Like many cities in America, the Milwaukee Public School system (MPS) is in bad shape. Last year MPS had to cut 500 people from the payroll to try and bridge the gap between their bloated legacy costs and plummeting budget.
Despite these problems, the MPS is spending more than $1 Million a year maintaining costly and deteriorating empty school buildings. These are properties that have eager buyers chomping at the bit to snatch them up but MPS and the city refuse to sell!
Why would a cash strapped school system refuse to sell empty buildings while laying people off to pay retired union pensions? Because these eager buyers are private schools in the state voucher system and MPS sees them as competition.
So rather than take a massive infusion of cash for empty buildings, money that could be used to hire better teachers and improve the public system, MPS has done everything in it’s power to block any sale that would result in a high quality school that they can’t control.
In short, children in Milwaukee are being robbed of a quality education simply to protect union turf.
In the video above (which I produced), Education Action Group’s Kyle Olson exposes this unfortunate situation.
Jaw dropping part: When MPS school board President Michael Bonds compares children to soda, saying the request to sell empty buildings to non-union operators is like “asking the Coca-Cola company to turn over its facilities to Pepsi.”
Classy.
