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This race was crucial because of deadlocked votes on the school board of late. The way it was won, however, may further polarize the school system rather than create the comity Wacker and her backers desired. Wacker focused her campaign on harmony and community as well as parental involvement, seeking to improve the public schools rather than tear them down with money speeding to private and for-profit enterprises. Barbara Horton, a voucher school director, former acting superintendent of the schools (passed over for that full-time job in the 1990s) and long cozy with her former boss at the schools, Howard Fuller, was recruited into the race by Fuller and the mayor's faction.
Without money for as many mailings, Wacker spent a lot of time going door to door herself and clearly impressed voters with her personality and attitude. She had the further benefit of her family image (married 25 years, four children graduated from public schools) and hands-on experience working within the school system. She was so squeaky clean, and was coming across so strongly, that she had every reason to keep focusing on issues and style. Yet on April 2, Horton walked off with 58% of the vote. What changed?. Some observers point to an unusual opportunity for blacks to have an across the board sense of identity voting for county exec (Dumas), judge (Butler) and schools (Horton). Others concede that there are low-income voters who have bought the bill of goods on voucher schools. These were factors, but maybe not decisive. The tone the contest took in the last 10 days was not only ugly but relentlessly impossible to ignore. Indeed, teachers in private and public schools alike now have a textbook civics lesson in how third party interference can up-end the basic issues. And in a school board race at that. Wacker felt personally attacked and "maybe I was naïve," she said the day before the election. "I so dislike dirty campaigning that all I could think of was bending over backward to make sure that fairness extended to my opponent. I went out of my way with the media to do that." Horton also felt personally attacked, but she and her supporters reacted quite differently. They went on a blistering attack, nasty by any definition of the term. What happened first to Wacker was an outrageous attempt to smother her in the recall fever, to link her to the fallen reputation of the previous county exec. The schemers turned out to be the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, a voucher supporter that is not subject to the same election disclosure rules that candidates and their supporters are. The MMAC sent fliers to Northwest Side homes with a photo of Ament next to the headline: "School Board Candidate Annie Wacker Has Some Special Friends." Now, Wacker doesn't know Ament. Her union positions haven't even been county related (president of the school secretaries, community services liaison for United Way). So what was the connection? Well, the MMAC was savaging her for merely serving on District Council 48's executive board, which doesn't negotiate contracts. This was not just guilt by vague association. This was not just anti-union. The clear implication was that recall petition signers who regard Ament and his high-salaried aides as corrupt and incompetent should see Wacker and every public employee the same way.
"The flier that the MMAC sent out is just a blatant lie," DC 48 Executive Director Richard Abelson told the press. "It's either out of malice or complete and total ignorance." To help decide between malice and ignorance, recall that the MMAC has done last-minute flier attacks before in school board races. Most recently they went after Jennifer Morales and Peter Blewett, who won anyway and also oppose vouchers and the other mantras of reform pushed by the mayor's faction on the board and already regarded by many genuine education reformers as unproven and antiquated. There is now a lingering aroma around the MMAC, which has 2,500 business and community members, many of whom rely on all these low-life public workers to shop with them or buy their services. What their leadership concocted surely could not be what many of these businesses thought membership in the MMAC would bring, And a swell was rising to nail the MMAC to the wall for its tactics. That would have balanced the picture, but it was not to be. Because with friends like Jack Rosenberg, Wacker couldn't successfully deal with enemies. Actually, Rosenberg doesn't know Annie Wacker. He's a retired businessman with money and he's a devout foe of school choice. Like the MMAC, he had taken independent action in other school board races. And he apparently expected the MMAC to do something harsh and he prepared to respond in kind. So he decided to "help" with his own money and separate campaign. The first help was a polished and perfectly innocent image TV ad on Wacker's behalf.
Wacker did not know the nature of his contents till they landed on her doorstep. While Rosenberg's efforts were in Wacker's view unseemly and changed the nature of her campaign, there was a difference from what the MMAC had done. Rosenberg had hired a professional operative, political consultant Todd Robert Murphy, who made sure the fliers had a factual base. The MMAC mailings were just false in linking Wacker's union service to Ament. And then the Horton camp started sending out fliers of a nature that indeed provided a legitimate reminder of the days when her supporters threw eggs. By the time the media got involved, and did they ever, the mailboxes were thick with accusations and the media saw no differentiation to be made. It equated the efforts, a sort of "plague on both your houses" tone. Media coverage of the actual issues and personalities of this important race had been lukewarm to that point, but the third-party tactics brought intense last-minute media coverage, virtually matching attention to the county exec race. Stories burst forth on every TV station's local news. A half dozen stories appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In actuality, the media spent more time and space on what had been done to Horton than what had been done and was being done in ever more mailings to Wacker. The intrusion of a retired businessman into the race was regarded a more interesting story than the intrusion of an entire business association. The TV ad for Wacker also drove attention to Rosenberg, since it was highly unusual to have a metropolitan-wide TV commercial for a one-district school race. "The thing I learned from this," said Wacker the day before the election, "was how hard it is to get the media to treat things fairly, and I don't think it should be hard. I think that is what they should be concerned about."
She was dealing with a death and illness in her family. Her son was involved in a serious traffic accident. A Horton flier landed on the doorstep saying Annie Wacker was a liar (citing the Rosenberg mailings) , Annie Wacker was "clueless" and thus had to rely on negative campaigning because she couldn't talk intelligently about issues. (Of course, all she had ever talked to were issues.) And voters went to the polls in large numbers because of the county exec race, many with fire in their eye and an image of Ament's photo next to Annie Wacker's name. The night of her election win, Horton went on WTMJ Radio to declare that her victory proved that the "smear tactics of my opponent didn't work." Her interpretation of the events went unchallenged. The school board's mayoral faction now has a one-vote majority, but it doesn't have clear sailing. Certainly not as word spreads throughout Milwaukee about how this race was won. The tactics, the manners, the arrogant talk afterward, could further open wounds rather than close them. And any celebration might be short-lived. The entire so-called mayor's faction on the board - John Gardner, Joe Dannecker, Kenneth Johnson, Jeff Spence and even Horton, since this was a special election to fill Donald Werra's incompleted term -- must face the voters next April.
Actually a Battle for All City Children Annie is walking. Door to door in the snow. And then driving to other neighborhoods to walk to more front doors. It's how she's helped win elections for others in the past and it's the way she's determined to win the Milwaukee School Board First District for the Feb. 19 primary. Walking and talking common sense.
Not all these neighborhood walks, many featuring streets without sidewalks, are uphill. But to many, Annie Wacker's campaign is an uphill battle to bring balance and real direction to the Milwaukee public schools. "Big money and the corporate machine in Milwaukee will be working against Annie, " said Sheila Cochran, secretary-treasurer of the Milwaukee County Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Unable to match that sort of machinery, Annie makes most of her case one voter at a time in an enormous district on the Northwest Side that runs 90 blocks east and west at some points and extends at other points from County Line Road on the north to Hampton Avenue on the south. It's not just her tenacity that drives her campaign and worries her opponents. It's her credentials -- not just as a public school parent and a union leader but also as an experienced frontline insider of the school system and its policies. Along with hard-won know-how about campaigning, Wacker has a vision of how the Milwaukee Public Schools can do better at defining and clarifying policy, how it can prevent itself from serving as a punching bag for state politicians and how to find common chords among diverse views. To distill her considerable parental and career credentials, she and Jim Wacker have been married 25 years and all four of their children - Tim, Ariel, Adrianne and Anthony - went through Vincent High School after attending such elementary and middle public schools as Lloyd St., Jackie Robinson and Grand Avenue. Meanwhile, Mom was working as a secretary and then head secretary within the MPS for 14 years, seeing the workings of a lot of schools as well as serving a stint at the central office. The schools included Malcolm X Academy, Kilbourn Ave., Spanish Immersion, Gaenslen, Lloyd St. and Grand Avenue. "It is often said that if you want to know what's really going on, talk with the school secretary, " laughed Wacker. "It's true. " She was president of the Milwaukee Educational Secretaries (AFSCME Local 1053), serving eight years and negotiating several contracts. She was also elected to District Council 48's executive board and she became the go-to person for organizing a host of events and strategies. "I think having been involved as a parent, an employee as well as a union officer, all that gives me a unique perspective, " said Wacker. "I understand the difficulties that parents face. I have insight regarding how the system is run, its strengths as well as weaknesses. I interacted with union as well as management employees, developing skills that I know will serve me well. I sure understand negotiating, compromising and closing the deal. " Wacker took a leave of absence from the secretary role when she was tapped in 2000 by the Milwaukee County Labor Council to head up MALEC (Milwaukee Area Labor Electoral Coalition). " The hardest working woman I know, " said Cochran. Many credit her efforts to generate labor turnout as a leading reason the Democrats carried Wisconsin. Wacker continued on leave to serve as community services liaison for United Way, and resigned from MPS Dec. 7 to avoid any conflict of interest as she started to circulate nomination papers for the 1st District school board race. The school board didn't order this special election (primary Feb. 19, general election runoff April 2) until that week in December. Wacker and other potential candidates had seen the board twice turn down earlier special elections and finally had to pressure the board through nonpartisan protests. The delays by the school board mean the sprawling 1st District will go eight months without a representative on the nine-member board. The incumbent, Donald Werra, resigned last summer because he was moving out of the city. In fact, this 1st District race has become of extreme importance to the entire city. Many have speculated that one faction of the school board wanted to delay the election until they found a "name" candidate willing to run and more attuned to their viewpoints. That faction on the school board has been rather simplistically dubbed by some in the media as "the mayor's faction": Joe Dannecker, John Gardner, Kenneth Johnson and Jeff Spence. For a brief time, with allies swept into office in the late 1990s, they held a clear majority on the school board, allowing them to force through several proposals and also force out Supt. Alan Brown (spending $400,000 to buy him out, according to news reports) and replace him with the current superintendent, Spence Korte. That majority, though, made changes in a manner that many in the community found speculative, arrogant and anti-staff, so in the last election the voters corrected that situation by voting in Jennifer Morales and Peter Blewett. Along with Charlene Hardin and board chairman Lawrence O'Neil, they have tried to provide balance, which unfortunately has led to a lot of deadlock. The tie votes (4 to 4) since Werra's departure have become endemic. That's why, as Cochran puts it, "This is a school board race that transcends a local district. This is to gain control of our children's future. " Wacker's opponents know it. The "name" candidate found to face Wacker in a field of five is a former acting superintendent of the schools, Barbara Horton, the deputy who took over when Robert Jasna retired. In fact, her supporters were vocal and violent in their dismay when the board passed her over for Brown. Now Horton is a voucher-choice champion and executive director of the Darrell L. Hines College Preparatory Academy of Excellence (which, despite the full name, currently covers only kindergarten through fourth grade, hoping to add a grade a year). It just got the green light to become a charter school, which means that under state law, it can receive about $6,721 per student in public money. (Schools just in the choice program are receiving $5,553 for each qualifying low-income household student.) The school, which now has 190 students, must go sectarian to qualify for charter money. It was founded and has been connected closely to the Christian Faith Fellowship Church, and it bears the name of the church's pastor. Wacker points out that the ultimate fate of the choice-voucher issue is "a legislative issue and, quite frankly, the future of these programs will be decided in the Supreme Court"" What a member of the school board has to focus on, she said, is "that lobbying and policy should be geared to accountability of all schools receiving public funding. " Unlike some other candidates, she is willing to define the buzz word "accountability": "Test scores alone are not a true measurement of accountability. To me accountability is to ensure that the state aids and tax dollars are spent wisely and effectively, to provide our children with options for careers, including technical education and the skills to be contributing members of our society. "Directors need to be accountable to their constituents. They are to be advocates of the children and families. Schools that are in trouble may very well need additional resources to provide the tools to succeed, more social workers, more teachers, mentoring programs. Labeling a school a failure is labeling every child a failure. I don't believe that to be true. " Nor would she tolerate the dissension that has characterized the current board, and believes the constant bickering among the board, the state and the city has pulled the focus from what they should be doing.
"The school board doesn't communicate success, " she said. "Having worked in the system and been a parent, I know that there are many positive things. Rarely do you hear about the successes in Science Olympics, or that an MPS student had the highest score in Advanced Placement Testing in the state. " "Much of what the public hears is negative and perpetuates the myth that MPS doesn't work for children. For example, while the graduation rate is deplorable, and the gap with the rest of the state even more so, the numbers are skewed. People don't want to talk about that. "It has been my experience that members of the board would prefer to place blame on the staff of MPS. As far as I'm concerned there has been too much finger-pointing about who is to blame and very little work toward identifying the real causes and finding real solutions. Some of those solutions are not possible without the city and community working with MPS, not against it. " Wacker submitted to more Q & A with our newspaper: AFSCME 48: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current system? Wacker: Needless to say, money is a big issue for MPS. The state revenue caps harm MPS in that revenue is dependent upon enrollment increases. One issue facing MPS is the current state budget and the efforts now underway to reduce commitments and revenue to local government. Unless that can be stopped, it will affect MPS, forcing unpopular decisions regarding what needs to be cut. Parental involvement is a another big issue. MPS truly needs to be creative in its approach to parental involvement. A strength of the system is indeed its employees and their commitment. Additionally, we have an infrastructure that is nationally recognized, we have schools that are innovative and on the cutting edge as well as students who are exemplary. There are other weaknesses, including our graduation rate, and I think most importantly the failure to recognize that we must work together with other governmental units to address all this. AFSCME 48: Why do you always emphasize the need for cooperation among all governmental units? Wacker: Our children come to school with issues that no child should have to deal with. We inherit a level of social and economic problems beyond what most school boards in the state face. As a society, we must address those issues in order for our schools and our city to succeed. Also, MPS does not aggressively seek additional dollars from the available grants and foundations interested in these type of programs. AFSCME 48: Along those lines, how will the new federal education bill affect things? Wacker: As I understand it, the bill will bring some additional Title 1 monies to Wisconsin as well as some flexibility regarding state monies. The greatest concern that seems to be raised is around testing. Standardized testing is extremely expensive to administer, leads to curriculum development around the test and stifles creativity in the classroom. While standardized testing should be an assessment tool, it should not be sole measurement of a child's education. AFSCME 48: I know to this point it has had minimal effect on the 1st District, but the brochures are being mailed to all school households and there is a big promotional push about it, so where do you stand on the MPS Neighborhood School Initiative? Wacker: To be against "neighborhood schools" is practically un-American, yet the current proposal gives me pause. I view it from a practical standpoint, that is, the funding is for capital expenses (buildings) and not programming. Additionally, limiting parent options for MPS schools is something I would not be in favor of. I am concerned how the neighborhood school initiative addresses the high mobility rate, families that move from neighborhood to neighborhood, and its impact on student achievement. I am opposed to anything that further segregates an already segregated system. AFSCME 48: What should be the board's relationship with the superintendent and the school administration? Wacker: The relationship should be about the children and the working families. While disagreements will occur, failure to find any common ground harms the children. The board sets policy, the superintendent and school administration should implement and be open and honest with the board. There should be open dialog revolving around policy. The political and personal agendas should not interfere with what is best for children. |
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