State Street photo: Richard Hurd / Flickr
People walking on State Street contrasted with students in a classroom.
I like the Wisconsin State Journal. In fact, I rely on the morning daily for a lot of the raw material for my writing. Given the pressures the whole industry is under, I think the State Journal does a more than competent job in covering state and local news. I don’t know where I’d be without it.
What I don’t get is the paper’s editorial focus on a State Street pedestrian mall. They’ve made it a cause for years now, even going so far as to make it a point of emphasis when endorsing candidates for city offices.
And, for reasons I don’t understand, the paper long ago stopped running daily editorials of its own. Five days a week it runs opinions from other papers and on Saturday it runs no editorials. Only on Sunday does the paper opine on something on its own terms.
So, that once a week editorial is valuable real estate and yet again on a recent Sunday the editorial board invested space on the pedestrian mall thing. It’s not that I think they’re wrong and, in fact, I was once a big advocate for anything that would be a shot in the arm for the downtown. I just don’t think this is especially important, one way or the other.
The paper has carried on these kinds of campaigns before, but it was for things that are really important. For years, the State Journal has been calling for a nonpartisan redistricting commission, similar to what they have in Iowa. While we do now have fair maps in place, we don’t yet have the commission. So we could easily flop back to a heavily gerrymandered situation after the next redistricting. This is a cause worth fighting for, consistently and over a long period of time.
Not only does the pedestrian mall not come anywhere near that importance, but the idea is problematic. Buses, service vehicles and delivery trucks use the street and some federal transit aid is tied to the free flow of buses along it. So, it’s not as straightforward as you might think. My own view is that, while I guess it would be nice, it’s just not worth the staff time and money to make it happen, even if you could figure out a way not to lose the federal money. The city has needs that are a lot more pressing.
For example, the most important entity in the city, our public schools, are producing anemic test scores and robust truancy rates while making one shaky financial management decision after another. Now, that would be something worth focussing on.
The schools demand attention because the public needs to be awakened from its extended nap. Voters just don’t seem to be upset by the status quo. In November, the biggest referendums — and resulting tax increases — in the district’s history passed by wide margins. And earlier this month two incumbent school board members ran without opposition while a contest for a third seat, with two interesting candidates vying for that open slot, got lost in the awful $100 million food fight for the state Supreme Court.
If our town needs a long-term editorial campaign on anything, it’s the state of our schools. In fairness, the State Journal did endorse a candidate in that one competitive school board race (the same one I did and he lost) and they did support one referendum while opposing the other. But those were one-offs.
I reached out to the Journal’s editorial page editor, Scott Milfred, and he told me that before that Sunday editorial the last time the paper editorialized on the mall was almost a year ago, though they did mention it in some of their candidate endorsements. “I think your impression is off. We definitely write more editorials about our schools than the pedestrian mall,” he wrote. And he went on, “We believe the city’s downtown is incredibly important to the health of the city. And having such a wasted space — a river of concrete that buses no longer use — in the heart of the downtown, is a missed opportunity to do something special so downtown can thrive.”
Fair enough, but as a daily reader of the State Journal (for the last 45 years, no less), I don’t think my impression is that far off. There’s a difference between editorializing on specific candidates and questions facing the schools and a consistent, concerted proactive effort behind one theme.
What’s needed, I think, is a continuous focus, month after month, about the performance of our schools and how they might be improved – something like the way the State Journal once focussed on nonpartisan redistricting, but even more intense.
I do try to provide that kind of focus here in my blog for Isthmus and on my own site. I make it a point to write critically about the schools as often as I can, but I’m a relatively small player these days. It’s not just the newspapers that aren’t up in arms — as I believe they should be — about the performance of our schools. We don’t hear much about it from the mayor or the county executive or the Chamber of Commerce or other civic groups either.
The quality of our schools impacts everything in our community — our long-term civic capacity, our workforce, even our property values. And, by most measures, those schools are underperforming, especially by the standards of a community that values education as much as we do.
And our schools are a lot more important than the freedom to step off the sidewalk on State Street.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
