March, rally in Milwaukee seek support for public education
Michael McLoone / for the Journal Sentinel
Students, parents, active and retired educators and school administrators, clergy, civil rights groups and community leaders particitpate in an education march and rally Saturday in Milwaukee.
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A clarion call for public education was sounded Saturday as a few hundred people gathered for a march and rally aimed at energizing support among the public and policy-makers.
The rally's aim was to boost public education's prominence as a local and national issue of concern, said John Stocks, the National Education Association president and the former executive director of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers union.
But Stocks, the rally's featured speaker, gave a fiery denunciation of trends he said threatened public education.
"It's the beginning of a major organizational effort to kick back on the governor, the MMAC, the privateers and the profiteers," Stocks said in an interview. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce last month played host to a conference on the idea of a state "recovery school district" that would take over low-performing MPS schools that could be run by a charter school.
Variations on that idea took root in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Tennessee, and it's a hot topic in other states.
Stocks said Milwaukee was "ground zero" for such an effort, part of "a deliberate effort to replace public education with a privately managed, free-market system of schools.
"Our beloved public education system is in jeopardy," he said in remarks at Forest Home Avenue Elementary School. "They are going to try in fact to create in this particular city the dismantling of the
