School gets students into college. But do they stay?
Charter school founder says, ‘This is not the time for taking victory laps’
Like countless high schools in highpoverty cities, the Milwaukee Collegiate Academy takes more than its share of kids who grow up amid violence, abandonment, drugs and abuse.
It’s the sort of childhood trauma that leads, according to statistical probability, to mental illness, academic struggles, unemployment, addiction or incarceration.
In a city longing to break the generational cycle — parents with neurological trauma frequently pass down trauma to their own kids — the tuition-free MCA can make a claim that sounds like a Cinderella version of the American Dream:
For six years in a row, 100% of MCA seniors have been accepted into college — from a small charter school housed in a converted warehouse with no windows and no gym. What’s more, the class of 2018 collectively earned $3.45 million in scholarships, remarkable for a total graduating class of 53, many who entered as freshmen with third-grade reading levels.
Mission accomplished, many might declare. Surely these kids are on their way to a four-year degree, the 21st century ticket to stable income and career fulfillment.
Right?
Howard Fuller, the long-time education reformer who founded MCA, sighs wearily at the question. “Being accepted is not the same as going.” Deflating his tone further, he adds: “And going is not the same as completing.”
“We are struggling with both the going and the completing,” said Fuller. “This is not time for taking victory laps. We have so much work to do.”
For Fuller, 77, who once co-founded a university and served for years as
superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools system, the Academy in many ways is the culmination of his life’s work. He’s not defeated.
He’s proud of the kids. He still teaches. He’s in the school every day that he’s not traveling and knows each student by name, and often their personal ambitions as well as their adversities.
But these days, just when he seems close to a formula that can be replicated and scaled, Fuller speaks with unvarnished bluntness about a city caught in a 50-year downward spiral of poverty and unemployment.
“This is the most challenging place to operate any kind of school,” he said, adding: “We try to break the cycle for as many as we can.”
He’s been tracking down the 400 or so graduates from the school’s 15 years of existence. About 16% have earned a college degree within six years of enrolling in a post-secondary school.
The kids, he said, make giant strides in school only to get on the bus at the end of the day and return to intermittent homelessness, teen pregnancy, parents in prison or single parents with two jobs.
His school is falling short of its own idealistic slogan: “to nurture scholars capable of transforming their world by sending them to and through college.” It’s the “to and through” that gets repeated often. Each MCA student can recite it.
Fuller doesn’t use his office. He sits at a coffee table in the middle of the “commons,” the big room ringed by lockers where the school’s windowless corridors converge and kids congregate. He’s searching his laptop for data from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.
MCA beats the national average but only barely: among low-income students who are the first generation in their family to attend college, only 11 percent will have a college degree within six years of enrolling in school. The figure encompasses all races as well as both two-year and four-year degrees.
“We are beating the national average, but the national average is horrible” — hardly an endorsement of upward mobility, he said.
MCA’s rate also compares to 55 percent of their more advantaged peers who were not low-income or first-generation students.
Fuller turns to a website with U.S. Census Bureau data. “We’ve got 27,000 households in this city that have a household income of less than $10,000. That’s 11.8 percent of the total. You want to talk about trauma? That’s trauma.”
That’s in a city where the federal poverty threshold for a family of four is $24,300. If Fuller moves the income threshold upward to $15,000, that’s one in five households in Milwaukee, which in turn ranks among the nation’s most impoverished big cities.
“A Time to Heal,” a Journal Sentinel series published last year, explored neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic
experiences is an everyday fact of life. The Journal Sentinel series showed trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing, creating populations so traumatized that the local workforce is incapacitated.
Although he grew up nearby, Fuller is astonished at the adversity his students face. “Our salutatorian last year, her mother had been in prison since she was eight. Our valedictorian and her mother had been homeless. Man, I don’t even understand how people survive.”
College is not meant for everyone, Fuller says, but everyone should have the option. The “college premium” — the difference in annual income between millennial college and high school graduates — is wide no matter how it’s measured.
“I’m sure we’re going to have gradual improvement and that’s what gives me hope,” Fuller said of MCA’s success rate. But he adds: “We’ll never turn it around by telling lies and claiming easy victories.”
Located only two blocks from the abandoned concrete expanse that used to be the A.O. Smith autoworks, the city’s biggest industrial employer in the last century, Fuller’s school couldn’t be plainer.
But it’s designed as a therapeutic environment. It might lack windows but the interior is bright. Hallways are festooned with pennants and flags from colleges around the nation. There’s classes on yoga, meditation and ways to deal with test anxiety.
Everything about the school emulates the college experience. The barebones cafeteria is named “the student union.”
To keep their eyes on the prize, Fuller each year takes a gaggle of students to Stanford University in California, where the 5% acceptance rate is the most exclusive among the four-year U.S. schools, lower than Harvard. “None of our students have ever applied to Stanford,” said Fuller, who also lets them tour UC-Berkeley. “It’s just a part of exposing them to another world.”
Can MCA’s results be replicated and scaled? To do so would mean cloning the MCA culture, which Fuller created over the years with gradual but continuous hands-on involvement.
With total enrollment of 323, no one falls through the cracks, not even the nerds, gamers and introverts, said school principal Judith Parker. Although the school has two counselors on staff, those roles fall equally on the teachers as part of an understanding when they’re hired, Parker said.
“You cannot be effective as an urban educator without that,” said language arts teacher Kwame Green. Every day as they arrive and leave, each student passes at least seven faculty or administrators. If facial expressions or body language signals something might be wrong, “they’re pulled aside and asked how they are doing,” Parker said.
“Mistakes are expected, respected and corrected,” said Dean Philip Smith.
Graduates who do punch the ticket of a four-year degree often return. “Even after they graduate, they can talk about life decisions or loans,” Parker said.
Fuller’s students seem to love him even though Fuller otherwise has made himself unpopular at times as an outspoken firebrand who speaks with unnerving candor.
In 1969, he co-founded the Malcolm X Liberation University, an experimental school that stayed open until 1973. In the eighties and nineties, he spearheaded legislation to create Milwaukee’s system of voucher and charter schools, making himself a national figure in the process.
In 1999, Fuller met then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush to discuss school choice reforms. Fuller, who holds degrees from three universities, also founded the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University.
At a major conference in late September at the city’s new Fiserv Forum on the topics of “race and trauma,” it was Fuller whose comments got the most reaction.
Fuller told the 1,400 attendees that he respects those who advocate trauma-informed practices but has no patience for those who can’t get beyond lip service.
“Let’s deal with what it means to go to a house where the toilet doesn’t work, where you don’t have a job, where you don’t have health care,” he said. “If we’re not going to eliminate these conditions, let’s quit having these conferences.”