Public Education: The Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School

Locate the impressive new Milwaukee art museum sailing into Lake Michigan, on the shoreline drive and shadowed by downtown Milwaukee. Now drive straight west, away from the lake, away from money and away from the Midwest. The African-Americans who largely inhabit the “inner city” of Milwaukee still speak with the southern accents of their grandparents and great-grandparents, blacks who came north to escape the memories of slavery, the bigotry of the south, the rural poverty of the depression. In a neighborhood of run-down but habitable row houses, Christian churches of many Protestant sects, and check-cashing holes-in-the-wall, you will find a modern school building, brick with bright tile accents, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School. It is the only Waldorf school in the United States that is, simply, a public school. It is not a charter school, and does not receive money from student vouchers. It houses around 310 students, 98 or 99 per cent African-American, in grades K-5. Like many urban schools but unlike most Waldorf schools in the U.S., children may eat breakfast before school and stay long afterward in “wraparound” programs. It is one of about 115 public elementary schools in the Milwaukee district, a “specialty” school in a “choice” program, created by forward thinkers in Milwaukee in 1991. Other choice schools include schools that use Montessori methods, schools that emphasize the educational use of technology, and “language immersion” schools that teach in Spanish, French, German, or sign language.

A paragraph in a school selection guide published by the school district describes the school this way:

Urban Waldorf follows a year-round calendar using a trimester system with three
breaks during the year and no school during the month of July. Its curriculum
reflects the phases of child development. Concepts are expanded through
movement, music, recitation, visual arts, and traditional reading, writing and
math. Waldorf methods develop clarity of thought, sensitivity of feeling, and
strength of will. Specially-trained Waldorf teachers stay with their class
groups as they move through the grades.

Unlike independent Waldorf schools, Urban Waldorf is required to give standardized tests, and they were being administered during the week I visited. Several faculty members characterized the students, apologetically, as “on edge” because of the tests, but nearly every student I saw was well-behaved and courteous. A third grade teacher said that the two weeks of testing were disruptive but “a small price to pay” for being able to teach the way she wanted to teach the rest of the year. Teachers were attentive to their students, and I had no sense that this was caused by my presence. Mark Birdsall, then “implementer” (a paid liaison between the Milwaukee public school system and the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA)) at the school, described this attentiveness as usual and necessary because of the behavioral and emotional difficulties that some students suffered. “Things can get out of hand pretty quickly,” he said. Laura Birdsall, a fourth grade teacher, characterized her class as having half the students working up to grade level, and including 3 cognitively disabled and 4 learning disabled students in a class of 21. She also described a student who had suffered horrific abuse—being doused with boiling water—at home. Teachers monitored students more closely than in any Waldorf school I have seen. Absence required a letter from home upon return. Teasing was shut down instantly. Speech was monitored as in this exchange during a time when children were working quietly at their desks:

Student: “He sharpening his pencil.”
Teacher (calmly): “He is . . . ?”
Student: “He is sharpening his pencil.”
Teacher (matter-of-fact): “Standard English.”

The faculty of the Urban Waldorf School is about half African-American. Administrators believe it would be better—not that it isn’t acceptable as is—to have more black teachers, but trained Waldorf teachers of color are few and far between. Except for a group trained at the founding of the school, few exist. The school hopes, with a charter Waldorf school nearby (the Tamarack School) and the Prairie Hill Waldorf School, half an hour west of Milwaukee, to implement a new round of training soon. In the meantime, the school has to accept teachers, white and black, who will get on-the-job training and begin to employ Waldorf methods as they learn them. Among these teachers, attitudes vary, according to those with whom I spoke, regarding Waldorf methods. One teacher I observed, able, kind and diligent, did not say a morning verse with her class, for example, although the curriculum she followed would have been recognizable to Waldorf teachers anywhere in the U.S. (Saying a prayer-like morning verse is a universal custom among Waldorf schools.)

The school owes its existence, initially, to Mark Stamm, Robert Peterkin and Mary Bills. Mr. Stamm, a former student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM), and an anthroposophist, apparently suggested to Superintendent Peterkin, now at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, that Milwaukee ought to include a Waldorf school as one of the choices among its schools. Peterkin investigated and approved, supported by Mary Bills, then president of the Milwaukee school board. Ann Pratt, an experienced Waldorf teacher from New Hampshire, took on a role as liaison or “implementer” to facilitate communication between the largely independent world of Waldorf education in the United States and the Milwaukee public school bureaucracy and to aid in training Milwaukee public school teachers in Waldorf methods. In this she was assisted by Betty Staley, an experienced Waldorf teacher and teacher at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California, and Francis Vig, a teacher at the Chicago Waldorf School. Belden Paulsen, a professor at UWM, made possible an accredited training, and Dorothy St. Charles, a public school teacher at the time, stepped up to the principalship of the school.

I asked Paulsen why Milwaukee, of all places, should be the first—and so far only—public district to open a Waldorf school. He characterized Milwaukee as having its fair share of conservative segregationist racists, but cited the city’s progressive tradition: The mayors of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960, for example, were socialists, he said. More important, he ascribed the success of the school to “a few creative, innovative individuals,” and emphasized his belief that change can be accomplished by a few key people.

He saw no reason why every large public school district in the country couldn’t adopt a choice system similar to Milwaukee’s, and include within it a school or two that uses Waldorf methods. On the other hand, he quoted a teacher from the early days of the school saying that Waldorf teaching isn’t “simply a job; it’s a way of life.” The demands of Waldorf teaching, including especially training time and expenses beyond those required for state certification, could be daunting, if not prohibitive. He recalled that the school received a dozen or so calls from school districts as far away as California and Texas, but that early interest never amounted to much. He characterized outside interest as relatively superficial; without a commitment specifically to Waldorf educational methods, it seemed, the effort required to implement such a school was too great.

I asked Cheryl Colbert, a former teacher at the school and now principal, about accusations of racism or Eurocentrism regarding Waldorf education. She, an African-American, claimed these were not an issue for her or for the school. “I don’t know where Steiner got them,” she said, “but storytelling, music, movement . . . these are part of the African tradition, and they’re good for children.”

I attended a Black History Month assembly at the school. In some ways it was like Waldorf school assemblies everywhere. Children entered by classes, generally quietly, and sat in neat rows on the gym floor. Several students, led by a teacher, played music at the front of the room. A teacher stood to lead the assembly and introduce the performers. The differences were in the culture of the school. The initial music was African drumming. The assembly leader used a microphone, and was more flamboyant than other (white) Waldorf teachers I have seen. Many of the presentations would not have seemed out of place at any Waldorf school—students reciting poetry, for example—while others definitely expressed the rhythm and music of Africa and an African-American heritage. The assembly ended with the school’s theme song, more like a midwestern school anthem than the lyrical stuff you might hear at other (coastal) Waldorf schools.

For many Waldorf teachers and for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), a public school cannot be a Waldorf school; it can only claim to be “Waldorf-inspired.” I find little evidence to support making such a distinction in Steiner’s work. In fact, Nancy Parsons Whittaker quotes Steiner as saying that his methods may be applied “anywhere there is the will to do it.” (2001) AWSNA’s argument would surely be that any school or teacher can use Steiner’s methods, but only in an independent school can teachers work freely “out” of anthroposophy, and only in this case can a school consider itself a Waldorf school. Other than providing a label for parent consumption, if you will, the distinction seems facile to me; a child’s experience at the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School is the experience of an education according to Steiner’s educational principles. Some teachers are anthroposophists and some are not, but this is true in private Waldorf schools as well.

Frankly, under Dorothy St. Charles’ leadership, the school seemed to have achieved a remarkable degree of independence. Ms. St. Charles related several stories regarding curricular decisions that she and her faculty were able to make as a school against the decisions of the Milwaukee superintendent of schools. She was able, with her superintendent’s support, to ignore district mandated reading curricula in order to allow her teachers to teach reading as they found Steiner suggested. They met weekly, as Waldorf school teachers do, despite union contracts that limit faculty meetings to once a month. The union filed grievances but never pursued them—the teachers in the school met willingly.

Eugene Schwartz draws a distinction between Waldorf and Waldorf-inspired schools in that laws regarding the separation of church and state (or perhaps better stated, against the state establishment of religion) mean that students in public schools, regardless of teaching method, cannot, for example, include the name “God” in their morning verse. This seems a somewhat nominalist and picayune point; soviet state prohibitions against religion did not prevent Aleksander Solzhenitsyn from maintaining his beliefs. And whether or not a teacher or a student is allowed to speak a word or not seems to have little bearing on inner attitude or pedagogical experience.

One first grader I saw was so pleased with his work—copying a sentence from the blackboard: “Mufaro had two girls, one sweet and one sour.”—that he held his paper before his face and kissed it. According to conventional Waldorf school wisdom, the teaching of writing in first grade would be too soon. Standards—and a minority community that embraces those standards as necessary to ensure so far as possible a decent education—require teachers to accelerate the curriculum. Teachers in Milwaukee work hard to convey, for example, the artistry from which written letters arose historically, before they begin teaching writing, however, and are acutely aware of the compromises they must make to succeed as an “inner city” public school.

(Since I wrote this in 2002, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School has changed buildings and grown to include 475 students in grades K-8. Not much discussed, it's the largest Waldorf school in the U.S. Cheryl Colbert is still the principal.)