The DOJ’s Agenda to Shut Down School Choice

First off, Dean Kearney, thank you for recommending me to be the September Alumni Blogger of the Month.  It’s much appreciated and, I’m sure, will be a rewarding experience.

For everyone else, I’m CJ Szafir, associate counsel and education policy director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (“WILL”) – a nonprofit legal organization that works to advance the public interest in law, individual liberty, constitutional government, and a robust civil society.  We have offices in Milwaukee.  The president and general counsel of WILL is Rick Esenberg, who is also an adjunct professor at Marquette Law.  Prior to WILL, I worked in the state legislature, serving as policy adviser to the Senate Majority Leader.  I graduated from Marquette Law in 2011.

As noted, I work primarily with education reform and, truly, this is about an exciting time as any to be in such a field, as evident by the state recently expanding school choice statewide.  For all the law students reading this, I never anticipated working in education law and policy; it’s a perfect example of how life can lead you to unexpected places.

My optimism and excitement aside, it’s with great trepidation that my first blog post be on a topic that will be unsettling to many – the United States Department of Justice has a political agenda to shut down school choice.  Think this is an overstatement?  Consider the following two major developments from the summer, one of which is in our backyard.

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Summer Youth Institute at Marquette Law School

A Summer Youth Institute is being held at Marquette Law School this week.

Students attending the Summer Youth Institute are spending a dynamic week learning about the law, practicing skills, and meeting with attorneys, judges, and law students. They are learning about the American legal system, notable figures in legal history, and the United States Constitution. They are reading United States Supreme Court cases and learning about case analysis and note taking.

Students are also practicing oral advocacy and will be participating in a moot court before a judging panel. They are studying negotiation strategies and engaging in a mock negotiation.

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Charter School Session: Performance, Perspective, and Passion

Charter schools are “the strongest wave of educational reform in the United States” and they’re not going away, one of the nation’s premier charter school researchers told a conference at Marquette University Law School this week. So what can be done to make the overall results of the movement more positive?

At the conference, titled “Charter Schools: Assessing the Present, Looking to the Future,” Margaret (Macke) Raymond, director of the Center for Research in Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, outlined policy implications of research she has led that includes data from 30 states.

“State policy matters a lot and there are specific policy variables that will get you a fair amount,” Raymond said. For example, authorizers of charter schools need to play their role well if they are to foster high performing charter schools while keeping weak operations from ever opening or closing them down if they are getting poor results. Having multiple local authorizers of charter schools (which Milwaukee has) and having a cap on the number of charter schools (which Milwaukee and Wisconsin do not have) leads to poorer results, Raymond said.

Charter schools are publicly-funded schools that operate to a large degree in independent and self-governing ways, freed from some of the rules and constraints put on conventional public schools. A little over two decades old, the charter movement has grown rapidly, with more than two million students in such schools nationwide. In Wisconsin, there are more than 200 charter schools. Authorizers, most often public school boards but sometimes other government agencies or even private non-profits, give a charter school permission to operate and at the end of a contract period, usually five years, have the power to withdraw that permission based on performance.

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