7. Open Enrollment, Part One

The Referenda

In this episode:

• The recent "merger" revelation and what it means
• The history of school district boundaries and the things they separate
• How and why Open Enrollment and Chapter 220 were created
• What we have gained from OE over the years and what we hope to gain by drawing it down

Show notes:

WSD merger stuff

Special school board meeting to release legal opinion

WISN-12 coverage and interviews

The legal opinion itself

Tosa 2075 Task Force materials

Resource booklet

Open Enrollment Data Review slide deck

Policies brief

Task Force final report

State legislative and DPI resources

LFB explanation of Open Enrollment history and processes

DPI enrollment, demographic, and discipline datasets

Histories of general school choice dynamics in MKE/WI come from here:

John Witte, The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program (Princeton UP, 2001).

Robert Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education (Penn State UP, 2015)

Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education (The New Press, 2020).

Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black Education Reform in Milwaukee (U of North Carolina Press, 2004).

General history of spatial, educational, and economic segregation in the urban north

Shep Melnick, The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality (U of Chicago Press, 2023)

Ansley Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (U of Chicago Press, 2017).

Carla Shedd, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and the Perception of Injustice (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015)

Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2020).

Mike Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (U of Chicago Press, 2023).

Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Andrew Kahrl, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U of Chicago Press, 2024)

Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield, eds, The Resegregation of Suburban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2012).

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (U of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publishing, 2017).

Matt Kelly, Dividing the Public (Cornell University Press, 2024).

Jerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (Yale UP, 2002)