For Dr. Robert Kattman, it’s the little things that best demonstrate his success.
On a routine visit to the Seeds of Health Elementary campus on 32nd and Greenfield Ave., Kattman ran into a fifth grader that was bawling inconsolably.
“I stopped and asked him what’s wrong,” Kattman recalled. The boy responded “my RIT score went down!”
Retelling the story, Kattman chuckled with pride, telling me how he calmed the boy down and discussed how he might improve his RIT score, a routine test that tracks a student’s achievements over a school year.
“He was devastated that his score had gone down,” Kattman said. “When you see that in a school, [whereas] in many schools kids blow their tests off and they don’t care – but in these schools they do.”
Kattman, director of UW-Milwaukee’s Office of Charter Schools, referred to the 11 charter schools in Milwaukee that he is responsible for overseeing, including Seeds of Health Elementary, Milwaukee College Preparatory School, Urban Day School, Tenor High School and others.
For over 10 years, Kattman’s job has been to approve and develop charter schools in Milwaukee’s inner-city that will set children living in poverty on a course to go to college.
“They’re all going to be dealing with urban students, and all of them need to be prepared to deal with students who come from backgrounds that aren’t conducive to educational achievement,” Kattman explained. “So, their job is essentially to figure out how to change that, and they do it by changing culture.”
Beginning of charter schools
Charter schools first came into existence in Wisconsin in 1993, when the state authorized local school boards to create schools that receive public money, but are given the flexibility to largely run themselves and employ experimental education strategies. In that way, they are meant to be “laboratories” of educational policy where strategies can be tested and maybe implemented into the rest of schools.
“The heart of the whole charter idea is that you can introduce innovation into schools,” President of Urban Day School John Plantenberg said.
Charter schools are still public schools that receive a set amount of state and federal money that is attached to every student in a district, but charter schools do not receive district money generated from property taxes like most public schools. They are nonsectarian, cannot charge tuition and must use a lottery system for accepting students if there are more applicants than seats at the school.
On the other hand, charter schools do not have to pay for a large bureaucratic infrastructure such as that of MPS, and they have more authority over their own budget, not having to use the state accounting system and not having to give the same salaries to faculty and staff (who are not necessarily unionized at charter schools).
“The difference between a charter school and a public school is that we have total autonomy over how we want to spend our money,” Principal of Milwaukee College Preparatory School Robert Rauh said. “We have autonomy over our budget and how we want to spend our money. We have autonomy over who works here.”
With that autonomy is an increased demand for results by the authorizer. Failure to meet the standards set by the authorizer can result in the school being shut down, as UWM has done four times.
“Autonomy for accountability,” is the charter school motto according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website.
Becoming a charter authorizer
The OCS opened in 1999, after the state legislature amended charter school law to allow state-approved organizations, such as UWM, as well as local school boards and districts to approve charter schools to open and then monitor how effectively the schools educate their students.
That legislation opened the door for UWM, the Milwaukee Common Council and Milwaukee Area Technical College to authorize charter schools in Milwaukee along with MPS, as well as UW-Parkside in Racine alongside the Racine Unified School District.
While some authorizers tend to let charter schools run their course until results are due, Kattman stays closely involved with every charter school, visiting each one at least once a month.
“Some people think what they’re looking for in an authorizer is hands-off,” Plantenberg explained. “Others think that it ought to be more hands-on, not hands-on in the sense that you’re actually interfering with the school, but that you’re looking more closely… There are people who don’t like that and there are people that like that. We like it.”
A charter school in transition
Kattman’s “hands-on” approach was instrumental in transitioning Urban Day from a choice school into a charter school two years ago.
Urban Day has its roots as a religious school, founded in 1913 as St. Benedict the Moor School. In 1967, the school closed and reopened as a non-religious community school where parents paid what they could while working within the school to keep it running, the first of its kind in the country according to Plantenberg.
When the school reopened, it was named Urban Day School as a gesture of defiance towards its wealthier neighbor in Whitefish Bay, Milwaukee Country Day School, which had just recently merged to form University School of Milwaukee.
“Urban Day School was a school for children living in poverty, and the message there was that we can provide as good of an education for these children in the inner-city of Milwaukee as the wealthy people can the suburbs,” Plantenberg said.
Urban Day operated as a pay-what-you-can school supplemented by free labor from parents and donations until 1989, when Wisconsin initiated the first school choice program in the country. This program allowed low-income families to choose to send their children to a private school using a voucher issued by the state. It also gave Urban Day a steadier revenue stream than before, allowing them to expand.
“There was about 20 years in there where Urban Day School grew rather rapidly because there was enough funding so that you could grow the school, but it wasn’t enough money to offer the education that really was the Country Day School education that we had promised,” Plantenberg said.
Plantenberg and the board that runs the school began shopping for charter school authorizers in the area who could not only hold Urban Day accountable for results, but also one that could provide experience and support in revamping the school. UWM seemed by far to be the best choice.
“We interviewed authorizers and we also interviewed schools in the various systems to see what they were getting from the program and how it was working for them,” Plantenberg said. “It was the accountability and you could tell that the accountability was working because you look at the schools that [UWM was] authorizing.”
UWM approved Urban Day to become a charter for the 2010-2011 school year. To earn the charter, Urban Day proposed completely revamping their teaching model and hiring a new principal, Shandowlyon Hendricks-Williams, who revamped the faculty.
“[Urban Day] terminated all of their administrators, terminated 40 percent of their staff, hired all new, brought in a really dynamic [and] demanding principal, brought in our evaluation methodology, and now you go to the school and it’s orderly – people are teaching,” Kattman said.
Part of Urban Day’s transition was the implementation of a program called “Success for All,” in which students break off into small groups for a couple hours each day. These groups are based on reading level and not on grade level, allowing for students in three different grades to be in one group together.
Although Plantenberg and Kattman both describe the first few weeks as “chaotic,” especially breaking up over 500 students into 50 groups at the same time, but once students, faculty and staff adjusted to the program, the environment and the culture changed.
“The learning environment here is much better, it’s much more positive than it was as a choice school,” Plantenberg said. “I think that has to do with a new principal, real high-quality teachers and a well-defined program and well-defined expectations.”
Now only half-way through its second year as a charter school, it is still bringing its standards up to Kattman’s comfort zone, but the school has been very successful so far.
“Urban Day has made some really great jumps in year one and year two is even better,” Kattman said. “If they keep that up, they’re going to be one of these other really good schools.”
Milwaukee College Preparatory School is one of those successful schools, with over 80 percent of its students scoring proficient for their grade levels in math and science, 20 percent higher than the MPS average according to the 2009-10 OCS report.
In Principal Rauh’s eyes, the success of his and other urban charter schools demonstrates that students of impoverished areas have just as much ability as students from the suburbs and it comes down to teaching.
“We believe not only all children can learn, but also all children will learn and it’s up to us to make sure that happens,” he said.
Although Kattman will soon retire, with a search already under way to replace him, Plantenberg attributes much of the success of Urban Day and UWM’s other charter schools to Kattman.
“There is a good model for a charter authorizer, right here in town,” Plantenberg said. “So, anybody who wants to be a good one, go visit Dr. Kattman.”
