Candidates for Citywide Schools Seat Present Contrasts: Professor, Parental Advocate Face Off

By Sarah Carr, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Mar. 22–Of the two candidates running for Milwaukee’s citywide School Board seat, one is a policy-oriented professor. The other is a people-oriented parent advocate. One lives on the city’s east side and has the support of the business community. The other is a central city resident with the backing of the teachers union.

One is focused on how top-down policies affect the lives and futures of students. The other is focused on student and parent impulses. One favors police in the schools while the other opposes the pilot police programs at Bradley Tech and a cluster of schools on the north side.

For Bruce Thompson and Bama Brown-Grice, the contrasts are about tone and style but they are also about issues. Who wins will not only help determine the role of the School Board in the community, but also what decisions the district makes about hot-button subjects such as school safety or the approach to financial troubles at the Milwaukee High School of the Arts.

Bama Brown-Grice

Brown-Grice pondered running for the School Board 14 years ago when the struggle to get her son into MacDowell Montessori School made her feel like she was “pulling teeth.” Now her son is in college, and Brown-Grice says she’s grown tired of watching reform after reform come and go in the district.

“We want instant gratification,” she said. “We won’t wait for something to work once everybody gets on board. Someone reads a new book,” she adds, and the district is pulled in a different direction.

Brown-Grice has made parent involvement the focal point of her campaign, and she tends to see issues through the lens of being a parent. She worries, for instance, that having police permanently in the schools would send a negative message to parents when they walk in the school. Instead, she feels that the existing school safety aides need to be trained to deal with day-to-day issues, and police should be called in when the safety aides cannot handle the situation.

When asked what she would do to get parents more involved, Brown-Grice said she would make an effort to listen equally and in depth to everyone who comes to School Board meetings. She added that when new initiatives are introduced in the schools — like a new math program, for example — parents should be called in to receive information and training along with the teachers.

Brown-Grice believes the curriculum at many schools — with the exception of specialty programs such as art and Montessori — needs to be more consistent so that students will not struggle when they transfer to a new school.

She also said there’s a need for more activities, in both studies and extracurricular pursuits, that grab students’ attention and make them want to stay in school. She suggested movies during lunchtime as one possibility. “I think we need to do something to let the level of education be more joyful, be more adventurous,” she said.

Bruce Thompson

As chief credentials, Thompson cites his previous experience on the Milwaukee School Board and 25 years as a professor. “I have a close feel for what world the kids are coming out into,” he said.

One of Thompson’s passions is management theory. He has detailed ideas on the role of the School Board (it should be a part-time, policy-making body that leaves the daily operation of the school system to the superintendent and other district leaders); the quality of principals in the district (overall, their training needs to be improved); and the role of decentralization in urban school districts (“while it’s a tool, it’s not the whole story”).

Thompson supports the pilot efforts to put police in the schools. “You can’t have education without safety,” he said. “Police in schools is not a panacea, but you need every kind of tool you can find.”

Taking a firmer ban against cell phones is another tool, according to Thompson. “Effective schools really do have a sense of what’s acceptable,” he said. He added that alternative school settings should be used for some chronically disruptive kids.

When it comes to student achievement, Thompson believes strongly in “value added” measurement, which takes into account a student’s prior performance and socioeconomic level in measuring how much progress they are making. If there are three possible math programs that could be adopted, for instance, Thompson said it’s important to look at which one is “more noticeably effective than the others.”

Another priority would be to assess leadership in the schools and district and see if policies or programs could nurture budding leaders, like a principal’s academy. “We have to be more transparent about how principals are chosen,” he said.

As a board member, Thompson said he would focus on being collaborative; talking with others to find areas where they have common agreement; and moving forward based on those points of accord.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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