Carolyn Stanford Taylor, Wisconsin’s First Black State Superintendent: The Challenges Facing Public Education
Carolyn Stanford Taylor has held many positions in public education including student teacher, teacher, president of Madison Teachers, Inc., principal and state superintendent for public education
Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
One could say that Carolyn Stanford Taylor has seen public education from just about every perspective imaginable. Growing up ion Marks, Mississippi, Stanford Taylor’s family were one of the first to integrate the public schools there. Brown vs. Board of Education was meant to create equal opportunity for all children to receive a quality education. The powers that be in Marks found a way to continue the status quo.
“My family was one of the first families to integrate the schools in Marks,” Stanford Taylor said. “So we go over thinking we were going to get something better. We thought, ‘Oh, they got a swimming pool. They have all of the athletic equipment. They have this great, brick building with pristine yards.’ But that isn’t what we got. We got them filling in the swimming pool with cement. We got them stripping all of the athletic equipment and taking it to a private school. So what they did in order to avoid integration was to build an academy. Those who could afford to take their kids to the academy — of course there was a cost — they did. And so what was left in the public schools were Black students, African American students and poor white students who couldn’t afford to flee.”
Stanford Taylor came to UW-Madison to study education. Since then, she has obtained her degrees, served as a student teacher, and became a teacher and later principal in MMSD. She was the first African American woman to serve as president of Madison Teacher’s Inc. And she then became an assistant superintendent of public education under then superintendent Tony Evers and ascended to the role as state superintendent when Evers became governor of Wisconsin. And even after she decided not to run for the elected state superintendent position, Stanford Taylor returned to MMSD to serve as an administrator for then Superintendent Dr. Carlton Jenkins working on community engagement. Oh and her daughter Carlettra attended Madison public schools and is now an administrator for MMSD.
Stanford Taylor has seen education from just about every perspective possible.
“I count that a privilege,” Stanford Taylor said. “I think at every level, I was able to see something different. What is really interesting is that as a teacher, you start to think about the rules and policies and regulations. You think, ‘Wow, I probably could have more impact if I were a principal.’ Art the principal level, you start to think, ‘Oh, yeah, we still have thumbs on your soul. I could probably have more of an impact on a state level.’ And then you get to the state level and you see all of the politics that is involved in education and you go and visit different districts. And you visit classrooms and you start to think, ‘This is really where it is, right here at the level where you really touch the people whom you are trying to impact.’ So it is at that local level. Don’t get me wrong. I loved working at the state level. I loved being innovative and coming up with different ways of doing things and bringing a different perspective. I think more than anything, having worked at all of those levels, I was able to bring those people’s voices into the room. But coming back after retiring from the state to a local level and being able to use the knowledge that I gained from across the state and working at the state level, that was exciting.”
Stanford Taylor is an educator and not a politician and so her decision not to run for state superintendent of public instruction made sense.
“You realize how political those positions are,” Stanford Taylor said. “And so you’re always playing the game. You’re always trying to figure out what the next move is or how you need to be able to sway folks’ opinions so that they understand what is really happening at the local level and how their decisions impact the local level. And often. Of course, you run across those people who really are in it for single issues. And that is the part that is so disheartening.”
One of those single issues is choice. What began as an initiative by the late State Representative Polly Williams and Dr. Howard Fuller to allow poor inner-city African American students attend better funded suburban schools became the Trojan Horse for allowing the large-scale funding of private — even religious — schools.
“One single issue was around choice,” Stanford Taylor said. “And so legislators and others who received letters from folks that talked about how there should be more choice. And my thought is that there has always been choice. It’s just a matter of who is paying for it. We’ve had private schools. And those parents who had the ability to pay, moved their kids to private schools. But I go back to why public schools were created. Public schools take all students. Anyone who comes, we take them and we work with them. Private schools get the option of who they take. And when we look at what is happening now with choice, which includes the vouchers and all of those other avenues for families, you start to think about where is the funding coming from. And the way that we viewed it in Wisconsin is we didn’t increase the pie. We just started to divert money from public education into more choice avenues. Every time I was before the legislature, I always said, ‘If we’re going to have two parallel systems running, let’s adequately fund both of them. But that message hasn’t held any sway yet.”
In some ways, Stanford Taylor’s experience with integrating schools back in Mississippi was happening all over again.
Next issue: More Challenges