Reading, Writing, Roulette (cont.)
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Public-School Options
Certainly no one would disagree with the statement that at one time Milwaukee's schools were indeed failing Black children. Isolated in one of the most segregated cities in the nation, the city's majority-Black public schools were known in the mid-eighties for their abysmal standardized-test scores, for a dropout rate that was more than double the state average, and for twice as many suspensions among Black students as for Whites. Back then, says John Gurda, a White historian and author of The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee County Historical Society), "The school board was widely viewed as a place where good ideas went to die."
The system is changing: Last fall, voters booted five school-board members who were backed by the teachers' union for a prochoice board, and public schools are responding to the competition posed by choice schools. Log on to the district's Web site and you'll find engaging marketing descriptions like "We invite parents as full partners ..."
But many of the changes were just part of an evolution. Long before vouchers were an option, Milwaukee parents had many public-school choices. Following a desegregation lawsuit in the late 1970's, court-ordered busing led to a Byzantine system that shipped disproportionate numbers of Black students to outlying areas and brought in few White students in exchange. Today nearly 70,000 of Milwaukee's 105,000 public-school students are bused, mainly to relieve overcrowding, not segregation. In a practice known as double busing, Black students pass one another in buses on the way to one another's neighborhood schools. "The perception today is that you've got to get on a bus to get a quality education," says Aquine Jackson, Ph.D., director of MPS Student Services. "We're now asking parents what it would take to make your neighborhood school your school of choice."
Within the public schools, Milwaukee parents can send their kids to a neighborhood school, or, if space is available, to one of about 32 charter schools, one of 5 immersion, or one of 49 intensive-training magnet schools. But those public-school options weren't enough for the parents of the 8,000 children who've chosen voucher schools. The problem, says historian Gurda, whose children are products of Milwaukee's public schools, is that "there's no clear outline of a system that's emerging. The more choices there are, the higher potential there is for confusion."
With so many options, some parents are less likely to do the research, and instead focus on a friend's recommendation, proximity or connection to a church. And just as Brenda Gordon's kids found themselves at a place like DLH Academy, simply because she attended a certain church, other students have landed in choice schools like the one in the Y.