Tommy Washbush
The story of how a Native American tribal college helped launch a Make America Great Again charter school, whose “1776 curriculum” downplays America’s history of genocide and slavery, shines a light on the unraveling of public education in Wisconsin.
In December I wrote an article for the Wisconsin Examiner about Lake Country Classical Academy — a conservative, Christian school in Oconomowoc that gets curriculum and teacher training from a college in Michigan with a network of charter schools and deep ties to Donald Trump. The curious thing about the school is that it was authorized by the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe College five hours north in Hayward.
Why would the Ojibwe college authorize a school with a curriculum provided by Hillsdale College, known in Michigan as a conservative bastion whose president was appointed by Donald Trump to help promote a “patriotic,” white supremacist version of U.S. history?
One tribal member who took part in the process but didn’t want to speak about it on the record told me, “I would never send my kids there, because my value system is different. But that doesn’t mean we have the right to impose our will on them. … The U.S. government has just shredded Ojibwe knowledge and indigenous knowledge. So for me, the big thing is educational sovereignty. Parents have the right to educate their kids the way they see fit.”
“Educational sovereignty” is the catch phrase uniting a Native American tribal college and conservative Christian school choice activists who are pushing to expand tribally authorized independent charter schools in Wisconsin. (Independent charter schools are paid for by taxpayers, but operate outside the oversight of local school boards.)
UW professor and Native American education historian Matt Villeneuve calls the appropriation of the Native American legal concept of sovereignty by right-wing enemies of the federal government “incredibly uncomfortable.”
There are also uncomfortable issues involving money and oversight. Wisconsin public schools have never recovered from the great defunding of education in 2011, when the Legislature cut per pupil spending by $554 across the state. This year’s budget increase, despite an unexpected $5 billion surplus, was $0. Meanwhile, the state is increasingly siphoning money into private “parental choice” schools.
The Ojibwe tribal college was not the first independent charter authorizer Lake Country Classical Academy applied to. The state’s other independent charter school authorizers, including the UW’s Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO), turned the school down. In Wisconsin, the entities that can authorize independent charter schools include the OEO, Milwaukee’s common council, the chancellors of UW System schools, technical college district boards, the Waukesha county executive, and the state’s two Native American tribal colleges — the College of the Menominee Nation and the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe College.
After the Ojibwe tribal college agreed to authorize the classical academy, it received a state implementation grant of $750,625. Under its contract with the school, the college receives 3 percent of all the per-pupil revenue the state directs to the school to cover the costs of providing oversight. But the tribal college’s representatives have made it clear they have no intention of meddling in the school’s affairs.
“As long as you’re teaching your children to be productive people, that’s what we want,” the tribal college’s attorney James Schlender testified at a Dec. 14 state Assembly education committee hearing. “That’s the idea of educational sovereignty — that’s the principle to it. We don’t make them do things; we don’t require things; we don’t imply things; we make ourselves available if they have questions about different things.”
Nor do members of the Assemly’s education committee appear overly concerned about oversight. Most seemed supportive of a bill to expand tribally authorized charter schools from the current cap of six to an unlimited number of schools. But the author of the bill to lift the cap, Rep. David Steffen (R-Green Bay), could not tell the committee how many tribally authorized charter schools now exist in Wisconsin or where they are located. (Lake Country Classical Academy is only Wisconsin’s second tribal college-authorized school. The first, also launched by the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe College, is a school-within-a-school on tribal land with an Ojibwe language and environmental focus.)
Members of the education committee seemed confused about the mission of the tribal college’s newest charter.
“Are students other than tribal members in your school or is it just tribal members?” Rep. Donna Rozar (R-Marshfield) asked Schlender and the academy’s founder, Kristina Vourax. “We have a mixture of all backgrounds,” Vourax replied. In fact, Lake Country Classical Academy does not serve children of tribal members; it draws students from school districts around Oconomowoc.
The largest number of those students come from nearby Kettle Moraine, which has been struggling for years with declining enrollment. Kettle Moraine’s chief financial officer, John Stellmacher, will never forget the day, Oct. 15, when he heard from the state that his district would have to pay out $1.5 million for more than 100 kids who had decided to leave the district to attend Lake Country Classical Academy. “Our operational budget is about $50 million,” Stellmacher says, “and having a budget swing of about 3 percent a week or so before you set your final numbers definitely causes a little heartburn.
“Our state taxpayers are now financing two systems,” Stellmacher says. “There are more options, but there is also more cost.”
That cost includes our shared interest in maintaining high-quality public schools for all Wisconsin children.
Ruth Conniff is editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
