WEAC members were forced to respond to attacks throughout the 1990s.

 

In the mid-1980s, a subtle change in priorities was taking place in statehouses throughout the United States. Right-wing anti-public-education forces were gaining power all over the country, and they were introducing a host of new initiatives ultimately intended to weaken teachers’ unions and divert resources and funding away from the public schools and toward their pet causes and projects.

That movement took root in Wisconsin in dramatic fashion, and can now be seen as the signifier of a critical era for WEAC. Anti-public-education forces established an aggressive power base in Wisconsin that would prove to be a severe challenge to WEAC and public schools across the state for the next two decades. With a shift in control of the state Legislature in the early ’90s, education came under serious attack from people who were adept at using aggressive rhetoric and divisive politics to make teachers and their union a wedge issue in Wisconsin politics.

After passing by large margins in both houses with heavy lobbying from WEAC, an early retirement bill for public employees drew a gubernatorial veto in 1987. The bill improved the prospects of early retirement for WEAC members, among others, and therefore was a top legislative priority for the organization’s staff and members. Politicking before and after the veto and during the near-override of the veto by the Legislature made it clear that the reaction was based not on legitimate policy concerns, but rather on an effort to link the retirement bill to a weakening of the state’s mediation arbitration law. After more than two years of intense political warfare and a total of three gubernatorial vetoes, both houses of the Legislature eventually passed the retirement bill by veto-proof margins, forcing the first-term governor to sign it into law in the spring of 1989. But the writing was on the wall: teachers and public education were under attack.

The mediation arbitration law remained under fire in the 1989–91 state budget proposal. That budget also saw the first real effort to implement school vouchers in Wisconsin, an idea that would become a key priority for anti-public education forces over the next several years. Under the school voucher scheme, parents would be free to send their children to any public school in the state, with about $2000 in state aid “following” them to the school of their choice. In Milwaukee County, the plan would have allowed low-income parents to send their K-6 children to private and religious schools in the county, at state expense.

WEAC was able to defeat the budget attempts to weaken mediation arbitration and the statewide school voucher plan in 1989, but those initiatives would be back again in the 1990s. The Milwaukee voucher plan survived the budget process with bi-partisan support, setting up a WEAC-led court battle on behalf of public schools that lasted into the next year.

Milwaukee’s private school voucher program would become a national model for anti-public education and anti-teacher forces everywhere, with Wisconsin’s largest city serving as a testing ground for school privatization schemes cooked up in right-wing think tanks in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. The conservative philosophy that ardently insisted upon the separation of church and state in the 1950s had given way to its opposite for the apparent purpose of bashing and undermining public schools. Many believe these attacks on public schools were just one step in a broader plan to completely replace public education with for-profit ventures.

In the early 1990s, many of the same political forces orchestrated the passage and implementation of two of the most destructive anti-education laws in Wisconsin history: school district revenue caps and the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO) law. Taken together, these two laws were a cancer on public schools and education funding in Wisconsin, eroding the ability of school districts to fund innovative education initiatives and creating wage stagnation for teachers and education support staff. Even more insidiously, they virtually eliminated mediation and arbitration in teacher contract negotiations.

Next>>