by Scott Walker
Waiting for Superman told the stories of parents who were desperately trying to get their kids into high-performing charter schools. To make it in, they had to win a lottery, with dozens of families competing for each spot. The children’s fates were left, literally, to random chance. Some got in, others did not. It was heartbreaking to watch the ones who didn’t make it.
In Wisconsin, we came up with a solution to the problems outlined in Waiting for Superman: We gave every public school in Wisconsin the same freedom to innovate and function like a high-performing charter school.
For years, officials in traditional public schools had complained that if they were just given the same kind of flexibility as charter schools, they could deliver the same quality education in a traditional school setting. Well, in Wisconsin we gave it to them.
Collective bargaining agreements had tied the hands of school administrators—restricting their decisions on everything from the length of the school year to the length of the school day. Union contracts determined everything from whether teachers could be assigned to lunch duty, to how many field trips could be taken in a given year, to how teachers were assigned and transferred, how promotions were decided, how raises were determined, how professional development dollars were spent, how changes to the curriculum were to be made, and how many faculty meetings could be held with a principal—and even how long those meetings could be.
In Milwaukee, the first agreement between teachers and the school district in 1965 was just 18 pages long.1 By 2007–2009, it had grown into a 246-page monstrosity. To put this in context, the teacher contract at Messmer Preparatory School, a Catholic school in Milwaukee, is just 3 pages long, plus a fourth page explaining teachers’ compensation and the benefits package.2, 3 By contrast, the Milwaukee teacher contract has 75 pages covering salaries and benefits and another 64 pages covering teaching conditions, teacher assignments and reassignments, and grievance procedures.
For example, the teacher contract in Milwaukee limited faculty meetings to just two hours per month (down from two and a half hours), and stipulated that “the administration shall notify the teachers . . . at least one calendar week prior to the inservice or faculty meeting date if it is to last longer than one hour.” As for teacher supervision, MTEA once advised its members that while a school principal “may occasionally check the lesson plans of all teachers,” he or she “cannot require a faculty to submit lesson plans weekly nor on any other periodic basis.”4
In other words, public school principals and administrators had no power to run their schools. All power was in the hands of the union stewards.
Worst of all, collective bargaining made it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.
Why? Because the teachers had “tenure,” which effectively guaranteed them jobs for life, regardless of poor performance. Under collective bargaining, teachers got tenure after just a few years on the job—and once they got tenure it was almost impossible to get rid of them, no matter how bad they were.
In Waiting for Superman, former Milwaukee schools superintendent Dr. Howard Fuller recounts how, when he would visit schools, good teachers would come up to him and quietly pass him notes saying things like, “go to Room 222.” They wanted him to see where the worst teachers were. But before he walked into the classroom, the principal showing him around would pull him aside and say, “OK, Howard, I want to tell you, this is one of my, what they call, Two-80-Ts.” That, Fuller explains, “is a provision in the contract that provided what we call the ‘dance of the lemons.’”
“Lemons” are chronically bad teachers. Every school had them, but thanks to tenure rules, principals could not get rid of them. So at the end of the school year, the “lemon dance” occurs as many of the failing teachers transfer out of their schools and use seniority to claim a slot at another school.
With the passage of Act 10, we ended the “lemon dance” in Wisconsin. We limited collective bargaining to wages only, and got rid of seniority and teacher tenure. Now, Wisconsin principals no longer have to subject students to the “Two-80-Ts” or transfer them to other schools.Today, they can get rid of them.
We gave principals and superintendents in traditional schools the freedom to make decisions about hiring and firing, and without consulting the union stewards. With the passage of Act 10, we empowered principals to hire based on merit, pay based on performance, and spend professional development dollars on teachers who deserve it rather than on the basis of seniority.
Today, school officials in Wisconsin can assign teachers as they see fit, extend school days, lengthen the school year, make the curriculum more rigorous, change classrooms and scheduling, supervise the development and implementation of lesson plans, and hold as many faculty meetings as they want—all without consulting the teachers’ union.
No more “last in, first out” rules like the one that forced the Milwaukee school district to lay off a great new teacher like Megan Sampson. No more tenure rules that protect chronically negligent teachers like the ones Howard Fuller tried to fire.
A school superintendent in northern Wisconsin I spoke with explained that Act 10 had allowed him to save money, hire more teachers, reduce class sizes, and improve performance. “But the best part,” he told me, “is I get to go back to my office and work on the curriculum instead of worrying about union grievances.”
Our reforms made Wisconsin’s public schools better places to learn. That is important to me not just as a governor but as a father. Both my sons, Matt and Alex, attended traditional public schools—as do my nieces today. So for me, Act 10 was not simply about saving money; it was also about improving education for my kids, my nieces, and all of the other children across Wisconsin.
I am a strong supporter of expanding options at charter schools and choice schools—and we have done both. But even with those changes, between 80 and 85 percent of students in our state will still be educated in the traditional public schools for the foreseeable future. The reforms in Act 10 gave us a chance to make those traditional public schools better.
For some, it’s difficult to change. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess points out, “It’s really hard for Pan Am or TWA to just turn into JetBlue. The way that usually works is that old, established ventures fail and the baton gets passed to somebody who gets to start on a fresh sheet of paper.” That’s why charter schools are still important. They give innovators a chance to start the educational equivalents of Jet-Blue. But today, every Wisconsin school has the freedom to function like a high-performing charter, if it wants to do so. Ultimately, it’s up to principals and school officials to use the flexibility we gave them, but it is available now thanks to Act 10.
It’s amazing how some portrayed our reforms as attacks on teachers and public education, when all we did was give school districts the flexibility they had been requesting for years. Our reforms were not antiunion; they were pro-student, pro-teacher, and pro-education. Our goal was to put the kids ahead of the bureaucracy, and to put resources into the classroom instead of the union coffers. That is precisely what we did.
I am proud that we were able to take a $3.6 billion deficit and turn it into a surplus. Balancing a budget is great, and improving the economy is awesome. But in the long term, the most important thing we did with Act 10 is improve education. That will have an impact not only on my kids but also on kids all across Wisconsin for generations to come.
During the recall election, my opponent, Mayor Tom Barrett, was asked by Weekly Standard reporters Stephen Hayes and John McCormack if he could name a single school hurt by our reforms. “After two attempts to dodge the question, he finally gave up. ‘We can do an analysis and get back to you on that,’ Barrett told the Weekly Standard.”5
He never did.
On the day that I signed Act 10 into law, many had predicted it would be my political undoing. If anything, the opposite was true. If I had balanced the budget by simply cu
tting aid to schools and local governments by nearly $1 billion without reforming collective bargaining—that would have led to my political demise. We would have decimated education, law enforcement, fire protection, sanitation, and services for the poor. We needed to reform collective bargaining not simply to balance budgets but also to empower local government to better serve the people.
From the beginning, I knew that we would be all right once the reforms were implemented and started to work. There would be a lag between the time when Act 10 went into effect and the moment it became clear that our reforms were working. But given the time to work, I had been confident that the people of our state would see that we had done the right thing.
Now, my faith in our reforms had been validated. Every morning, citizens across our state were picking up their newspapers and reading stories like these about how our reforms had saved jobs, strengthened education, and improved services.
Our reforms were working. And people could feel it.
CHAPTER 19
“Does Anyone Remember What This Recall Was All About?”
In late November, as the unions began gathering signatures for my recall, I was raking leaves one Sunday with one of my son’s friends, Gavin, in front of my home in Wauwatosa, which is on a busy street. A car came by and honked the horn. I looked up and as the window rolled down the driver proceeded to flip me off.
Gavin turned around and asked how I put up with stuff like that. I said that it was good to ignore these things, to stay positive, and if you did, then good things would eventually happen. I went back to raking leaves.
A few minutes later, I heard more honking, this time from two cars.
“Lord,” I thought, “maybe I should have waited until dark to rake.”
I turned to look. Sure enough, two drivers had their windows down, arms out. But this time, both of them gave me a thumbs up.
Gavin yelled over, “Mr. Walker, did you know that was going to happen?!”
No, I had not, but God had heard my prayer. It was one of many signs that cheered me up and gave me comfort.
I could feel things were turning around. Yet despite the good news, our polls were still in the basement. But I was confident we could win back the people of our state because I had seen it done before—here and in other places.
Back in 1991, when Governor John Engler took office in Michigan and began working to tackle a billion-dollar deficit and controversial welfare reform legislation, his approval rating dropped to 18 percent.1 By 1994, Engler was reelected to his second term by an overwhelming 61-38 margin—and again in 1998 by an almost identical 62-38 margin.
It was a similar story in Indiana. A March 2006 Indianapolis Star poll found that “Governor Mitch Daniels’ approval rating has dropped to 37 percent as many Indiana residents object to the pace of change in state government during his first 14 months in office.”2 By 2008, he was easily reelected to second term by a margin of nearly 58 to 40—receiving more votes than anyone who had ever run for office in the history of Indiana.
The reason both Engler and Daniels won is simple: Their reforms worked. I knew our reforms would work as well. That is why, when my approval rating dropped to 37 percent, I was not the least bit worried. I knew that every day, every week, every month that went by, things would get better. The reforms just needed time.
Of course, Engler and Daniels both had one advantage we did not enjoy—a full four years to implement changes before they had to face the voters again. That was plenty of time to demonstrate that their reforms had been effective. I did not have the luxury of four years to prove my case. I had to face a recall election just seventeen months after my inauguration. Engler and Daniels were reelected to second terms. I had to get elected again just to finish my first term.
I was fortunate that Wisconsin law required that an official had to be in office for at least one full year before a recall. That gave us at least some breathing room. If the law had allowed me to be recalled in 2011 instead of 2012, I would almost certainly have lost.
In Ohio, Governor John Kasich was not so lucky. He had also passed collective bargaining reform legislation that outlawed strikes for public employees, banned arbitration, implemented merit pay for teachers, and gave cities and school boards greater flexibility. Thousands of union activists stormed the Ohio state capitol to protest the changes about the same time as the protests in Wisconsin.
One big difference between our bill and the bill in Ohio was that we exempted firefighters and police officers from our collective bargaining reforms. Kasich had not. This allowed the unions to cast Kasich as an enemy of public safety. As Robert Costa reported in National Review, “In one commercial, an elderly woman whose daughter was saved from a burning house warns—after a montage of flames—that ‘fewer firefighters could mean the difference between life and death.’”3
After Ohio, it looked like genius on our part to exempt police and firefighters. I wish I could take credit for having that kind of foresight, but the truth is our decision was not political—it was policy driven. We had contingency plans in place to have the National Guard take over state prisons if corrections workers went on strike, but if police and firefighters walked off the job, the risk to our citizens would have been unacceptable.
Another advantage we had over Ohio was time. Kasich never got a chance to implement his reforms. Under Ohio law, Kasich’s opponents simply needed to gather 230,000 signatures to trigger a referendum on his law. By July 2011, they had gathered 1.3 million. That meant his reform law was immediately suspended and put on the ballot in November, where it was repealed before the changes could take effect. Ohio voters never got an opportunity to see whether or not the reforms had worked as Kasich promised (which is too bad, because I believe that they would have worked there too).
In Wisconsin, by contrast, voters would not cast their ballots until after they saw that our reforms were working. And now they were finally seeing stories appear about how our reforms had saved schools and local governments millions of dollars. They were hearing school superintendents, principals, and mayors explain how Act 10 had allowed them to save money, improve services, and avoid layoffs. They were hearing their kids come home and tell them that school was the same or better than it was before.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel summed up the mood in an editorial on August 9, 2011:
So it turns out that the sky isn’t going to fall on all local governments in Wisconsin. The numbers now starting to come in show that Governor Scott Walker’s “tools” for local governments apparently will help at least some of them deal with cuts in state aid imposed by the state budget. That’s contrary to the expectation and the rhetoric of critics in the spring, and it’s to Walker’s credit. It bears out the governor’s assessment of his budget-repair bill.4
In November, after the results started coming in, our campaign began running ads with stories from real people testifying to how our reforms were working.
In one ad, a high school teacher in the Kenosha School District named Kristi LaCroix looked into the camera and declared:
I’m not big on recalls and I think that at this point, in my opinion, and I’m only speaking from the “I,” it feels a little like sour grapes. It’s, you know, “we didn’t get our way and so we want to change the outcome.” The person I’m going to stand behind and that is going to get my vote is the man or woman who says what they mean and mean what they say and it’s not about being popular, you know, it’s not about getting the votes—it’s “this is what’s right.” Scott Walker said from the beginning, “I’m going to do what’s right for Wisconsin” and he did. He did.5
I was grateful for her words, and her ad was very powerful. She came across not only as a teacher, but as someone you could trust, someone who could easily be your friend.
The union reaction, however, was not so friendly. The reprisals began almost immediately. Activists formed a “Fire Krist
i” page on Facebook where people posted vicious messages. Teachers in her own school called her a “Judas” and a “scab”—engaging in the very kind of name-calling that would be punished with a visit to the principal’s office if one of their students had done it.
According to WISN 12 News, Kristi was “blistered by negative and vicious emails and phone messages at school and on Facebook, including one suggesting she get protection. ‘You are alone in the wilderness,’ one person wrote to her in an email. ‘Your best bet is to start a job search soon. Better hope the unemployment gets extended. Enjoy your isolation.’”6
Someone even posted her home address and phone number, and the names of her children, online.7
Kristi was unintimidated. “There are other teachers that are like-minded,” she said. “They just need the courage to come forward and stand up to the union.”
I’ve always believed that courage begets courage. So I was not surprised when, after word got out about the attacks against Kristi, we started getting e-mails and calls from other teachers who offered to be in ads themselves.
More and more, teachers and retired teachers began coming up to me to thank me for what we did. Initially, I could tell when a teacher was going to mention their support for our efforts. He or she would come close to me, look around to see if anyone was near, and then quietly tell me, “Governor, you’re doing the right thing.” Often the teacher was married to someone who ran his own business. As much as anyone, he understood the real costs of employee benefits and was not put off by our reforms.
Many of our friends who are teachers expressed their support for Act 10 and told stories of being blackballed at school. Several mentioned that other teachers would actually turn their backs on them when they entered the faculty lounge. It was certainly odd behavior for the very people who are supposed to discourage bullies on the playground.