Community Debates Proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy

Over a hundred supporters and critics of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men packed the auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building for the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) Board of Education meeting on Monday, March 28th.

The agenda included determining whether the Board of Education would send Madison Prep, a proposed all-male charter school aiming to prepare young men of color for college, to the Department of Public Instruction for funding.

For almost two hours, community members, including teachers, parents, administrators and concerned citizens argued for and against the proposed charter school.

Vanika Mock, a broker for Keller Williams Realty and Payroll Administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was one of the voices advocating for Madison Prep.

“I support Madison Prep a hundred percent,” Mock announced. She cited multiple justifications for a school like Madison Prep, such as the high incarceration rate of African American males and the achievement gap between African American and Latino males, and Asian and white males in Madison public schools.

In February, Mock and her 10-year-old son, Ryan, attended a forum featuring students from Urban Preparatory Academy, the Chicago charter school on which Madison Prep is modeled.

“He was able to meet the young men and he was just flabbergasted,” Mock explained. “He had never seen so many sharp[ly] dressed black men, ever, together. My son was enamored by these young men because he saw himself in these young men.”

Ryan, who currently attends Elvehjem Elementary School, would love to attend Madison Prep when it opens, Mock added.

In contrast to Mock’s enthusiasm for Madison Prep, critics like Stacy Harbaugh, an American Civil Liberties Union Community Advocate, protested the Urban League’s decision to make Madison Prep a male-only school.

“It’s not just African American boys who face challenges. We want our public schools to be safe places to learn for all students, but we cannot leave girls behind,” said Harbaugh, drawing applause from the crowd.

She added that if Madison Prep was approved, it would be in violation of district policy and of Wisconsin’s non-discrimination laws that include sex segregation.

“Our community’s girls deserve more than a promise and an asterisk at the end of its charter school proposal,” Harbaugh finished.

In responding to Harbaugh’s comments, Mock likened the need for Madison Prep to a fire.

“If you think about it, it’s like a fire,” she said. “You got a fire, right? Are you gonna get the kids, the people who are most at risk, or are you gonna get the people in the situation where the fire has not yet spread. You’re gonna get the people who are right in the fire first, right?”

Many community members also voiced concerns about the fact that Madison Prep will be a non-instrumentality charter school, which some believe will divert money away from other public schools.

Currently, all of the MMSD’s charter schools are instrumentality schools, which means that the district has a say in how they are run. A non-instrumentality charter school is not subject to oversight by the MMSD.

“The main implication for instrumentality charter schools is that the teachers of those charter schools are employees of the district and therefore, subject to the collective bargaining contract,” Laura DeRoche-Perez, ULGM’s Charter School Development Consultant, said in an interview. “In the case of Madison Prep, it will be its own 501(c)(3) organization. It will be its own non-profit. And it will be completely outside the realm of the district, which means it has a lot more autonomy and flexibility. ”

DeRoche-Perez says non-instrumentality status allows the ULGM to be “very nimble in making changes as we need to. Especially, in those first three years. We’re going to encounter challenges, problems, difficulties that we can’t even imagine right now. So to have as much flexibility as possible is how we think that the studens will be best served.”

Other skeptics like historian and activist, Allen Ruff, critiqued the charter school movement in general.

“The Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation, out of Milwaukee, financed Manhattan Institutes's studies going back twenty years, that initiated the whole charter school movement,” says Ruff.

According to Ruff, the Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., and the Bradley Foundation is a right-wing organization that also funds the Black Alliance for Educational Options, an organization that Kaleem Caire, President and CEO of ULGM, worked for.

“We have to understand that when they talk about either independent schools or non-instrumentality schools, that they’re talking about taking money from public schools and privatizing that money to educate a small minority of the community,” Ruff argued.

Later, during a question and answer session with the BOE, Caire countered this view of charter schools.

“Charter is just a name for an independently developed school that’s supposed to be an innovation for how we fix things in regular schools,” he said.

Furthermore, in making the case for non-instrumentality, Caire explained that the ULGM’s experience with the district has been slow because of the multiple daily demands for the district’s services.

“We can’t afford to have a school that has to operate on this slow timeline to make the kinds of innovations that are necessary that our kids need right now,” said Caire. Caire believes that independence will allow Madison Prep to be “more effective and efficient.”

Ruff also asked the Board to question the amount of money that the ULGM says it needs to run Madison Prep, which is estimated at $2.6 million per year.

While Caire declined to share the estimated total expenses of Madison Prep, the grant being sought from the Department of Public Instruction is for $175,000 for the first year.

Ultimately, the Board voted 6-1 to pass the grant proposal on to the Department of Public Instruction. The DPI is expected to grant funding by the end of April, after which ULGM and the MMSD will negotiate a contract, and the ULGM will commence the search for the Head of School, Madison Prep’s first administrator.