The nation’s right wing is trying to hijack the Milwaukee School Board elections.
Buying the school board
By
Bob Peterson
What do the Wall Street Journal, John Walton of Wal-Mart and free-market academic Milton Freidman have in common? They are all part of a concerted national effort to hijack the April 1 Milwaukee Public School (MPS) Board elections. Their goals are explicitly pro-privatization, anti-public education, and anti-teacher union. With Milwaukee serving as the prime example in the nationwide voucher wars, it's not surprising.
The five MPS School Board incumbents who are up for re-election April 1 constitute the majority on the nine-member board. They are all drawing considerable financial and political support from pro-privatization forces from throughout the United States.
Ideological, right wing groups and individuals have supported pro-voucher candidates for the Milwaukee School Board in the last few elections. Given the U.S. Supreme Court decision last June upholding public funding of religious schools, the legal cloud over vouchers has been removed.
Why then, is the Right so interested in our schools? To read their tracts in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Times one gets the impression that a pro-public education Milwaukee School Board would be able to dismantle the voucher program. That's just not the case.
What is true, however, is that several members of the Milwaukee School Board play an important role in the national movement for vouchers and privatization. They write about vouchers, speak at national right wing gatherings, and host visitors who come to Milwaukee to see the voucher experiment in action. To have a member of the Milwaukee School board publicly proclaim that private school vouchers help the public schools adds credibility and strength to the voucher school movement. (Individual Milwaukee School Board members are not required to release their personal income or travel expenses when their travel is financed by outside groups, so it is unknown how much personal financial support the pro-voucher board members receive via speaking engagements.)
The scope of right wing support is impressive. In the 1999 school board election, pro-voucher candidate John Gardner won, spending more than $190,000, or nearly four times as much as his opponent. This does not include the significant independent political expenditures made by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) on his behalf. His contributor lists that year and this year read like a who's who in the conservative right wing movement and the Milwaukee business community. For example, Wal-Mart heir John Walton, and his wife Christy, both contributed the maximum $3,000. They also contributed the maximum of $800 to several of the district candidates. Other contributors include insurance company executive Pat Rooney from Indianapolis, Betsy Devos of Michigan-based Amway Company, Peter Schaeffer and Louis Woodhill of NEON Systems in Houston, Howard Fuller and his wife Deborah McGriff, and Richard and Sherry Sharp of Richmond, Virginia.
While Gardner has received the most support, all of the incumbents rely heavily on the national conservative movement. For example, Joe Dannecker, the most vulnerable of the other incumbents, has received significant outside funding. His campaign finance reports from February 10 and March 25 of this year show that of the nearly $16,000 in contributions he reported since January 1, 2003, more than 74 percent came from people who lived outside of Milwaukee, and only a few were from people in his district.
The scope of such support seems to be broadening this year thanks to a March 20 Wall Street Journal editorial, and an article that ran in the conservative Washington Times three days later. The Wall Street Journal editorial, headlined "The Empire Strikes Back," was a thinly disguised fundraising appeal. According to the WSJ, the "Empire of the status quo" is the Milwaukee teachers union and its "national and state brethren."
The editorial asserts that Gardner's "union-backed opponent" Tom Balistreri, former principal of Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, is receiving $2 million worth of support from the teachers unions. The Washington Times article quotes Gardner saying, "I know that they have a war chest of $2.4 million."
The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, and Gardner offer no evidence for these ludicrous assertions. Teacher union leaders dismissed the notion with a laugh. The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association's political action committee has given the maximum allowed $3,000 to Balistreri, and $800 to district candidates Terry Falk, Leon Todd, and Jan Doleschal. MTEA is also making some limited independent expenditures—mainly yard signs and mailings to their members.
Conservatives, meanwhile, have formed two new conduits to give money to the pro-voucher candidates. The Fund for Choices in Education is a political conduit created in August to fund voucher supporters. According to a recent report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this group has given $28,840 to John Gardner, and lesser amounts to the other four pro-voucher incumbents. The second group, The Milwaukee Fund for Public Education, revealed its existence on March 23, and reported that it had given about $50,000 to the five pro-voucher incumbents: $21,500 to John Gardner; $6,400 each to Barbara Horton, Jeff Spence and Ken Johnson, and $7,900 to Dannecker. The conduit’s administrator is Bruce Thompson, a staunch voucher supporter and former school board president who was defeated two years ago by grassroots candidate Jennifer Morales, the city's first Latina school board member.
In addition to the national support, local conservatives have rallied to the cause. Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, Governor Doyle’s budget director David Riemer, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce (MMAC), and right-wing radio talk show hosts are all beating the voucher drum. The MMAC endorsed the five incumbents (without even interviewing their opponents) and put a large, unreported amount of money into radio ads and mailings smearing the challengers as puppets of the teachers unions. Individual members of the MMAC, virtually all of whom live outside of Milwaukee, have also contributed significantly to the pro-voucher candidates. Right wing radio talk show hosts Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling, and Jeff Wagner have spent hours of airtime supporting the incumbents and smearing their challengers.
The national voucher movement isn't just in the business of hijacking Milwaukee School Board elections. In the 1997 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a nationally financed, $200,000, pro-Jon Wilcox postcard and phone calling campaign helped defeat Walt Kelly. This year's flood of right wing money into the school board coffers seems to have also spilled over into the one Milwaukee-area state Senate race as well. Joel Brennan, who is running for the seat in the 7th district, is challenging Assembly Rep. Jeff Plale, who has received money from the same constellation of right wing forces as the pro-voucher Milwaukee School Board candidates. For example, Pat Rooney, John and Christy Walton, Richard and Sherry Sharp, Bill Orberndorf of San Francisco, Howard Fuller, Deborah McGriff, and George Mitchell all contributed the maximum $1,000 to Plale.
If you'd like to stop the hijacking of the Milwaukee School Board by the national right wing movement, please vote or encourage your friends in Milwaukee to vote against the incumbents on the school board. Vote FOR Tom Balistreri in the citywide race, Terry Falk in District #8, Maureen Keyes in District #2, Jan Doleschal in District #1, and Leon Todd in District #3. And vote for Joel Brennan, too.
March 31, 2003
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Bob Peterson teaches fifth grade in the Milwaukee
Public Schools, is an editor of Rethinking Schools and rethinkingschools.org, and a FightingBob.com contributing editor.
