Phillip Morris: all gas and no brakes.

The choice of 98.03% of voters for school board.

The election is over. The Three Dads lost big time. I may write up some of my general observations about it all in the near future. For now, I wanted to offer this final candidate interview. Of course, Phillip Morris is no longer a candidate, since he ran unopposed for Seat 4 and won. You did it, Phil! So while it won’t help my readers decide how to vote, consider it a taste of what’s to come.

But first, a short digression.

Bill Clinton was considered an extremely charming and persuasive politician. This charm got him into a bit of trouble, but people still talk about the 1992 town hall debate he had with George Bush, and I vaguely remember an anecdote¹ about how Republican leaders in Congress had a rule that their fellow Congressmen were forbidden from talking with him one-on-one about significant pieces of legislation lest, in the dazzling tractor beam of his blue-eyed gaze, they end up offering too many concessions and compromises.

A second anecdote I remember comes from a journalist describing the first time he met John McCain. McCain put his arm around his shoulders, and shunted him off to a quiet corner of the room, and talked to him as if he was revealing a secret that he’d never unburdened to another soul before. The journalist loved it. He thought he was getting a real scoop, even though it turned out he’d already “confided” the same thing to a half-dozen other journalists that day.

I don’t have any personal experiences, so I don’t know exactly how this works or what it feels like², but I know that the stereotype of politicians is that they’re slick, a little greasy, that they’ve worn a mask so long that there’s no longer anything underneath. But I think, for some of the most successful ones, it’s not a mask at all. It’s a warm glow, before which all their interlocutor’s petty prejudices and preconceived notions evaporate. And rather than being a necessarily malign quality, it seems useful insofar as the task of a politician is to get groups of disagreeable people to come together and accomplish things.

This is all to say that Phillip Morris is a charismatic and empathetic guy. He doesn’t dissemble. He speaks candidly, or appears to, and at length. For two-and-a-half-hours he made me feel like I was the only person that mattered. When we sat down all the way back at the end of February, he told me he’d spoken, so far, to forty-six people already—parents, teachers, administrators, residents. He’s probably spoken to 500 more since then. He seems somewhat tireless, and in fact states at one point that “a lot of my coworkers and colleagues will say, Phil's all gas, no brakes.” Indeed.

As I said, Phil and I talked for two-and-a-half hours. He did most of the talking. I tried to interject and get clarification on certain points he’d make, and sometimes he would oblige, for a moment, before he’d free associate onto some other topic, never to return. If this was intentional, it was quite skillful. But it didn’t seem intentional, though that would indeed be another mark of its skillfulness.

For instance, near the beginning of our conversation he describes an early version of his campaign website as “very direct…very, very blunt.” However, this elicited such howls of outrage from his liberal friends—“I was called Hitler, Trump, and all kinds of other things”—that, despite the school district’s Superintendent personally telling him that he should keep it up, it lasted for less than 12 hours.

Like any curious person, I asked what his website had said. He tells me that there were “three main things” and that one of those things was a call for “radical empathy,” something that on my personal list of most-Hitler-adjacent terminology wouldn’t even break the top thousand. Radical empathy? This is what your liberal friends are upset about?

“Yes,” he answers. “The word radical triggers people.”

The second was a demand for the board to “stop rubber stamping” new policies, and the third we never got to because we started talking about something else, and I never followed-up.

I ask him what he’s learned so far from talking to forty-six people, and he responds that he sees many residents “that feel like they’re losing something,” namely, a sense of control of the community that they had grown-up in and come to revere. He is somewhat, but not entirely, sympathetic to this. There’s “a lot of drama […] very high school” he says. “If I were talking to [people in their] 20s, you know, maybe early 30s—parents—I could see some drama. But then I'm seeing the 40s, the 60s.” He says that it was an interesting dynamic, especially considering the supposed non-partisan nature of the election.

I ask him where he thought the source of this “drama” and division in the community came from.

In the very beginning, I would have said it was a conservative versus liberal thing. That has its place. There are parts of that. But inside those groups, there are several very liberal groups and people that I've talked to that have conservative thoughts about certain things. And so it's not necessarily us versus them, left versus right. It's a where I am right now, because this is where my family is, this is where we are, it's how we're feeling about the situation. I feel this way about this one thing, not about the whole thing.

People, he says, have “this misperception that people just disagree with the entirety of everything that the board's doing.” While that might be the case for some people—multi-generational residents who “want to go back to where we came from”—many others are recent arrivals, or those that might have grown-up here, moved away, and returned, and who seem caught in the tension between fond childhood memories and the fact that their own “values have changed” in ways that are not entirely reconcilable with that past.

Some of the fathers he’s spoken to—in Melrose or Pasadena, what he calls “the middle zone”—tell him that “We're making choices because our kids are second, third, fourth grade. And […] we don't disagree with everything,” but that they also don’t feel like there’s really a good forum “to have a clear dialogue.”

But he thinks that, on the whole, the values of residents are “a lot closer than people think” and that much of the gap could be bridged through better communication. “I found in talking to both colleagues and friends on the left side or right side of the aisle, that they discount the other side without asking any questions and not engaging at all. And so I always tell them, ‘Have you talked to them?’”

When I first started working in Wisconsin, my territory and insurance was the whole state. So I went from Milwaukee to […] Blackburn Falls, you name it. And I said to the people who were always like, “Oh, you're gonna encounter some racism” and all these things. And I told them, I said, “In those first five years, I encountered differences, but none of that other stuff.” I said, I let a lot of that stuff go to the side, it's just noise. I said, if you meet people where they are, and can communicate with them, and you know, just learn what's important to them, you'll learn something very quickly. People are exactly the same no matter where you are.

Inclusion is a part of communication and many residents, he said, don’t feel like they’re being included in important decisions that the school board is making. “They're talking, they're creating, and when I say they, they're representing the school board or the administration. There's policies being created that don't represent our community.”

Part of this has to do with the speed at which things have changed. He brings up the revisions to the Human Growth and Development curriculum specifically. While he found it to be less of a concern among those he talked to than he expected it to be, he cited it as both an instance where a good portion of the community didn’t feel heard or included and as an example of a change that he seemed to think was enacted unnecessarily quickly.

Referring to a resident he had spoken to who seemed to contradict the message from administrators and school board members that there had been an earnest attempt to engage stakeholders and bring in a diversity of viewpoints to help with curriculum revisions:

He brought up a good example. He was like, my wife worked on a committee in another school district before we moved here on this exact topic, and she just wanted to introduce it. We already teach our kids this stuff at home—families look different, and they operate differently, and they have different parts that maybe come from a different lens. He was just like, there are several lenses you can come from, but it was very clear that you wanted to only come from this one […] because the committee was built with a majority of people that fell into that camp and not the community as a whole.

I say, “So the committee selection process was sort of skewed or engineered to reflect a certain viewpoint that they already had settled on or something like that?”

“Yeah.” He continues

It didn't have to be a wholesale thing that had to happen all at once. If you actually go and read it, it was supposed to be phased in over a ten-year period. The whole thing. And I said, “You would get zero,” I guarantee—and I have talked to many people about it—“You're getting zero resistance had it been phased in that way. Fifth grade backwards.”

I ask him why he thought they pushed such large changes through so quickly.

Nobody wanted to answer that question for me. I can't get a straight answer. It's like, Well, it's what we needed done, and we’re focused on being the district of the future and this and modern. And like, that's great. Those are great visions. But that's kind of shock and awe.

Regarding other hot-button issues, Phil makes it clear that he is not “the D&I [diversity and inclusion] candidate.” He’s been asked this, or something like it, before. “I'm like, no. I said, D&I should be on everybody's list. It should be a part of the conversation, I said. But that's not my, why is that my thing?”

Nor does he have any particular thoughts on critical race theory. “I have no thoughts for this school district at this present time on that. No, because it's not something that we should be concerned [with]. We have other things to consider.”

He describes these positions while telling me about several different Political Action Committees who have tried to elicit his views on various topics. “I talked to some friends that are former assembly members and have been in state government and whatnot, and they're like, They're looking for the bench to groom. How can they spin these things? If we can capture you now in a non-partisan thing, but if you lend some thoughts here, you might be useful later on.”

Phil maintains that he is not particularly interested in lending them his thoughts or being useful to them later on. “I don't plan on doing this for the next, any amount of time.” He’s concerned, right now, he says, because his children are in kindergarten and second grade, and they’re doing great, but that middle school, not just in the district but nationwide, is a hellish landscape where academic progress goes to die (my words, not his). He doesn’t want to see this happen.

Almost nationwide, kids are coming out, fairly above proficient in elementary school. In middle school, they drop completely off, and it takes them every bit of that three years, and so basically for four years to get back to “just meets” [standards]. And then have to start this almost from scratch at high school.

We see that if you look at the numbers between our middle school and high school, it's exactly that. Then we subtract and take out and look at the black and brown students, it's even tougher. They fall off the most, they fall so far down, and […] how many of these fall out of the district altogether?

He’s also concerned about his kids’ Spanish class. “They've got Spanish multiple times a week in Lincoln. It's across the district.” This is not an extracurricular—which he thinks it should be—but a requirement put in place at the behest of parents who wanted their children to…be bilingual I guess. “I don’t dislike that it’s there,” he says, but after it was implemented five years ago, scores in math and overall academic achievement as assessed by the Department of Public Instruction begin to go down. “That's when we start seeing, as a district, we went from 89.7, it dropped to 87.4, and to get us all the way down to the 72.7 [where] we are right now,” he said “In five years, that's a big, big drop.”

While he admits that he has no idea really if the introduction of required Spanish instruction is causing the drop in performance, he notes that

You're taking, when you do the math, you're taking time from the pupil. Seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes a day on average in English […] and then I think it was twelve minutes a day for the math. So you do that math for five years. Or you just do it over each year, and you got a kid that's already struggling. And I'm taking time from them—who may not be getting time to do extra work at home.

“We can't afford to go any further down,” he says, “That's when people make those decisions, because I would be one of those.” Even the residents who are strong supports of the local public schools are telling him, “if the schools got that bad, we're just going to go to a new school.” They “wouldn’t have said that two years ago.”

Phil mentions a number of particulars like this. Seemingly small or unrelated choices that could have important implications if his model of public education is correct. It is the same when we talk about the violence and behavior problems in schools, and how you might eliminate them. “I don't know if we have Saturday school here or if we just have suspensions or in school suspension or whatever. Are you familiar with the Vel R. Phillips School?”

I admit that I don’t know much about it.

“Nobody wants to tell me anything about it,” he says. “I'm like, is it the school for the kids that are coming out of prison from Lincoln Hills and all that stuff? Because Lincoln Hills closed, but their results are in our DPI results for the school district.” In his mind, we’re already spending resources on it, so maybe there are ways to use it more effectively.

Why are we not using that as a diversion program? We have these kids that are going through this. If you tell me it's only 15, 20, 25 kids, well then let's create a plan here that yes, you have to go spend six weeks here before you can matriculate back into your classroom.

If you opt out, well then that's when you have the most extreme consequences. But if you do, because we're trying to keep you from going the other way where you're going to be behind bars or whatever the new Lincoln Hills is going to be, let's solve that right now if we have those resources. Nobody was talking about that.

In contrast, he doesn’t consider certain popular interventions, like restorative justice, to be a great answer to these problems.

“I don't like the term, restorative justice,” he says.

“You don't like that term?”

“No, because restorative justice to me is a bit of a cop out there. That's savior syndrome. Like, well, we want to make sure we're doing things that aren't creating this bridge to the school-to-prison pipeline. It's giving more chances here. I’m like, how many chances do you need?”

Nevertheless, in the next breath, he tells me he sits on the board of the Nehemiah Project, a program he describes as, a “restorative justice and anti-recidivism program for kids.” He says, “these kids that come, it's their last chance. The judge basically comes to our social worker and our executive director and says, ‘Can they come to Nehemiah for X amount of time to be safe from going straight into prison?’”

The difference between these programs seems to come down to the latter’s focus on a few targeted priorities. “The two biggest barriers for kids not going back to the system are forgiveness and literacy.” Literacy because, “all those kids have a second or third grade education no matter what their age is” and forgiveness not “for something you did to me, it's forgiveness for things that I've inherited from my community and from my environment out here that affect everything that I do.”

I mention that I feel like this is how advocates of restorative justice in schools would describe their program, but he says the district’s restorative justice program “should be focused on things that are going to benefit and get these kids to a baseline that match up with the other kids here.” Instead, he suggests that advocates think they’re “going to save everyone” but this is a recipe for burnout and ineffectiveness. “You'll never make it 20, 30, 50 years if you think you are. You have to have a realistic understanding, […]you have to be very clear with your goals and the outcomes you're trying to seek in order to get there.”

I’m not sure that proponents of restorative justice programs in schools would agree with this characterization, but I think—pulling from other parts of our conversation—that Phil has some larger critique about the allocation of scarce resources across too many goals and with unclear ways of identifying whether those goals are being accomplished. This was a theme of some his critiques of the district’s DEI initiatives and of the strategic plan as a whole—that it had “all these wonderful things” but that “when you looked at the milestones, it’s very gray.” People are happy to report, “Well, we were able to do some of this, a little bit of this, and we did this kind of diversity thing, and we created these committees,” he says, “But they’re all incomplete. They’re all good attempts, but they’re incomplete.”

None of this, well, we accomplished 2% of each one of these over the last 20 years. No, we have to accomplish 100% of something every year. […]

Otherwise you're going to go to the project or the problem of the day. And it's like, oh, it's diversity between kids. And then it's academic disparities between diverse kids. And then it's academic disparities between diverse kids, but boys versus girls. And then we go to this, and it's the problem of the day. But we didn't ever completely solve that last one. But we went to the one because this is what's important today. Versus saying, if we can focus on this, this is our lens. We're all in on this. And we said, no, we'll tackle these other ones because we're going to have others that come up. But this is where our focus is. I said, so if you maintain that focus, we can move forward a whole lot easier.

Like Mike Zollicoffer in our interview, and like some parents that I’ve spoken to, Phil worries that if the problems with violence in schools are not handled with some sense of urgency and deliberateness then things could devolve very quickly. “It takes one thing. We let the violence get out of hand, one bad incident happens. Or you put an SRO in a position where the worst thing you ever think could happen. That changes the entire—I don't care if you're 226, 213, 225—it changes it all.” It will create path-dependent effects that the district never recovers from.

“People will leave,” he says. “Or they'll flee in plain sight. They'll still stay here. They have a really nice house. They have a nice neighborhood until the neighborhood goes to complete crap. They'll stay here and they'll just do what a lot of these parents have told me: ‘I'm sending my kid to Christ the King.’” This then will reduce support for public schools, as people are less personally invested in them, and it will be a vicious cycle.

I don't know if you follow Rebecca Kleefisch’s 1848 Project. And a lot of these, there's a 1920 project. It's very anti-public schools. And Tosa is like the last gate. Tosa and Shorewood are the last two that if we can get the money out of the public schools and get them into these private schools or sit in private schools, these charter schools, like that's the demise of your public school system. Because you'll never get them back. Once somebody buys a piece of property and builds this brand new, you know, this new car smell, well, “I want to try it out. They've got a state of the art football field” or this, that, the other, a science lab. People are going to go try it.

We talked about much more including the “gigantic gap” in academic performance between male and female students, how much the food sucks at school, the divide between the East and West sides of the city, and a half dozen other points that, if included, would make this 7,000 words instead of 3,500. If you want to know more, just email him. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you what’s on his mind. Every bit of it.

1. The internet refused to corroborate this for me, so maybe I’ve got some of the details wrong. But I don’t think I’m just making it up.

2. I did get to meet Joe Biden in Washington D.C. once when he was still a senator from Delaware. I have a picture with him, and I’m sure I shook his hand, and I’m sure he said something to me, but all I remember was how brilliantly—and unnaturally—white his teeth were. Also, I was sixteen and thought the whole thing was pretty lame.