We have raised nearly $52 million in private philanthropy over eleven years to bridge a gap that should never have been ours alone to bridge.
What distinguishes One City from other public charter schools in Wisconsin isn’t just our academic growth. No other charter school in Wisconsin was established with the specific purpose of serving as a testing ground for innovation for others to learn from. One City was. Our 2017 charter application explicitly mentioned the concept of demonstration schools. This legislation doesn’t create a new purpose for One City; it fulfills the purpose we were created for, and something I have dedicated my entire professional life to.
Once again, I didn’t return home just to start a charter school. I came back to create a new pathway for charter schools to achieve their holistic mission and promise: to act as laboratories of innovation that help all public schools and the children they serve get better. The Demonstration Public School Act accomplishes this.
What the Demonstration Public School Act Will Do The Demonstration Public School Act does not allocate funds from school districts. It is an additional investment in research and development to establish a teaching-hospital-like model for K-12 education. Just as teaching hospitals improve medicine through combined treatment, research, and training, One City acts as a laboratory that develops innovations, validates them via a formal UW research partnership, and freely shares them with every public school district in Wisconsin. The bill mandates this. Dissemination is not optional; it is part of the contract. I have attached a document to this email that further describes our impact as a demonstration public school model.
The $4 million this legislation allocates annually would help us, if selected by the OEO, pursue a goal that should matter to every Wisconsin educator, policymaker, and parent: reaching 80% proficiency in ELA/Reading and Math among One City scholars within five to seven years. That is not just an aspiration. It is the minimum we will accept, because anything less leaves our children economically stranded in an AI-driven economy that is already eliminating entry-level jobs that once provided young people without college credentials a starting point. We are developing the model, the data, and the documentation so that what works here can be implemented in classrooms across Wisconsin.