Since 1976, Milwaukee has been under court order to “racially balance” its public schools. Now, there are about one hundred thousand school-age children in this city. Approximately 70 percent are black or belong to other minorities. How do you “racially balance” a system in which 70 percent of the population is made up of minorities and only thirty percent is white? How do you justify the millions of dollars that the federal and state government are paying the schools to achieve this impossible goal?

The same court order mandates that only 30 percent of the teachers can be black. “Racial balance” is the goal once again. But if the city is 70 percent minority, where are the non-black teachers supposed to be coming from? And why are black teachers who want to work in the inner city prevented from teaching?

Below are some maps that will show what happens when the government and the courts try to force “racial balance.” In the middle of the first map, the small circle is an inner city school, and every one of the round black dots represents one of the other schools in Milwaukee. Under the “racial balance” plan, black children who would ordinarily attend the inner city school in question are bussed all over the district—to a hundred and four different schools.

Historically, blacks have demanded equal opportunity education; what they’ve gotten instead is forced desegregation. What do blacks want? We want the same thing whites want. We want our kids educated in their own communities. Yet look at the second map, showing the bus routes for just three schools. (Imagine a map showing the bus routes for over one hundred schools!)

Better than anything, these bus routes show the chaos and confusion caused by forced “racial balance.”

They also show corruption: the government pays the educrats an extra thousand dollars in desegregation funds for every new route. For the last decade and a half, forced busing in Milwaukee has cost taxpayers $335 million.

Public Schools: 90 Percent Failure Rate

In the meantime, the public schools are failing to educate our children. Sixty percent of all Milwaukee ninth graders do not complete high school, and of the 40 percent who stay in the school and walk across the stage to receive their diplomas, only 10 percent can read. For what amounts to a 90 percent failure rate, we pay $600 million a year to support the Milwaukee public schools—that averages out to about $6000 per student. The educrats keep saying, “You’ve got to give us more money, because it’s tough to educate these inner city kids. They are poor, and they are raised by single mothers; we can’t expect them to learn…”

That’s the stereotype: poor black children are slow learners, difficult and expensive to educate. Well, my children were raised in a single parent home. My husband and I divorced when the eldest was thirteen and the youngest was five. After the divorce, five of us had to live on my salary, which was only $8000 a year. And we did live on it, though we were certainly living below the poverty level. According to the educrats and all the experts defining who we were, my children were simply not supposed to make it. I am happy to tell you that the educrats were wrong, because my children did make it and they were not stereotypes.

But poor black children do share a major disadvantage. Unlike those whose parents can vote with their feet and enroll in good private schools, poor black children are forced to go to the school the government selects for them. That’s not right. We’re supposed to educate all children, because if we don’t educate them we’re going to incarcerate them—Wisconsin, for example, has eight new prisons on the drawing board, but no new schools. The state should be encouraging the establishment of more private and public schools and more private businesses—giving children basic academic skills and putting adults to work instead of giving them endless social programs. Blacks want to learn and to earn their way just like everybody else. We don’t want welfare that just puts us back on the plantation—this time the government plantation.

And blacks don’t want their children to be forced to attend public schools if there are better alternatives. In the Milwaukee public school system, 62 percent of the teachers and administrators refuse to send their kids to the public schools. This flight from the system has had ironic results. When 23 suburban public schools were recently in danger of closing due to low enrollment, black children were simply bussed in, and the state gave the schools an extra $12,000 for each. So, the failing suburban public schools received a guaranteed source of students and more than $22 million a year in additional government funding.

Private Schools and Parental Empowerment

I opposed forced desegregation from the start. I wanted what most parents want: for my children to be educated in their own community. At the time, there were about a dozen private schools in the inner city of Milwaukee. They were previously Catholic institutions that had been reorganized as private nonsectarian academies, and they were a wonderful alternative for low-income and minority students—predominantly blacks, but also Hispanics, Asians and whites. They allowed students to get a good education in their own neighborhoods with teachers who really believed in them, rather than the educrats’ stereotypes. What’s really impressive is that these private schools had a 98 percent graduation rate.

But they couldn’t get by on the tuition they charged, and although successful, they were in danger of closing their doors. Meanwhile, the public schools were getting millions of our tax dollars whether they did a good job or not. So a few years ago, a small group banded together and approached the state legislature. We said: “Why not allow tax dollars to go to the schools that are working?” We didn’t know that vouchers had already been defeated in every other state where they’d been proposed, We didn’t even call our proposal a voucher plan; we called it “parental empowerment” or “choice.” Meetings were organized to discuss our proposal. We hoped to attract a few dozen people, but hundreds of enthusiastic parents began showing up and staying for sessions that ran on for hours. This shocked public school officials, especially since they couldn’t get more than a few parents to any of their meetings.

People often fall into the habit of saying, “How do you get the poor involved in the education of their children? They just don’t care, or they don’t know enough to make ‘intelligent’ choices.” But, in reality, if you give them a sense that they can make a difference in the lives of their children, if you give them some power, you’ll find out that poor parents can care more than anyone. They don’t take education for granted. They know that education is the only way out of poverty. And when you empower people and give them a sense of ownership, they become responsible, and they learn how to make decisions. And when they are treated with dignity and respect, they respond to it.

Choice empowers parents. It allows them to choose the best school for their children. It doesn’t say, as the educrats do, that poor people are too dumb (they use the word “uninformed”) to make choices. Poor people are the same as rich people. They may not have much money, but they have the same desires and the same needs. And poor people make decisions all the time. They decide where they are going to live, what grocery store to buy from, where to shop for clothes—they decide everything, but all of a sudden, the educrats claim that they don’t have enough sense to make a decision about the education of their children.

But the teachers’ unions, the NAACP, the bureaucracy, and the educational establishment didn’t agree. In the name of protecting the poor, they all opposed choice. We didn’t try to beat them—they were too powerful. Instead, we went directly to the parents, and we organized the community from the grassroots level, from the bottom up. And they kept coming to our meetings by the hundreds—even the Joe Six-Packs and the Archie Bunkers. Republicans, Democrats, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims publicly spoke up in favor of the plan, even when it had nothing to do with their agendas.

When we proposed choice, the parents in the audience said, “Are you serious? You mean we can take our children out of public schools?” They began showing up and sitting in the galleries at the state capitol and watching the legislators, who, for their part, were shocked that the parents were there. Like the educrats, they also believed that the poor didn’t care.

And to everyone’s surprise, the parental empowerment bill—the first in the U.S.—passed into law. Starting in the 1990-91 school year, up to 1000 students could claim $2500 worth of tuition vouchers (a fraction, of course, of the per-student expense at public schools). This year, one private school had 600 applicants for 100 openings. Every private school in the inner city has a waiting list. Hundreds of low-income families want out of the public school system. Those who have succeeded in getting out are spreading the word: Their children, two to three grade levels behind in the public school, are now working at their grade levels. Once always absent, they are even refusing to stay home sick! A typical response is, “Please don’t make me stay home—my teacher is expecting me.” There are no gang problems and only a two percent drop out rate.

Sure it’s only one thousand in a city that has one hundred thousand students, and the educrats are fighting the bill in the state supreme court, but I think it’s a real victory—and we’ve only just begun. If the poor people of Milwaukee can achieve something no other group in the nation has been able to do, then anything is possible.