Milwaukee’s public schools typify the kind of school district now undergoing state takeover in a wave of such imposition of “recovery” or “achievement” districts being rushed through state legislatures. The bills are often fast-tracked without legislative debate and without input from the communities where the takeovers are being imposed.   The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes the provision—log-rolled into Wisconsin’s state’s budget when it passed on July 12, that grants Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, “broad authority to oversee a special district in Milwaukee for the city’s most troubled public schools…. The Program, devised by Republican state lawmakers from the suburbs, is designed to take some of the district’s lowest performing schools from the control of the Milwaukee School Board and put them under the control of Abele and a commissioner he selects, or directly under MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver, if she chooses to use that authority.”

But the Milwaukee…