Tom Barrett: The Comfortable Mayor

By George Lightbourn

You had to look quickly, but four years ago when Tom Barrett was running for Mayor of Milwaukee he surprised most observers with a big, bold initiative.  He announced that, if he was elected mayor, he would move to take over the Milwaukee Public School system.  “The success of the city and the success of our public schools are so closely linked that the mayor should be accountable for the academic performance of the students of MPS.”

Wow!  Not many people expected anything so avant-garde from Mr. Barrett.  This was heady stuff, the type of initiative that only the boldest big city mayors had taken on. 

And then it was gone.  Within days, the idea was history.  The heat from the school board, the teachers’ union and the other mayoral candidates proved too much.  It was as though he had never brought the idea up.  Mayoral candidate Barrett was as shy in talking about his idea of taking over MPS as he would have been about wearing a lampshade at a New Year Eve party.  So the issue went away and never came back.

MPS breathed a sigh of relief and all was quickly forgiven.  Tom Barrett was elected and the city and the school district quickly went back to business-as-usual.

The fact of the matter is that Tom Barrett personifies the comfort zone of Milwaukee.  He’s a mayor who keeps the lights on, keeps taxes from rising to the stratosphere and he is one of the most affable politicians on the scene today.  He is the comfortable mayor.

Meanwhile, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is shaking things up in New York and he has his sights set on the schools.  He is willing to bite into New York’s failing schools, an issue that must seem a little too gritty, a little too risky for Tom Barrett to embrace.  Bloomberg, walking a trail blazed by Richie Daley and a few other cutting-edge mayors, has announced to the world that when it comes to New York schools, there will be no business-as-usual.  He hired Joe Klein from the Clinton administration and put him in charge of turning around the schools.

New York is trying things reformers in Milwaukee can only dream about.  For example, in New York schools that do exceptionally well, the school will get a boost to its budget and the principal will be eligible for a bonus of up to $25,000.  Principals in schools on the other end of the achievement ladder will be replaced and will ultimately be let go.  These and other Bloomberg reforms are rankling the education establishment.  They are just too different.

No one in New York has any doubts about who is in charge of the city’s schools; it’s the mayor.  They are hoping he can do for the school system what Mayor Giuliani did for the safety of the streets.  The Economist described Bloomberg’s efforts as “the most far-reaching urban school accountability initiative in America.”

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee things remain comfortable.  The mayor’s education agenda has him adding more police to make the schools safer.  That’s a fine idea but that and posing with the Superintendent of MPS on the first day of school appears to be all that is on the mayor’s education agenda.  True, it might not be a reform agenda, but it is comfortable. 

So let’s not kid ourselves, we might talk a good game when it comes to reforming MPS.  But our heart really isn’t in it.  In Milwaukee we like comfortable ideas and we have the mayor to prove it.