Lessons from the Heartland by Barbara J. Miner

Author:Barbara J. Miner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588647
Publisher: The New Press

An unusual alliance helped spawn Milwaukee’s voucher program—conservatives, libertarians, black nationalists, business leaders, and religious-school advocates in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Over time, especially as the Milwaukee program abandoned its focus on community-based schools serving poor children, various people have joined or left the voucher movement. But one force has consistently been a mainstay both ideologically and financially: Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. For more than two decades, the foundation has used its local and national clout and its bankroll to nurture, protect, and expand Milwaukee’s voucher program. From 1986 to 2003, it made an estimated $41 million in grants for school voucher initiatives.7 Subsequent grants have maintained a similar pace; in recent years, the foundation has increasingly funded corporatized charter school franchises.

Michael Joyce, the president of the Bradley Foundation from 1985 to 2001, helped shape both the foundation’s ideological direction and the orientation of Milwaukee’s voucher program. To this day, the voucher movement remains dominated by foundations, organizations, and philanthropists who share Joyce’s free-market worldview and who, in the name of reforming education, seek to replace public education with a universal voucher system that includes private and religious schools.

Joyce’s physical appearance obscured his power and influence. When I interviewed him several times in the mid-1990s for a profile in Rethinking Schools, he seemed to delight in the “man in the gray suit” persona he shared with so many Milwaukee executives. He could easily have been mistaken for a professor or a middle-aged Clark Kent: thick glasses in oversized frames, hair thinning at the top, a waistline growing but not out of control, a well-tailored but bland suit and tie. Nothing compelled one to take a second look. Beneath that Clark Kent façade, however, was a man fond of wielding power. And the Bradley Foundation ensured he had lots of power to wield. “Michael Joyce plays for keeps,” then Milwaukee mayor John Norquist said in 1993. “He is interested in advancing his agenda. He’s very much into the rough and tumble of politics and influencing policy.”8

Raised in a blue-collar, Irish Catholic Democratic household in Cleveland, the young Joyce supported the civil rights demands of Martin Luther King Jr. But like many neoconservatives, he became alarmed by the more radical demands of the black power movement, the women’s movement, and opponents of the Vietnam War. By 1972, he had shed his liberal leanings and voted for Richard Nixon. Over the years he slowly worked his way up the political and ideological hierarchy of the Republican Party. In 1979, he was asked by William Simon, secretary of the treasury for Presidents Nixon and Ford, to head the Olin Foundation—one of several that at the time dominated conservative funding. While there, Joyce gained a national reputation for using foundation grants to nurture a free-market conservative political agenda and to fund conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Manhattan Institute.

In 1985, the Bradley Foundation was flush with money after the Allen-Bradley Company’s sale to Rockwell International Corp.

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