They say that you can’t fight City Hall but a trio of education activists proved the cynics wrong.
After years of attending meetings, asking questions and refusing to take no for an answer, Gail Hicks, Marva Herndon and Lawrence Hoffman have gotten results that hopefully will benefit students in the city’s charter schools as well as city and state taxpayers.
The three activists were curious about the City of Milwaukee’s charter school program, a little-publicized handful of schools funded by taxpayers, run by private charter companies and overseen by the Common Council. Taxpayer-funded charter schools are generally seen as benign, transparent alternatives to low-performing public and voucher schools, but as the Milwaukee example shows, even this system can run amok if it isn’t overseen properly.
“The public needs to know the good, the bad and the ugly about charter schools,” Hicks told the Shepherd. “You are giving up your rights when you attend a charter school, your right to special education, your right to complain, your right to elect a school board. Parents find out far too late that there’s usually a private business of some sort in the background.”
At first, the activists were interested in ensuring that the buildings hosting these schools were safe. For example, they didn’t feel that students’ best interests were served when a school popped up near railroad tracks or on former industrial land without a playground or in a building not up to city codes.
But as they asked questions, they realized that the city’s charter school system, which receives significant taxpayer support, was totally opaque. While the Common Council has ultimate say over the schools, in reality the members were rubber-stamping recommendations made by the all-appointee Charter School Review Committee (CSRC) and didn’t seem interested in running a school district.
And that’s when Hicks, Herndon and Hoffman began digging in their heels.
Now, years later, their questions have had a real impact on the transparency of the committee overseeing the city’s charter schools and, hopefully, will result in better educational outcomes for these students. Hopefully.
“This is all based on the flawed assumption that the city should run charter schools,” Hoffman said.
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‘It Was Just Us’
Hicks, a retired special education teacher, Herndon, a retired computer programmer, and Hoffman, a longtime education researcher, didn’t intend to conduct a crusade against charter schools, but that’s what they ended up doing about six years ago as they tried to unravel the secretive nature of the city’s charter school system.
Hicks and Herndon formed Women Committed to an Informed Community and eventually joined forces with Hoffman. All three have volunteered countless hours of time and effort over the years and haven’t taken any funding from outside sources, claiming that the money would affect what they could say or do.
“No one makes that decision for me but me,” Hicks said.
As they initially looked into the city’s charter schools, they discovered that the system’s gatekeeper was the Charter School Review Committee (CSRC), then headed by charter and voucher advocate Howard Fuller.
They also learned that this city-appointed committee didn’t meet at City Hall. Instead, Fuller’s committee met at the offices of his Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. The committee, staffed by Fuller and his fellow charter advocates, met irregularly, didn’t post agendas or notify the public about meetings, didn’t provide minutes of meetings or allow public testimony.
So Hicks, Herndon and Hoffman began attending the meetings simply to figure out what was going on and sent open records requests to obtain agendas, minutes and contracts the committee had signed with charter schools and consultants.
“We would show up and take notes,” Herndon said. “It was just us.”
After collecting as much data as they could, they would meet in Herndon’s basement, fire up an overhead projector and try to make sense of what they were learning. They discovered that those overseeing the charter schools were not holding the schools accountable for low student performance and they argue that many if not all of the committee members had a personal, professional or financial stake in keeping the system going. The vast majority of the students in the dysfunctional charter school system were low-income, African American children.
Even worse, the trio discovered that members of the Common Council weren’t aware of what was going on. At the time, the council president was Willie Hines, whose brother runs a city-chartered school. As president, Hines chaired the committee that was tasked with overseeing Fuller’s CSRC and routinely rubber-stamped the committee’s recommendations. In addition, Hines didn’t allow public testimony during his hearings so critics couldn’t ask questions. When Hicks and Herndon pushed to speak in a June 2012 hearing, as the Shepherd reported, Hines asked a clerk to call security to remove them from the room, saying, “This is not a public hearing for you in the audience.”
Results
Since then, the trio’s activism began producing results. After the 2012 dust-up, City Clerk Jim Owczarski announced that the CSRC would need to post its agendas and minutes on the city’s website and begin meeting in City Hall. But even that little bit of daylight barely materialized. The committee met in a room in City Hall that couldn’t accommodate videotaping, audience members couldn’t always hear the committee members’ discussions and the agendas and minutes were posted late or were incomplete.
In addition, the trio ramped up their efforts within the community. They found allies in the pro-public education Schools and Communities United (SCU), the local chapter of the NAACP and the Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH).
“We built a larger coalition and had more input,” Herndon said.
SCU hired researcher Jack Norman to take a look at the true performance of the schools. As the Shepherd reported in January, Norman testified that four of the city’s 10 charter schools were failing even though the CSRC was giving them a pass and only looking at limited data on student performance. He also warned that the charter program was siphoning resources from the Milwaukee Public Schools and a destabilized MPS would ultimately impact the city’s coffers, since the city was responsible for MPS’ debt.
Common Council members took notice.
“That made a huge difference,” Herndon said. “Jack talked about the financial impact, that if MPS sinks, then the city sinks, too.”
The increased scrutiny gave new life to their efforts. Now, the CSRC’s meetings are videotaped, materials are publicly accessible and public input is allowed. One school decided to withdraw from the program and others are being put on notice that if they don’t improve their contracts will be terminated. The committee also needs to calculate the financial impact of new city charter schools on MPS. And council members as a whole seem to be more skeptical about the benefits of running a charter school system when these schools in general aren’t performing any better than MPS schools.
Another factor is the selection of Alderman Michael Murphy as Common Council president after Hines left that position. Murphy had met with the trio early on and had been willing to listen to their concerns about building safety, Herndon said. As Common Council president, he’s been more receptive to criticisms of the program in an attempt to improve its performance and become more transparent.
Murphy told the Shepherd that he didn’t always agree with the trio but that they had a valuable impact on the city’s charter school system.
“I think they’ve been a much respected voice and I’m glad they’ve been challenging me and the council on improving the transparency of the charter review process,” Murphy said. “They’ve added value and I’m grateful for that.”
The trio said that they will continue to pay close attention to all of the city’s schools, including those in the MPS system as well as those in the Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele-run Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program (OSPP). According to the Republican-crafted plan that created Abele’s new school district, the OSPP has no real public transparency requirement, meaning that the bad old days of the early years of the city’s charter school system will seem like good, open government in comparison. But Hicks, Herndon and Hoffman said that they will be watching.
