The Accountability Mirage: Why the MPS Board's Carmen NW Decision Tells Us Everything We Need to Know

On November 20, the Milwaukee Board of School Directors will vote on whether to renew Carmen Northwest’s contract. The school serves 550 students and has 60 staff members on the northwest side. It’s not an easy decision. These never are.

I know this from experience. For nearly a decade, I served as a charter school authorizer. I helped train other authorizers. I led school accountability efforts for a major urban district, and designed charter renewal processes intended to prevent this kind of thing from happening. I’ve helped make the tough decisions to close low-performing schools – both charter and district-operated. I’ve sat through the testimony, listened to the anger and heartbreak, and looked students and families in the eye to deliver this news. I’ve carried the weight of knowing my recommendation would upend families and communities.

These decisions – good charter authorizing – matter in ways that most policy questions simply don’t.

That’s precisely why the MPS Board has a charter renewal process. That’s why they redesigned it this summer, with active participation from board members, specifically to ensure that when these hard decisions had to be made, they’d be grounded in evidence, not ideology. The reason those processes exist is to avoid arbitrary decisions driven by political agendas.

But last week, the board abandoned that process entirely.

At Thursday’s committee meeting, board members didn’t ask the questions you’d expect from a board serious about accountability. They didn’t ask: What is this school doing well? How do we support continued improvement? Or even: How do we make sure students, families, and educators have clarity about what comes next?

Instead, they asked a different question: How do we push them out?

One newly elected board member stated plainly—and on the record—that he will vote against any independent charter school renewal, period. Not based on performance. Not based on what’s best for students or families. As a matter of “principle”.

That’s not accountability. That’s ideology.

Good authorizing means applying consistent standards to all schools. Carmen Northwest scored 76% on the MPS charter renewal scorecard—a score that falls squarely in the range for a three-year contract. The district’s own staff and board members who visited the school, reviewed the data, and evaluated performance recommended a three-year renewal.

80 other MPS schools — more than half of the district — have lower levels of student proficiency in Math or Reading than Carmen Northwest. These are not the schools the board is threatening to close. These are not schools that the board is even seriously discussing. Many of them serve similar student populations in similar neighborhoods. Many are on the city’s north side, where more than two-thirds of Black MPS students attend schools not meeting state expectations.

If the School Board is genuinely serious about accountability, that’s where the conversation should start. Close the lowest performing schools first. Then, if you’re going to remove better-performing options like Carmen, at least you’ve put something better in their place.

Instead, the board is doing the opposite. It’s threatening to close a school that outperforms more than half of its own schools, including most of the schools in the same three-mile radius serving the same students. And it’s doing it based not on performance data, but on whether the school fits an ideological template about what kind of schools families should have access to. That’s not accountability.

Here’s what makes this especially damaging. The board undermined its own process in real time. Board President Zombor participated in redesigning the charter renewal process this summer. Work specifically aimed at addressing failures from prior years. She even served on the charter review panel for this campus. That process recommended renewal. And then she attacked it.

This is how you destroy your own credibility. This is how you tell every school operator—charter or otherwise—that your process doesn’t matter. That politics and ideology matters. That if they don’t fit your preferred model, the data won’t save them.

It’s no wonder that in light of this School Board’s blind ideological hostility, other high-performing MPS noninstrumentality charter schools have made the decision to shift to a “more mission-aligned authorizer” to ensure their schools’ “long term stability”.

What happens next matters enormously for 550 students and their families. If Carmen Northwest loses its renewal, those students and staff don’t disappear. They have to go somewhere. MPS has no plan for where. No one knows what happens to them on November 21.

That alone should be disqualifying for a “no” vote. Before closing any school, a board has an obligation to have a plan in place. To ensure no student and no family is left uncertain about what comes next. The School Board hasn’t done that work.

But more fundamentally, this decision says something about what the board values. It says ideology matters more than outcomes. It says winning political arguments matters more than supporting schools. It says the board has drifted from its core mission: ensuring every Milwaukee kid has access to a good education.

Milwaukee families deserve better. They deserve a board that asks hard questions about performance and asks those questions across all schools. They deserve a board that closes the lowest-performing schools first. They deserve a board that protects good options for families, not eliminates them on blind political principle.

On November 20, the board has a chance to recommit to that mission. It won’t be easy. But it’s the right call, not just for Carmen Northwest, but for every family in Milwaukee watching to see whether their school board is serious about accountability, or just about ideology.

The answer, unfortunately, seems clear.