The faulty promises of the McKenzie Foundation’s proposed charter school

Forward Career and College Academy would likely leave Madison’s neediest students behind, while evading public accountability.

In 2019, my wife and I wrote about the dynamics of race in school politics in a commentary for Madison365. A core tension we illustrated was that many nonwhite community members in Wisconsin are justified if they feel a sense of frustration at public schools, but that many proposed solutions that bypass the public school system only exacerbate the actual problems faced by nonwhite students and families in K-12 education. These solutions include non-instrumentality charter schools—whose staff don’t technically work for a public school district board—and private voucher schools. The proposed Forward Career and College Academy (FCCA), which wealthy local real estate developer John McKenzie and his McKenzie Foundation hope to open in Madison in fall 2026, would fall into the same trap if it continues to pursue a charter through UW System.

A charter through the UW System would mean that FCCA would pull funding out of the Madison Metropolitan School District, without the same public accountability required of an actual MMSD-authorized charter school. It would answer to the appointed staff and advisors of the UW System’s opaque Office of Educational Opportunity, rather than to an elected school board. Its employees would work for a separate non-profit board, not MMSD, and would be unlikely to unionize. 

Similarly modeled non-instrumentality charter schools in Milwaukee pay significantly less and have worse benefits than Milwaukee Public Schools. Even if, as charter-school advocates argue, the lack of teaching license requirements and flexibilities a charter school has can increase teacher diversity (a dubious proposition already), it would create a dynamic where said diverse workforce would get worse working conditions than their public-school counterparts. 

Someone as wealthy as McKenzie could, instead, invest in paying to cover the higher education costs or license costs for aspiring nonwhite educators. We already have many passionate and excellent staff of color in our lowest-paid, hourly positions in MMSD who deserve to be future teachers and student services staff members. The biggest barriers they face are the education requirements and licenses. MMSD struggles to fund programming to help existing staff earn the degrees and licensures they need and break down these barriers. That leaves a lot of marginalized people stuck in front-line hourly positions, when they should be moving up the ladder to become fully licensed teachers or accredited support staff. McKenzie and his partners say he has already invested $500,000 into his charter proposal. How many of our education support professionals could get a license or get the next degree they need with just that?

What McKenzie has spent much of that money on is working with Paul Vallas to develop this proposal. At best, this shows how out of his depth McKenzie is in the education landscape. Vallas most recently ran for Mayor of Chicago, despite living in the suburbs, on a campaign of racist dog whistles against the Black Chicago community. His campaign proudly touted the support of the Trump-and-Ron-DeSantis-endorsing Chicago Fraternal Order of Police. In 2001, Vallas was forced to resign as CEO of Chicago Public Schools after promising that his promotion of charter schools in Chicago would lead to higher standardized test results. The actual results were the opposite. He removed Black educators under the guise of weakening the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s no surprise he lost the mayoral race in every majority Black neighborhood of Chicago. Vallas even went after homeless students in Chicago, violating their rights and refusing to enforce a settlement for them. He then went to Philadelphia and had similar results, but also cost Philadelphia taxpayers $331 million through his debt agreements with Wall Street banks. Then he oversaw the total privatization of New Orleans Public Schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was then fired from his job as superintendent of Bridgeport, Connecticut’s public schools in less than two years. He even took advantage of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to ensure the continued privatization of Haiti’s schools.

Why has McKenzie partnered with such a racist, right-wing political player? McKenzie is frustrated by a lack of trades opportunities and career pathways in high school education. I don’t disagree. But instead of talking to school counselors, our building principals, and other frontline staff fighting these barriers every day, he presents his own half-baked solution by outsourcing to a bad-faith actor like Vallas. McKenzie seems woefully undereducated on what we offer in MMSD—we offer dual credit, college programming, apprenticeships, work credit, trades courses, and other career-readiness programming that he claims to want to see more of. If McKenzie did his research, he might discover that public transit access, housing troubles, and child care concerns are blocking many of our students from engaging in existing programming, rather than MMSD itself. With his connections, he could help address those needs rather than divest from our public schools. McKenzie made his money in real estate development. He could center his own expertise and help house the over 900 MMSD students who are homeless.

Aside from the transparency and labor concerns that come with a UW System charter school, FCCA inherently won’t help the very population McKenzie claims to care most about—those who want to break the cycle of poverty. I witnessed this working in Milwaukee education, including at a charter school. First and foremost, even a non-selective enrollment process eliminates the highest-need families, who do not have the time to manually and proactively apply. Second, charter schools have more flexibility to be harsher with punitive discipline, which almost always leads to disproportionate exclusion of students with disabilities and students with more need, especially if those things intersect with race. 

A school operating under a UW System charter could unintentionally only accept kids who have parents who have the privilege and skills to navigate a charter school application. Nationally, some charter schools have application requirements that often exacerbate disparate outcomes, such as requiring an essay that might exclude students who are already behind academically or don’t have the time to write an extra essay. Even a basic, non-selective application process is often unintentionally exclusionary. Families with the most needs, such as newcomers, refugees, and those struggling with day-to-day survival and extreme poverty, are unlikely to know about the application and will default to their assigned area public school. For example, 7,000 MMSD students are English Language Learners. While that is a broad category and in no way means all of those students are newcomers or immigrants, I am skeptical this charter proposal’s enrollment process will be well-explained to immigrant families. I am also extremely skeptical that McKenzie and Vallas have seriously considered the systems of support we have developed in MMSD to properly serve the over 100 languages in Madison schools, such as our diverse team of Bilingual Resource Specialists.  

When you combine this with common informal practices to push out and underserve students with disabilities, comparing outcomes at charter schools and public schools is like comparing apples and oranges. It is easy to claim success in supporting students when you have crafted a student population that would be successful in any school setting, while excluding those that truly need support.

When I worked at Carmen Schools of Science & Technology in Milwaukee, we shared a building with Pulaski High School, a traditional public school. Families often picked Carmen due to a perception of more rigorous discipline, college readiness, and career opportunities. In practice, we were understaffed and underpaid. Staff of color were further underpaid compared to white staff due to the lack of a transparent pay scale, and all our staff were paid on average $10,000 a year less than our union public school counterparts. We had fewer students with disabilities than Pulaski High next door. We had far fewer students with emotional-behavioral disorders and next to no students with intellectual disabilities. Our school did not provide transportation; Pulaski did. Our school did not have a nurse; Pulaski did. Our school did not have counselors; Pulaski did. Milwaukee Public Schools, as a city-wide school district, had career connections far beyond what Carmen could provide. 

Carmen’s policies meant it inherently pulled from the most stable working-class families—families that were poor by a national definition—but often excluded the most impoverished families, at least in comparison to Pulaski. Meanwhile, Pulaski outshines Carmen in academic growth while working with a more holistic spectrum of students. It’s no wonder that Pulaski actually grew to the point where MPS had to kick Carmen out to give Pulaski the rest of the building.

While poor families and families of color in Madison have every reason to demand more from the public schools, the reason my advocacy has always remained within the public school sector is because public schools have to serve all. Everyone has the right to an education, and when every other institution excludes you or lets you down, you still have a right to go to a public school. That means that public schools are unique in being the only institution that has insight into the true depths of systemic oppression and sees every unfair barrier our nation and society puts up. This doesn’t mean public schools aren’t a place of oppression or are somehow inherently liberatory. But it does mean that if you manage to make public education a liberatory space, you’ve done it for all people. If you merely divest from it to make a superficially liberatory space somewhere else, you’ve left people behind. 

This fundamental truth is what McKenzie, as a wealthy white man without education expertise, does not understand. If he wants to be an actual force for anti-oppression instead of oppression, the first step would be to withdraw the UW proposal and cut ties with Paul Vallas. The second step would be to approach frontline educators with humility, and spend time building real community with our working-class nonwhite Madisonians to hear directly from them.
If you have thoughts on the proposed charter, feel free to share it by emailing LaTonya Jackson, who is collecting feedback from the community for FCCA, at wew@waitingtoexhaleevents.com, Cynthia Gonzalez, the Office of Educational Opportunity Director overseeing UW charters at cynthia.gonzalez@wisconsin.edu, and the UW Board of Regents at board@wisconsin.edu.