Deborah McGriff has been a leader in the school choice movement decades. In the early ’90s, she was deputy superintendent of Milwaukee public schools when the city created its groundbreaking school voucher program. She is now a managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund. She also helped start the Black Alliance for Educational options and is on the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Late last month, she was one of three new inductees to the charter school hall of fame at a national charter school conference in New Orleans.
We recently talked with McGriff about topics from the growing push for diversity in charter school leadership to the concept of universal vouchers. Her comments, and my sometimes-rambling questions, are lightly edited for length and clarity.
One of your applause lines that got a lot of buzz came when you said [to a room full of thousands of charter school educators and advocates], “To us, not with us, for us, not by us, must end.” What did you mean by that?
In 1998, Howard [Fuller, her husband] received an award from the Center for Education Reform for unsung heroes. And when he accepted the award, he said, “This room is too white.” Since then, we’ve convened people to talk about this, to increase diversity in the movement.
People have finally caught up … more and more people are now beginning to say that if we don’t engage communities — and we like to say empower communities and have people as a part of their own liberation — the movement itself will suffer.
At NewSchools, we’re looking at the leadership of our organizations, so that you can engage communities, and it’s not just grassroots engagement. It’s at every level. Where the decisions are being made, you have to have diversity.
People like the phrase, “done to us, not with us or done for us, rather than by us.” That’s just a short way of saying we want to be involved in our own liberation and the creation of our schools in our communities.
You’re not just talking about teachers or advocates. You’re talking about the people on the charter school boards, the CEOs, the people in top-level positions. How do you go into communities and find people who are ready to step into those roles?
There are search organizations now with a specific focus on funding black and Latino folks. We’ve also invested in an organization that’s looking for charter school board members, so that the boards are not just trying to do it all by themselves, but here’s an organization that can help you with those efforts.
It’s also helping people who may be really good principals, for example, to aspire to want to operate their own schools, rather than just being the principal in an existing organization.
It’s really trying to tap any resource or pipeline that’s going to give you great candidates.
So in other words, you’re trying to find people who are leaders at the school level, and helping them progress?
We want to make sure that we’re not just tapping people who are already in education. We want to find people that are career switchers … There may be teachers, too [who want to become entrepreneurs].
Camelback Ventures, for example. [Founder Aaron Walker is] more of a career switcher. He was in the business world. Carmita Vaughan was working with a school district, but wanted to create her own fellowship program.
Some of the people who work for us — Alex Bernadotte, for example — was an associate partner with us. She decided she wanted to start a college access program. We made her an entrepreneur-in-residence. We invested in her organization, and Beyond 12 exists because she decided she wanted to be an entrepreneur.
You mentioned that [diversity and inclusion are] not a new issue, but are they starting to get more attention?
It’s started to get more attention recently, and I think that’s because there’s been increased opposition to organizations excluding communities from the work that they do.
In Milwaukee, you were present at the creation of a parental choice program for private schools. There was a marriage between the free market people and the social justice people that helped bring that program into being. Now that we’re talking about universal vouchers, what does that mean for the social justice wing of the movement?
I want everybody to have excellence. But the work that I’m doing, I have been trying to focus on ensuring that low-income and working class kids have the same opportunities as affluent kids. And so I tend to focus on those innovations that are going to increase opportunities for low-income and working-class kids.
That’s why I supported the Milwaukee Parental Choice program initially, because it gave low-income kids opportunities to have money go to successful private schools in the city. I did not support the expansion of the program to universal vouchers.
And so now universal vouchers are gaining currency—
That’s fine. I don’t oppose them. I won’t organize against them. I’m also not an advocate either in supporting the passage. I ask the question: How does this increase opportunity?
There is inequity for low-income and working-class kids, and I want to do things that help them close the gap and the inequity, not continue to perpetuate the gap. That’s not to be anti-affluent kids, but my bottom line is: Am I closing the gap if I support this initiative?
[On the role for different types of school organizations in a three-sector approach], are there things a private school can do that perhaps a charter school cannot?
I don’t believe one option is better than another. I think there are great private schools, great traditional public schools, and great charter schools. In each of these categories, there are schools that provide outstanding support for low-income and working-class kids, and your job is to find the school — whether private, traditional public, or charter — that can get your kid the education that they need to be successful. I am a supporter of all, but my standard is, what’s the quality of the education you provide for kids? Period. Especially low-income and working-class kids.
