Last week, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) leaders offered their alternative plan for the Republican-crafted Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program (OSPP). The law allows Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to take over and privatize up to three schools in the next academic year but MPS has other plans.
Abele and his appointed OSPP Commissioner Demond Means had offered a plan in April that would take over one MPS school and turn it into a charter school under the MPS umbrella this fall. They presented their proposal as a better alternative than offering up to three schools to a private charter operator and taking them out of the MPS district.
They gave the MPS board a June 23 deadline to act on the proposal.
Instead, on June 17 MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver and MPS Board President Mark Sain announced their alternative plan, which would launch an early education program in the 35th Street Elementary School and share space with Assata, an MPS partnership school. The 2016-2017 school year would be used as a planning year, and it would be set to open in fall 2017.
Driver and Sain said they had major concerns about the Abele-Means proposal —namely, that it didn’t conform to the OSPP law, didn’t include a mechanism for selecting a school and Abele and Means haven’t starting developing a request for proposals for the OSPP school in case MPS didn’t accept their offer.
“We had to take a few things into consideration—first and foremost, it had to be what’s best for our students,” Driver told the Shepherd. “And also to keep our community stabilized.”
Driver said there was no mechanism for selecting a school to be taken over. More than 50 MPS schools qualified for the OSPP because of their low performance. OSPP Commissioner Means had said he wouldn’t pick a school until after MPS agreed to his proposal, saying that it would create anxiety within the school communities to make public the schools that were under his consideration.
“We are not going to be selecting a school,” Driver said. “With that in mind, we thought it would be best to look at early childhood options. We see this as an opportunity to bring some resources into the 35th Street site.”
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She said she contacted some early childhood program partners in the community over the weekend to see if they could come together with Abele and Means to make the proposal work.
Driver and Sain called the early childhood alternative a “value-added” program for Milwaukee students, and pointed to a just-released Speaker’s Task Force on Urban Education report calling for more investments in early childhood programs in Wisconsin’s urban centers.
“Foundationally, this helps our students get off the ground,” Sain said. “When you look at some of the deficits that some of our community’s young people are coming from, the early childhood component helps to prepare them for their school career. This is something that we feel is value-added. It’s something that can truly help the district as well as the city’s children move forward academically.”
Driver and Sain said they have a June 23 meeting on the schedule with Abele and hope to persuade him to take up their offer.
Abele’s office didn’t respond to the Shepherd’s query about his and Means’ options if they reject MPS’ plan.
Pressure from Community Groups
Ironically, the MPS alternative plan is much like the first proposal floated by Abele last fall and throughout his campaign for re-election. He’d said he wanted to develop an early elementary “feeder school” in an MPS building and not take over a school outright.
But after the election, Abele scrapped that proposal, saying it wouldn’t conform to the OSPP legislation, which was inserted into the state budget by Abele allies Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and state Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield) last summer.
In late April Means sent the proposal for the independent MPS charter school to the MPS board, and gave them the June 23 deadline for a response. If MPS didn’t take his offer, he said he would find a charter operator to take over a school this fall. According to the county’s attorneys Means could draft and send out the request for proposals and submit his own proposal without any other oversight, meaning that Means could take over a school himself this fall.
Public school advocates—led by Schools and Communities United (SCU)—have been pressuring Abele and Means to refuse to participate in the OSPP, calling it an undemocratic and unjust law that would hurt Milwaukee’s African American and Latino students and further chip away at MPS’ stability. They’ve shown up at Abele’s and Means’ public appearances and on Monday held a rally outside of the Courthouse, where Abele has his offices.
“We see the takeover plan as an attack on our communities’ fundamental democratic rights by removing public institutions from the control of democratically elected boards,” said SCU Co-chair Ingrid Walker-Henry in a statement. “We also believe this is part of a larger plan to privatize Wisconsin’s public education system.”
