The UW System selected Gary Bennett, chief of staff for state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, to lead an agency that will explore opening new charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee.
Starting April 1, Bennett will head the Office of Educational Opportunity and will also be a special assistant to UW System President Ray Cross. The agency, a product of Darling and other Republican lawmakers, was part of the 2015 state biennial budget and has the authority to authorize new charter schools, oversee how the charter operates and supervise a charter’s compliance with federal law.
According to Julie Mead, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW-Madison, a charter school is “a school that comes into being by a charter or contract with an authorizer. The vast majority of authorizers are school districts. However, they can be other entities, such as the Office of Educational Opportunity.”
While public schools have a set of statutes in the state of Wisconsin, charter schools are relieved from a majority of those statutes, but not from ones in federal law.
According to the Chippewa Herald, Darling said Thursday that the new charter-granting entity is needed because the Madison school system is failing too many children.
But, according to Mead, adding charter schools into school districts is not necessarily the solution.
“We have public schools that are doing beautifully and public schools that are not doing as well. We have charter schools that are doing beautifully and charter schools that are not doing as well,” Mead said. “We know from many years of charter schools being around in one state or another that tinkering with government structure will not fix the problem.”
The implementation of additional charter schools is not yet guaranteed.
“We are still very early in the process,” said UW System spokesperson Alex Hummel. “We are awaiting the arrival and start up of our special assistant in this role," adding that there is no set timeline for pursuing new schools.
