MTEA files complaint over Howard Fuller charter involvement

The president of the Milwaukee teachers union filed an ethics complaint Thursday over charter advocate Howard Fuller’s involvement with the City of Milwaukee’s Charter School Review Committee.

The union alleges it’s a conflict of interest for Fuller and his group at Marquette University to receive a contract to help administer the committee because Fuller is connected to a charter school overseen by the same committee.

Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, said she’s looking for a remedy from the City of Milwaukee’s Ethics Board.

The relationship between Fuller and the committee has irked the union for years, but it’s coming up now because the committee on Thursday night was set to consider renewing a three-year contract with Fuller’s group, the Institute for the Transformation of Learning.

The contract is worth $630,000. The money is shaved off the public payments to the eight independent charter schools overseen by the city.

Fuller said Thursday there’s no conflict. While he is an emeritus board chair of Milwaukee Collegiate Academy, a charter school overseen by the city, he does not have a seat or a vote on the review committee. The services his group provides to the committee, he said, are staffing and administrative work.

Evaluations of charter schools’ performance and finances and recommendations about the schools are outsourced to other agents, he said.

In recent years, Fuller’s group has been paid a little more than $200,000 annually to provide administrative services for the Charter School Review Committee.