December 1, 2022 10:24 pm
What you don’t know about the UW System’s new charter schools should worry you
The UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO), created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 2015, is well on its way to overseeing more K-12 schools than the superintendents of most of Wisconsin’s 423 school districts.
Currently, the OEO, the UW System’s charter school authorizer, lists 10 independent charter schools it has authorized on its website. Three more schools haven’t opened yet but have signed contracts with the office. With 13 schools, the OEO has enough schools under its umbrella to be one of Wisconsin’s 20 largest school districts. Yet there is not much publicly available information about how the office is choosing to approve new charters, or even which schools it has already approved.