North Division: Educational Reform at Milwaukee’s Most Prominent High School Max Herteen History 681 Professor Walter Stern April 25, 2021 2 The shores of Lake Michigan invite tourists, residents, and passersby to encounter several of Milwaukee’s crown jewels. The Summerfest Grounds, home to the nation’s largest outdoor music festival; the Art Museum, renowned for its architecture; and the downtown city center, housing the city’s business, sports, and recreation hubs, dot the lakefront and remind the world of Milwaukee’s many sources of civic pride. Often overlooked, however, are the neighborhoods just inland from this impressive collection of Milwaukee’s attractions. The North Side neighborhood, home to the majority of Milwaukee’s Black population, is often forgotten and passed by.
Intense redlining, segregated schooling, and other funding and policy inequities have relegated much of Milwaukee’s Black population to this underserved neighborhood, which has experienced high rates of poverty, unemployment, and incarceration. The North Side is sadly affected heavily by racialized incarceration, unfair and inordinately high suspension rates for Black students, and the racist school-to-prison pipeline. In fact, it ranks as one of the worst areas in the entire county in these metrics.1 Of all these problems, one of the biggest and most obvious is segregated and underfunded schools. Because segregated schooling often results from the “neighborhood school” model, it is arguably caused by other racist policies such as redlining, real estate “blockbusting” (a practice essentially designed to create white flight), and segregated housing in general.2 Although inextricably entwined with other issues of race and class, including political underrepresentation 1 Kenya Downs, “Why is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?” NPR Code Switch, March 5, 2015.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/03/05/390723644/why-is-milwaukee-so- bad-for-black-people 2 Jessie Paulson, Meghan Wierschke, and Gabe Jun Ha Kim, “Milwaukee’s History of Segregation and Development: A Biography of Four Neighborhoods.” MINDS@UW, UW Geography Undergraduate Colloquium (2016): 6, 7; Barbara Miner, Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City (New York: The New Press, 2013), 111-112.
3 and segregated housing, education has the unique status as one of Milwaukee’s most contested and enduring issues. Educational reforms in Milwaukee have repeatedly focused on the city’s Black community and particularly on Black-majority schools. These reforms have been most frequent and most dramatic at one school in particular: North Division High School. A longstanding pillar of Milwaukee’s Black community, North Division went through a dramatic racial and economic transition due to increased Black migration to the neighborhood and the resulting white flight to the suburbs during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
North Division faced overcrowding, outdated facilities, and dramatic segregation, and it was at the center of integration debates in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, students, faculty, and community members debated community control, integration, and culturally-based learning, as well as logistical concerns over the construction of a new building and what type of school would occupy that facility. In the 1980s, more debates ensued, particularly during the “Save North Division” movement, which favored keeping North Division as a neighborhood school and thus a cultural hub for the Black community. Debates continued during the push by North Division graduate and social activist Howard Fuller to create an independent Black school district centered around North Division in the late 1980s.3 More debates and changes were to come in the 1990 and 2000s.
The school was controversially converted into three small charter schools in 2004, only to be reopened as a unitary “North Division High School” again in 2009–2010.4 Through the present day, it has continued to be a key site of discussions about Black autonomy, small school implementation, and other educational reforms. 3 Miner, Lessons from the Heartland, 134-137. Borsuk, “North Division High School to make Comeback in 2010,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), March 26, 2009. 4 Because of the number and scale of its reforms, North Division serves as a crucial vehicle to understanding educational inequality and reform in Milwaukee’s predominantly Black schools.
This case study will give a historical analysis of North Division’s many changes, from the integration struggle of the 1960s and 1970s to the modern-day reopening of North Division in the small high school model.5 The paper will argue that the most critical component of reform at North Division has been the involvement of local activists, particularly Black women and girls. In multiple different eras at North, the community continually stepped up to protest inequity and demand a greater voice in their school’s affairs. Even when governing structures failed to grant them real power, community activism never ceased. These oft-overlooked developments have had a huge impact on creating change at North Division and the surrounding community.
This paper will also note that due to North Division’s size and racial composition, it was always going to be a primary candidate for reform, but that influences other than hard numbers had the largest impact on its many reformulations.6 Several factors, including local and national trends in integration, school performance, and perceived educational innovation, brought about these changes. In addition to well-intentioned reforms, more negative factors such as budget cuts, impatience, and uninformed policy decisions also took their toll on North Division, both creating and destroying reform efforts. Even with strong local and national 5 In this paper, the author uses “integration” and “desegregation” interchangeably. It should be noted that during the debates, Black and white Milwaukeeans alike tended to use the term “integration,” but the term “desegregation” may be more useful today because it highlights the intentional segregative practices that the School Board and other bodies in the city employed.
6 Specifically, the 99% Black student population operating at near-overflow capacity made the school a key target for integration reform. It also meant that it would be difficult to meet reform quotas on racial balance, because so many white students would have to join the school—or a large number of Black students would have to leave—to meet the necessary requirements. Additionally, the current North Division building is so massive that it has been a prime site for small school reform. This thesis will go on to discuss both of these developments in greater detail.
5 influences present, though, it has been the grassroots activists who have played the most significant role in achieving change at North Division. In the process, and with historical analysis to interpret decisions, these developments help paint a clear picture of the difficulties Black education has been forced to contend with in an educational context that disproportionately favors wealthier, whiter, and more suburban schools. Much can and should be learned from the North Division experience, which can hopefully serve as both a lesson and a beacon of hope for locally-controlled reform in the future. Historiographical contributions This paper builds upon a larger, more far-reaching historiography.
There is a rich and valuable body of literature about educational reform in Milwaukee. While earlier works focus on the desegregation/integration, or Civil Rights Movement, era of the 1960s and 1970s, this thesis reaches past the 1960s in order to analyze similar obstacles and practices from different, more recent reforms. In doing so, it seeks to emulate the approaches of historians Jack Dougherty and Patrick D. Jones, who answer questions about education reform through the lens of grassroots organization.
Like these scholars, my work focuses on multiple, intersectional issues that grassroots activists faced and how their tactics and goals evolved. Dougherty’s More Than One Struggle is chronologically the first in this historiography to address this era, and Jones’ The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee builds on this scholarship just four years later. Dougherty argues that Black activists faced multiple, often intertwined, challenges in their civil rights protests, and Jones argues that Black activists in Milwaukee evolved and adapted to ongoing circumstances in open housing protests.7 7 Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and Patrick D. Jones, 6 Like this thesis, the more recent historiography of education reform in Milwaukee touches on the Civil Rights Movement while focusing more attention on recent developments.
While I hope to focus on recent educational history, as authors Barbara Miner and James K. Nelsen have, my ultimate goal and arguments are shaped by discussion of grassroots activism, as Dougherty and Jones have done. Miner’s Lessons from the Heartland and Nelsen’s Educating Milwaukee, which followed in quick succession, give broader educational histories of Milwaukee.8 Their foci are on post-1980s reform, most notably the neoliberal policy changes that occurred in the 2000s and early 2010s. These authors discuss more recent histories, arguing that conservative funding cuts and school realignments (charters, vouchers) have played the most prominent role in limiting public education, but they focus more on policy-oriented analyses than on grassroots activism.
Methodology and sourcework In writing this case study, I used a variety of sources on North Division, the City of Milwaukee, and educational and social trends nationwide. The bulk of my source work is primary documents from historical collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Milwaukee County Historical Society, and Milwaukee Public Library system. I give special thanks to Marcia P. Coggs, Vel Phillips, and Lloyd Barbee for their meticulously-preserved collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The thoroughness of these three Milwaukee icons amazes me to this day. From these collections, I was able to use hundreds of records on North Division and the The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009) 8 James K. Nelsen, Educating Milwaukee: How One City’s History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped its Schools (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015) and Barbara Miner, Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City. 7 City of Milwaukee, including integration plans, communications with constituents and city leaders, minutes from town hall debates, newspaper clippings, personal notes, bill proposals, and numerous other forms of primary documents.
Additionally, I accessed integration plans and community feedback from the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s archives. For more recent events, I used primary and secondary sources from many different places, including newspapers, video interviews, books on education in Milwaukee, books on racism and education nationwide, transcripts of oral interviews, and assorted academic articles and projects. My work in this paper approaches educational reform and history from a different angle, one that concentrates on an individual site of contestation (North Division High School). Most importantly, my work addresses the temporal gap in the historiography of Milwaukee’s education reform.
The latest publications were published too long ago to explore the majority of the 2010s, and much of my paper is devoted to extending the focus on activism during the time of more recent reforms. This is significant not only for analyzing the current effects of older policies, but also for examining and positing theory on more recent policy changes. My source work is based on this historiography, but more critically on primary source evaluation. I have studied the debates over integration through college student Carol Birmingham’s academic project, “A Chronology of the Integration of the Milwaukee Public Schools 1963–1976 with Emphasis on the Course of the De Facto Segregation Suit and Addendum.” Her work has given me insight into the planning stages of the integration debate.
Additionally, reports such as urban education doctorate student Theodore V.’s “School Desegregation Planning, Milwaukee 1976 Chronology, Plans, and Participants” and Milwaukee Urban Observatory writer Pamela J. Sampson’s “Options – School Desegregation” have provided additional context about the different players in the debate and their roles in 8 arguments. My work with the Lloyd Barbee, Vel Phillips, and Marcia P. Coggs papers centers on the grassroots activism local residents displayed, particularly Black women.
These are my most crucial sources in the introductory part of my paper, in which I introduce the context of the desegregation period. They show the resolve and commitment of North Division community members in fighting for equitable, community-friendly education.