Will Milwaukee Schools be turned over to National Charter School Companies? Ask New Orleans

With education reform ideas moving through Wisconsin’s legislature, three citizen experts on the nation’s “Recovery” School District— the Miracle that never was, and the Recovery that never came — will share their personal stories and perspectives. Dr. Raynard Sanders, Karran Harper Royal, and Dr. Kristen Buras are each actively engaged in the struggle to bring public education back to what has become the Charter School City, New Orleans. Milwaukeeans Please Join the conversation. Let us more fully explore how proposed legislation could impact Milwaukee classrooms and communities.

Will New State Legislation Give MPS Schools to National Charter School Companies? By Lisa Kaiser

Wisconsin Republicans have the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) in their sights.
That’s nothing new. Conservative Republicans have attacked public schools, and MPS and its unions in particular, for years.

But what is novel is a proposal for the state to, in essence, take over “failing” MPS schools and turn them into taxpayer-funded charter schools.

State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and state Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield) offered that proposal in their “New Opportunities for Milwaukee Plan,” which targets education and job creation in the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. A highlight of their education proposal would create a “turnaround school model in Milwaukee

[that] would operate outside of the traditional bureaucracy that stymies reform.” The Republicans would create a board to oversee a turnaround school initiative for all Milwaukee schools that fail to meet expectations. Darling and Kooyenga would also allow high-performing charter schools to replicate without getting additional authorization from any other entity. Currently, charters in the city are granted by UW-Milwaukee, MPS, the city and MATC, although the technical college hasn’t used this power.

Additionally, Darling and Kooyenga would like to create “free-market zones” in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, with no corporate income tax, right-to-work policies (they wrote their plan before the Legislature passed the state-level law) and the use of social impact bonds to allow entrepreneurs to ease their focus on profits….

But do Milwaukee and the state at large need more charter schools? Would MPS get better results if all of its failing schools were turned into charters?

Darling and Kooyenga didn’t respond to the Shepherd’s request to talk about their charter school plan. But three experts on New Orleans’ experiment with charters told the Shepherd that a recovery district has created as many problems as it’s solved.

Please Join Us! on Thursday, March 26, 2015 and Friday, March 27, 2015