Unintimidated by Scott Walker

Author:Scott Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Ending the “Lemon Dance”

It was now clear to the people of Wisconsin that the dire predictions that Act 10 would decimate education had not come true. But failing to decimate education is not, on its own, a compelling case for reelection. To win the recall, I had to do more than prove that our reforms had helped balance budgets without hurting schools—I had to show our reforms had in fact allowed school districts to offer students a better education.

That is precisely what they did.

Around the time I was elected governor in the fall of 2010, a remarkable documentary hit theaters called Waiting for Superman. The film, by liberal director Davis Guggenheim (the man behind Al Gore’s global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth), was a searing indictment of our nation’s failing public schools—including those in Milwaukee.

Waiting for Superman told the stories of parents who were desperately trying to get their kids into high-performing charter schools. To make it in, they had to win a lottery, with dozens of families competing for each spot. The children’s fates were left, literally, to random chance. Some got in, others did not. It was heartbreaking to watch the ones who didn’t make it.

In Wisconsin, we came up with a solution to the problems outlined in Waiting for Superman: We gave every public school in Wisconsin the same freedom to innovate and function like a high-performing charter school.

For years, officials in traditional public schools had complained that if they were just given the same kind of flexibility as charter schools, they could deliver the same quality education in a traditional school setting. Well, in Wisconsin we gave it to them.

Collective bargaining agreements had tied the hands of school administrators—restricting their decisions on everything from the length of the school year to the length of the school day. Union contracts determined everything from whether teachers could be assigned to lunch duty, to how many field trips could be taken in a given year, to how teachers were assigned and transferred, how promotions were decided, how raises were determined, how professional development dollars were spent, how changes to the curriculum were to be made, and how many faculty meetings could be held with a principal—and even how long those meetings could be.

In Milwaukee, the first agreement between teachers and the school district in 1965 was just 18 pages long.1 By 2007–2009, it had grown into a 246-page monstrosity. To put this in context, the teacher contract at Messmer Preparatory School, a Catholic school in Milwaukee, is just 3 pages long, plus a fourth page explaining teachers’ compensation and the benefits package.2, 3 By contrast, the Milwaukee teacher contract has 75 pages covering salaries and benefits and another 64 pages covering teaching conditions, teacher assignments and reassignments, and grievance procedures.

For example, the teacher contract in Milwaukee limited faculty meetings to just two hours per month (down from two and a half hours), and stipulated that “the administration shall notify the teachers . . . at least one calendar week prior to the inservice or faculty meeting date if it is to last longer than one hour.

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