Partly, for that reason, new Superintendent Brenda Cassellius asked the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS) to evaluate the MPS Office of Human Resources. This is not the first time CGCS has looked at the district’s HR department. But of the 19 recommendations it made in 2019, only one was fully implemented.
At the July 31 school board meeting, CGCS Executive Director Ray Hart outlined its latest findings in a presentation.
It is not enough to simply list the 12 new recommendations here. It is more important to try to understand why reform in the district has been so difficult to accomplish.
MPS has had so many twists and turns in its organizational structure in the last 35 years. Milwaukee’s school voucher program was established in 1990. Advocates for vouchers, such as Susan Mitchell, pushed whole sale dismantling of a centralized system when she wrote in 1994, for the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute to shift control from MPS “by allowing parents to choose schools their children attend and providing them the financial resources to do so.”