharted failure.
I don't think anyone is arguing that MPS needs help, but her idea is irresponsible and will only make things worse through inaction.
ReplyDeleteCapper,
ReplyDeleteHow could you possibly know that? Seriously?
He doesn't. He hasn't been alive long enough to recognize that MPS has been a rotten failure for decades, and all attempts to fix it by throwing money at it have failed.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need is less spending, more breaking apart MPS, and more involvement by parents via the power of school choice. This isn't rocket science we're talking about here, well at least not for us conservatives.
Tell a liberal he can't fix something through spending the money of others is a good way to confuse him.
Anony 1,
ReplyDeleteI explained that in the post.
Anony 2,
Where did I advocate for more spending? Or are you just using the squawking points you learned from squawk radio?