Public education is in crisis across America. And in Milwaukee, it is no different.

In recent months, the state has withheld money from MPS, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle have proposed mayoral control of the district and new legislation gives the Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers more control over failing schools and districts, which many see as code for "Milwaukee Public Schools."

Wisconsin's application for federal Race to the Top funds failed earlier this year, depriving MPS and other state districts much needed resources.

Milwaukee -- who soon welcomes a new superintendent, Gregory Thornton -- gets noticed on the national stage and so you can expect to read about MPS in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," the new book by New York-based Diane Ravitch.

Ravitch -- who was assistant secretary of education in the elder Bush's cabinet and was appointed by Bill Clinton to the National Assessment Governing Board -- is a research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also a respected education historian and writer.

In the book, which she wrote after reconsidering some of her long-held beliefs about education, Ravitch looks at some of the recent trends in school reform -- from vouchers, choice and charter schools to a heavier than ever focus on testing and accountability to attempts to force successful business management ideas onto public schools.

"Untethered to any genuine philosophy of education," she writes in the book, "our current reforms will disappoint us, as others have in the past. We will, in time, see them as distractions, wrong turns and lost opportunities. It is time to reconsider not only the specifics of current reforms, but also our very definition of reform."

We asked Ravitch about how some of the specific discussions in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" relate to Milwaukee.

OnMilwaukee.com: Milwaukee was a key district in the development of vouchers and choice. How did the city's early adoption affect the landscape?

Diane Ravitch: Milwaukee is indeed the nation's laboratory for assessing the value of school choice. The advocates of school choice predicted that academic performance in choice schools would not only soar, but that the competitive pressure would cause achievement in the regular district schools to improve. None of this has happened. The latest studies show that students in voucher schools and in charter schools do not perform any differently from those in the regular public schools.

OMC: Has our continued embracing of vouchers contributed to the problems we have now in public schooling?

DR: Of course. "Reformers" in Milwaukee have been pursuing strategies that we now know are ineffective. The more time and resources devoted to ineffective strategies, the less attention there is to finding useful improvements. Choice got the support of foundations and business leaders, but it has not worked.

OMC: What is the effect on our public schools of this so-called two-tiered system of choice schools and public schools?

DR: Typically, when large numbers of choice programs are introduced, motivated families leave the public school system. As New Orleans demonstrates, the choice schools tend to get relatively higher-performing students, especially since they retain the ability to remove or "counsel out" students who don't test well or who are disruptive. Over time, the public school system has a disproportionate share of the students who are most challenging to educate. It is surprising that choice schools don't show better results since the playing field is not equal.

OMC: Is it alluring to public schools to consider reorganizing under a charter?

DR: Certainly, especially if they thus become deregulated, can select incoming students and can remove students they don't want.

OMC: Last year, the discussion of mayoral control of MPS was extremely divisive. What have the results of mayoral control been in other cities?

DR: Mayoral control solves no problems. Of the cities that take the national test administered by the federal government, the highest performing do not have mayoral control, while some of the lowest performing -- Cleveland and Chicago -- do have mayoral control. Since New York City adopted mayoral control in 2002, it has seen very meager improvement on its national scores, less than other cities that are tested.

And mayoral control leaves parents feeling angry and disaffected because decisions are made about their children without their participation. Taking the public out of public education is not a school improvement strategy.

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