When Districts Break Up
by Ryan Bowers on Jul 27 2011 Posted in Blogger commentary
A few weeks back I stumbled on an unusualproposal by the Wisconsin teachers’ union (WEAC) to deconsolidate, or break up, Milwaukee’s public schools.
It appears that deconsolidation’s coming back in vogue as a "when-all-else-fails" strategy for district reform.
After a cursory scan I found a handful of instances of proposed legislation to deconsolidate large urban school districts in the past two decades including:
- Florida, through a statewide initiative (1998),
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg (2005),
- Las Vegas (2005),
- Albuquerque (2005), and
- Milwaukee (2011).
What caught my attention with Milwaukee was that this time it was the statewide teacher’s union that was fed up with the litany of reforms and turned to