A Tale of Two Agencies

“It's as if Milwaukee, Wis., had reverted to a state of lethal chaos.”

In December 2006, Time magazine painted a horrific picture of a city on the brink of dissolution.

“A Special Olympian is killed for his wallet as he waits for a bus. An 11-year-old girl is gang-raped by as many as 19 men. A woman is strangled, her body found burning in a city-owned garbage cart. Twenty-eight people are shot, four fatally, over a holiday weekend.”

While other cities had already experienced a rise in violent crime, Time reported: “Few places have suffered more than Milwaukee…” The numbers were dramatic. In 2005, Milwaukee saw the country's worst rise in murders jump in homicides--up 40%, to 121.

“This year's total will probably be lower, but as the killings over that bloody holiday weekend and other crimes show, violence has returned to the city. ‘You'll be able to read about something even more heinous tomorrow, lamented Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan. ‘People are scared.’”

As late as August 2007, as Milwaukee looked for a new chief of police, a spokesman for the Public Policy Forum, noted that Milwaukee had a higher murder rate than Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. “In fact,” wrote the Forum’s Jerry Slaske, “Milwaukee’s murder rate is almost 2.5 times that of New York City.”

Fast forward a year. This month, the Milwaukee Police Department reported that the first half of 2008 saw a dramatic fall in the rate of violent crime in the city. Through the end of June the violent crime total -- which includes homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault -- was down 19.4 percent.

Murders were down 31 percent, from 48 in the first half of 2007 to 33 in the first half of 2008. Property crime rates with the exception of burglary, were also down.

The numbers, of course are still incomplete, but the turnaround is unmistakable and potentially dramatic. Milwaukee is no longer routinely cited for its mean streets; indeed, it may be on the brink of becoming a nation model for crime fighting.

What happened?

Leadership and a commitment to actual change.

Faced with the rising tide of chaos, Mayor Tom Barrett upended the carefully choreographed search process for a new police chief and reached out for Ed Flynn, a proponent of the “broken windows” theory of crime fighting. Flynn made no secret of his respect for the crime fighting tactics of William Bratton, who helped clean up both New York City and Los Angeles. Flynn has moved quickly to shake up the department, shifting more officers to high crime neighborhoods and holding high profile street roll-calls.

In other words Barrett and Flynn saw the urgency of the problem, developed and implemented a plan to attack it. Plan; solution; results; and an opportunity for greater long-term success.

Contrast that turnaround with the torpor of the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Faced with an appalling dropout rate, massive unaccountable spending, low test scores, and a near-scandalous racial achievement gap, MPS…drew up a “strategic plan” -- a strategic plan that has accomplishment precisely nothing.

When the plan was drawn up last year, the Journal-Sentinel reports, the plan’s “ specific strategies for bettering academic achievement, professional development, transportation and other aspects of the district should be solid and ready for public input next month.”

Instead, the schedule has been scrapped, although school officials earnestly insist they are working on what they boldly call a “cultural transformation” that has, so far changed not a thing.

As the Journal-Sentinel noted, many in MPS were having a hard time cutting through the impenetrable jargon of the latest plan. “The biggest hurdles have been getting district employees to understand some of the plan’s jargon, said Jennie Dorsey, the district’s director of student services. In more than 20 meetings in the past year, her staff has struggled to make sense of phrases such as ‘functional plan’ and ‘student management’ and to see how the plan differs from what they’ve long been doing, she said.”

Unlike the fight against crime, there appears to be little political will to fix Milwaukee’s educational morass; and the mayor has carefully kept his distance from the dysfunctional system. So while the Milwaukee Police Department is fast becoming a model of the ability of institutions to change directions, the Milwaukee Public Schools continues to be a case study in bureaucratic sloth, institutional inertia, and educational failure.

Some things never change.