MPS leader’s first moves are crowd pleasers
Keith Posley is into football, so let’s start by saying Posley took the opening kickoff and led a quick drive for a touchdown.
On his fourth day as interim superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, Posley unveiled a plan that restores to schools $11.6 million that his predecessor, Darienne Driver, had proposed cutting for next year.
The fans (which is to say, people in the school board auditorium on Thursday night, many of them union leaders and teachers) cheered. School board members cheered — one of them, Michael Bonds, said they should drop the “interim” in Posley’s title.
There were winners and losers in the first days of a new regime at MPS.
Winner: Posley. He is off to a fast and popular start.
Winner: The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association. The union campaigned aggressively for no new cuts to school budgets.
A few weeks ago, it held a rally outside the MPS central office attended by several thousand people, including (I’m guessing) about half of all MPS teachers. And there will be no new cuts.
Loser: Central office. But how many fans does central office have? Not many among staff in the schools, hardly any in the general public. Posley’s plan to restore school budgets was paired with deeper cuts to central office than had been previously proposed.
And he presented the board with a plan to overhaul the administrative structure that means things will be run much differently than during Driver’s time. The plan included the elimination of the Office of Innovation, which Driver had defended.
Loser: Driver. So popular for so long, she was quite unceremoniously pushed out the door earlier than she wanted.
I strongly suspect the school board wanted to change leaders just as the budget for next year was coming to a head because members knew Posley would reverse the cuts to schools.
(I wonder if he, in effect, told some of them, “Give me the damn ball,” in a famous football phrase.)
Winners: Substitute teachers and part-time teachers. MPS is finding it hard to fill teaching positions. Posley proposed creating part-time teaching positions, with a goal of filling hard-to-fill spots.
And board member Larry Miller proposed creating a new category of substitute teachers who work at or close to full time and who would be eligible for health coverage.
(That led substitute teacher Alex Brower to end his widely publicized three-week hunger strike.)
And the biggest winner: The status quo. The real result in all of this is that things in the 160 or so MPS schools won’t be much different next year than this year. That’s better than things being worse.
But how happy are we with the status quo? What is in this budget that aims to change the overall deeply troubling education success rates of Milwaukee kids (not only in MPS)?
The Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan research organization, issued an analysis Friday of the financial state of MPS. One of its most important conclusions: “It is a sad reality that the current financial structure leaves no room for investment of any magnitude in strategic initiatives to address these concerns” about student outcomes.
The policy forum warned that long-term financial realities for MPS are worrisome, even if Posley’s changes stave off worse impacts for now.
In his first day as interim superintendent, Posley issued a statement giving his five job priorities.
The first was “increasing academic achievement and accountability.”
(The others were improving district and school culture, developing the staff, ensuring fiscal responsibility and transparency, and strengthening communication and collaboration.)
How is he going to pursue better achievement? That remains to be spelled out.
Another goal Posley set was more energetic efforts to enroll students. The long-standing trend of declining enrollment in MPS is a big reason for the overall financial problems of MPS.
But competing with charter schools and private schools, both offering free education to most Milwaukee kids, has proven challenging for MPS. Will that change
now?
The biggest loser:
Tough decisions. The board said no to proposals from Driver to make unpopular decisions that would have had longterm financial benefit. Reducing the amount of busing, requiring employees to pay more for such things as co-pays on health care, closing schools — none of them happened in this budget.
Predicting the money picture for coming years is an unreliable exercise. For one thing, the next budget season for every school district in Wisconsin will occur after the coming elections for governor and the large majority of legislators, and will be shaped by a state budget to be passed in 2019.
Public school advocates are already calling for a big push for more state funding.
But the MPS budget office issued projections a few months ago for future “structural” deficits that started with almost $39 million for the coming year and grew to over $170 million by four years from now.
The $39 million problem is being solved without huge pain (except to some central office administrators).
But it’s doubtful you can cut central office the same way next year.
At a meeting a few weeks ago, Driver told board members that one reason they were facing big problems was because they had declined to take unpopular steps in the past.
“If we say no to everything, this is why we’re here,” she said.
Posley’s big plays in his first days on the job were crowd pleasers and show an appetite for shaking things up.
But the touchdown came early in the game. There’s a lot of playing time to go before we reach the final score.
Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.