Here is the big news of the day and no, it is not President Obama's appearance Tuesday on the UW-Madison campus.
This is the story that should have repercussions throughout Wisconsin, especially in this campaign season.
Milwaukee's poverty rate is at 27%, up from 23.4% in the previous year. More than one of four Milwaukee residents -- impoverished! Worse, Milwaukee is now America's fourth-most impoverished big city.
Only Detroit (36.4%), Cleveland (35%) and Buffalo (28.8%) had higher poverty rates among cities with populations greater than 250,000. Milwaukee was ranked 11th in 2008.
Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo! Failure, doom, and disaster. All three are melting before our eyes like the Wicked Witch of the West -- perhaps beyond the point of no return. CNN on-line leads a counter-intuitively upbeat photo essay with this teaser: "For years, photojournalists have prowled the empty city of Detroit, feasting on its highly photogenic carcass."
... not so much has changed on Detroit's surface: empty seven-lane streets, lots of abandoned stuff, fortified mansions beside charred remnants of neighborhoods, grasslands reclaiming entire city blocks, gaudy casinos in the deep ghettos ... impoverished residents barely subsisting on freshly hunted raccoon meat.
It's what CNN calls "misery porn."
I know what our liberal friends will demand: quick, more government handouts! Tax high-income people -- those with the means to make major investments. That should spur economic development!
Education reform is the key
There is one thing the State of Wisconsin can do. It can take over Milwaukee's public schools. Break up the school district, fire incompetent teachers and principals, institute competition through a wide variety of charter schools, pay for performance, and triple the voucher system to encourage private investment and true competition.
Nothing is more important to Milwaukee's future than education reform, save perhaps public safety. Milwaukee's public schools are now outperformed by those of New Orleans, which has embraced reform post-Katrina.
The Milwaukee Schools are a failure by any measure. Ninety-four of the 100 largest school districts in the country have higher graduation rates than Milwaukee, where the graduation rate is 45%, according to a study by the Manhattan Institute.
That compares with 58% in Philadelphia, 63% in New Orleans and 50% in Chicago for the class of 2003, the most recent year for which this kind of data was available.
Milwaukee cannot succeed in the Information Age without top-notch schools. Even Tom Barrett understands that, yet he got absolutely nowhere.
As brother Charlie Sykes pointed out:
In August you launched a campaign to take over the Milwaukee public schools. You had the support of the president of the United States; the secretary of education, and the governor. In addition, your party controlled both houses of the legislature; you are the leading democratic candidate for governor. And yet your plan went absolutely nowhere. Does this reflect at all on the leadership skills you will bring to the governor's office?
You have had the power to charter schools for six years. This gave you a chance to support alternatives to the failing educational status quo in Milwaukee. But during your term, only one school was chartered and that one has already shut down. If you are as you have professed recently, so concerned about the quality of education in the city, why did you do so little with charter schools when you had the chance?
Democrats are just unwilling to cross their sugar daddies, the teachers union. WEAC, the state teachers union, is far and away the heaviest-spending special interest group in Wisconsin political campaigns. In the 2008 November elections, the teachers union spent $2.1 million in just five legislative races. Either for Democrats or negative ads attacking Republicans. One TV ad aimed at Rep. Frank Lasee "devoted 4 seconds to an education-related issue, and the other 26 seconds to Medicaid, envisonmental regulations, and overtime pay."
We learn that at a new web site called WEAC Exposed that exposes how "the union's vested interest trumps reform, innovation, and improved quality" in order to further its lucrative insurance sideline.
My post "Waiting for Superman to reform public education" brought out the teachers union apologists, including one poster who places at the top of his priorities a robust ACLU presence at every school "to fight for the First Amendment rights of teachers and students." See what we're up against?
Rising to the critical list for Milwaukee's unionized teachers is something so important that they are bringing a court suit to get: taxpayer-supported Viagra.
Once again we quote Jonah Goldberg of National Review. He called teachers unions, "arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today. … No group is more committed to putting ideological blather and self-interest before the public good."
I heard, I saw but I did not stand in line
I wimped out. I did not even attempt to enter the UW-Madison Library Mall Tuesday evening. But I watched the whole thing on the Internet -- amazing in itself.
A very good speech from President Obama. Full of passion and simple, ready-to-wear analogies. Liked the pulling the car out of the ditch and now the Republicans want to drive but D stands for Democrat/Drive and R stands for Republicans/Reverse.
As Dean Robbins writes, "None of that cerebral Obama detachment here."
Young people are -- God bless 'em -- emotional beings. I'm sure Obama will get bang for his buck. Attendance of 26,000 is impressive, I don't care how you slice it. UW-Madison is the flagship of a great university. Do they teach critical thinking? The genius of Hope 'n Change 2008 was that it was so content-free that could be whatever one imagined it to be. The porkfest of the stimulus package, the log rolling that gave birth to ObamaCare, the massive federal debt, the seemingly intractable unemployment -- no wonder there is disillusionment.
Only government can save America!
Except that ... it hasn't. It couldn't prevent the economic disaster from coming. In many ways, by encouraging housing speculation and insisting on subprime loans to targeted populations, government brought about the debacle. Nor can government fix the problem after the fact, apparently.
What to do? Demonize corporations! But that is so ... Ed Garvey.
Bad news, liberals. Corporations are economic democracy -- no better or worse than the people of American themselves. Unlike government, you are free to boycott one corporation's products and patronize the other's. Corporations are demonstrably no more or less corrupt than organized labor or the political class. Many of those 26,000 on or near Library Mall on Tuesday will be interviewing at corporations -- Capital Newspapers, Apple Computer, GE Healthcare. Pure evil!
Let's hope our corporations prosper for their sake and for those of us who hold stock in them.
Saw the black helicopter pass over Southwest Madison, but then I'm always seeing black helicopters.
