“The status quo is just not working for so many of our children:” Kaleem Caire Officially Kicks Off Campaign for School Board Tonight

“When you see statistics like only 145 black kids – out of 3,289 kids – are academically prepared for college using ACT scores … that is just crushing to me,” Kaleem Caire says. “I posted these numbers on Facebook and the lukewarm response I got was telling. People are so used to seeing us underperform. And that is troubling.”

Raised by his aunt Gretchen on Fisher Street on Madison’s South Side in apartment buildings across from Penn Park, Caire found himself in and out of trouble and many times underperforming in school as a youth here in Madison. Those youthful experiences were significant in his creation of One City Schools, an early childhood learning school that has changed the education landscape in Madison. Caire is the founder and CEO of the school on Fisher Street, right next door to the Boys and Girls Club, that is headquartered right down the street from where Caire grew up on Madison’s south side.

Nation-leading racial disparities that have existed in Madison for generations and generations of families has been one of the major impetuses behind Caire’s attempt to try innovative things with education. But because of this, and specifically, because he has embraced charter schools, Caire says that there are many people in Madison who don’t really know him that just want to put him in a box.

“I’m trying to transform public education. I’m not trying to create a parallel universe of schools,” Caire tells Madison365 in an interview at Barriques coffee shop on Madison’s east side. “The ideal is that we can learn from these models and replicate them. That’s what charter schools are for in the context of public education. Everything needs a reboot at some point. Public education needs a reboot.

“And some people are so afraid of that, man,” he adds. “But the status quo is just not working for so many of our children here in Madison. We’ve all seen the numbers. To be honest, I don’t even think it’s working for a lot of well-to-do white kids.”

Last month, Caire announced that he would be running for Madison Metropolitan School Board Seat #3, currently held by Dean Loumos who is not running for re-election. Caire will be facing off against former School Board candidate Cris Carusi.

Caire was initially struggling with the idea of whether or not he should run for mayor of Madison.

“I sat down with [Alder and now-mayoral candidate] Mo [Cheeks] in January of last year and he was seeing if I was going to run, out of respect,” Caire remembers. “I told him to go ahead and run and don’t let me slow you down. I was constantly going back and forth about it. A lot of my thinking had to do with the school. That’s my life work. It’s really about illuminating the issues that our families and children need.”

But, then, late last year, Caire says he really started to pay attention to the debates at the school board meetings around Educational Resource Officers (EROs). “I saw these young people out there advocating and how serious they were about these issues,” he says. “I could see the disconnect between them and some school board members.”

Momentum was building for him to get involved in the Madison school board race. Stark achievement gap numbers that he was examining as he went through numbers for proposals for One City Early Learning Center really pushed him over the edge.

“I told my family that I have to step up and do this. Nobody objected,” Caire smiles. “They’ve been around me so long, being an activist … there was hardly any excitement. They were like, ‘Oh, all right.’”

Caire’s school board candidacy officially kicks off tonight at 5:30 p.m. Cargo Coffee on East Washington where he will share his agenda for Madison’s public schools. His invite says that he “will discuss his plan to wage an unprecedented community-building campaign to revitalize and strengthen our public schools for our children, our city and their symbiotic future.”

“I feel really good about it. The thing that was tugging at me to do more to help our kids has settled down now that I’ve made that decision,” Caire says. “I know what I’ll be able to do as a board member. I will be very different from other board members because I will be a very active board member. I’m an organizer.”

This will be Caire’s second attempt at gaining a school board seat. Caire was a radical youngster (his words, not mine!) the first time he ran for school board back in 1998. His opponent was Ray Allen, a well-known African-American candidate who served three terms on the Madison School Board.

“[Community leader] Eugene Parks sat me down at Mr. P’s [in south Madison] side by side with Ray. Mr. P’s wasn’t operating at that point so when I walked in, it was like I was walking into [mob boss] John Gotti’s space, man, to be told by the guys that I need to fall in line,” Caire laughs. “They asked me, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ And then they joked, ‘You’re not even going to get 20 percent of the vote!’

“These brothers were laughing at me. I was intimidated as hell walking in there on the inside, but I was strong walking in there,” he adds, laughing. “Once I was there, I knew I wasn’t on these brothers level … but I’m gonna try.”

Caire ended up garnering 45 percent of the school board vote, and, in the end, the respect of the older men from the community.

“I consider Ray to be a friend and a mentor. I love Ray and his wife [Linda],” Caire says. “One thing that we showed the community was that we could be civil – people thought we were really going to go after each other. We never argued with each other; we just shared our different views on how things should be.”

After that school board run, Caire would be honored with both the city of Madison’s Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and the Urban League of Greater Madison’s Whitney Young Award for his work in the community. But he would soon be relocating to the East Coast where he would become the founding CEO of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, an organization that promoted alternatives to the traditional public school model for African-American families. He would also become the co-founder and CEO of Next Generation Education Foundation. While on the East Coast, he also held executive leadership positions with Target Corporation and Fight For Children of Washington, DC.

In 2010, Caire served as one of 45 expert reviewers for President Barack Obama’s $3.5 billion Race to the Top national education reform initiatives where he was responsible for evaluating education reform proposals presented by U.S. states and helped the U.S. Department of Education determine which states should receive funding.

Caire returned to Madison in 2010 to become the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison. In 2012, the Madison School Board rejected Caire’s proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school that would target at-risk students of color.

Caire was not discouraged. He went on to found One City Early Learning Center. In May 2018, One City’s Board of Directors voted to create One City Elementary School, a tuition-free public charter school – one of the state’s first 4K and kindergarten charter schools – that will eventually serve children in grades 4K through grade 6.

Some life clarity came to Caire while chatting with Kwame Salter, the first black president of the MMSD school board, and young Martinez White – a financial planner, entrepreneur, CEO, deejay here in Madison – at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute annual luncheon last year.

“Martinez told me, ‘I’ve been watching you, Kaleem … I’ve been watching your path and I can tell that through your work that you’re trying to save your younger self. It’s clear to me. We can see it,’” Caire remembers. “I sat there thinking that nobody ever put it to me like that. That’s pretty deep. Other people can see connections to the things I’ve done and my life experiences I’ve talked about.”

At One City Early Schools, Caire’s goals are to create opportunities for children that help them achieve their full potential.

“Everybody in my neighborhood looked out for my behind when I was young. That helped me move forward,” he remembers. “When I think about all of the other kids who didn’t have that same experience of people surrounding them like that. They didn’t. But we could. We could fill in those gaps. And there’s no candidate running for office right now that has the background right now. Not professionally and not personally.

“I always knew what I was about and what I was passionate about, but for a long time, I didn’t truly realize my calling,” he adds. “I struggled with that for a while. But in the last 4-5 years, I’ve known this is what I am supposed to be doing.”

As a school board member, Caire says that he plans on organizing the community to get behind the schools to do four things.

Cutting-edge programming for the students is number one. “It has to be things that are really preparing them to be successful in their future which is a much more complex, challenging world,” Caire says. “All of our children need to be prepared and involved in tackling problems that we are going to face. Are we preparing our young people to engage in that type of environment and to be better stewards in this country in our relationships around the world?

Caire says that we must have 21st-century schools that equip our students for the future

“We have old, antiquated schools, man. When you think of all the new office buildings that people are building around town … do they build places that look like our schools? Absolutely not,” he says. “So why do we force kids to go to school in crappy-ass places? It’s that simple. We’ve got to make sure that we’re updated and looking with an eye toward the future.”

Everybody in the school building needs to be respected, Caire says.

“They have to feel empowered like they can actually be a part of making a difference. I know in my school right now if those teachers aren’t in love with what they are doing and their kids and having the passion to move those children forward, then I’m sitting here and talking a bunch of junk to you,” he says. “We have to make sure that they not only have the salaries and compensation, which is important, but they have the work environment that is good. We have to invest in that.”

It’s going to take a combination of parents and community working together to really move the needle.

“When’s the last time you heard a board member say, ‘Parents, where are you? You can’t abandon these schools. You can’t abandon your children. You can’t go to school and cuss somebody out because you think they said something wrong.’ And even if they did, that’s not the way to approach it,” Caire says. “We can get results and get justice without doing that.

“But at the same time, the schools have to also be inviting to that. And the community is the big eggshell; it’s the bowl,” he adds. “It’s what’s holding all of us. And it has to be strong. We don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on in schools. We need the community to be strong with our schools.”

Finally, he says, we need to have a focus on how our students are learning.

“One of the challenges that our school and other schools will face is the way kids learn and how fast they learn now. You and I were textbook dependent children when it came to learning because of most of what we learned was in school,” Caire says. “But now you can talk to a child about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement and they can go online like voracious and hungry learners and they can cover your whole textbook in one weekend looking at YouTube videos and accessing information on the Internet.

“So, how in that environment do we help students move forward when many of our teachers are taught to teach slower than our students are prepared to learn? How do we utilize the resources that are around you – both the natural resources – which I believe kids birth-8 kids should be learning with their first computer, their brain,” he continues.

“We want to make sure that kids have the power to innovate going forward and to use those tools to do that as they get older,” Caire adds. “Looking where MMSD is now, we’re not having discussions like this. It’s all about ‘Do we have money for facilities? We’re talking about the behavior education plan, officers in schools. What about the achievement of our children, though?”

When it all comes down to attacking the achievement gap, he says, he believes that Madison can and should be doing what he’s doing at One City – creating a family environment for students where kids feel connected to each other, to their teachers, and to their community.

“We just don’t roll like that anymore. We have teachers that live somewhere else and they come in,” he says. “If we don’t have these real, authentic, organic relationships with children where trust is built then we won’t ever get the best out of them. We’ve got to create that environment in our schools. So, I’d want to show Madison that the challenges we have can be overcome.

“People need to get out of their own bubble of thinking and think about all of the people who are challenged in the status quo now and all of the people of color who are running for office right now,” Caire adds. “They are saying, ‘No, we’re not OK with you representing us anymore and us sitting on the outside.’”

Through it all, Caires stresses that he is a graduate of Madison public schools as are all but one of his children who aren’t currently in Madison public schools. He has a love of public schools.

“People need to determine if my [One City] school is anathema to public education or is it building the next wave of young people that feel connected to this community and want to do something with it? Right now, some Madionians have protectionists, fear-based thinking where fear of change guides what they do,” Caire says. “What I told [former executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.] John Matthews years ago is that if you guys don’t start getting out into the community and engaging people on the ground and supporting these community events and being present at the block parties, you will never have those people’s support when things go wrong. They won’t trust you.

“When issues of racial [in]equity were going on back then, your guys weren’t at the table,” he adds. “That has to change.

“And how many black and Latino did you see amongst the 100,000 [people] at the Capitol [for the Act 10 protests]? Very few. We don’t feel connected to you even if we are part of you. So, now they have an opportunity to redefine themselves,” Caire continues. “That’s what I told them. They asked me if I saw a space for MTI or the Teachers’ Union in my work, and I said, ‘Absolutely! You represent the teachers. You should be at the table always.’ But come to the table with your strengths and your strengths are those 3,000 educators that you have working for you and what they can do to turn the lights on for our kids. Be a part of defining what the future of education looks like in our city and not just argue for wages and benefits.”

People will support wages and benefits, Caire contends, if they know that you are supporting their kids. “It’s that simple. We have to be flexible; that’s Madison’s challenge,” he says. “Many of us have struggled to move the achievement gap because their thinking hasn’t moved.”

One of the biggest obstacles to racial disparities is that the city of Madison remains as segregated, if not more, as it was when Caire was a kid growing up on Madison’s south side in the ’80s.

“We live in binary, separate environments and when we come into contact with each other than people don’t know how to act. Liberal Madison are more comfortable saying ‘I support diversity’ but they aren’t around it and they are uncomfortable when they are,” Caire says. “We have to come into contact with each other. We have to live it. And that’s what’s happening at One City. I have a very diverse group of people involved in everything. It can be done.

“Don’t we want black kids to say,‘I love Madison!’? I do,” he adds. “I want them to say that they love where they grew up and I want their community to love them.

“Those are the young people who will help move this city further,” he continues. “If you give them reasons to hate or dislike, they will. If kids grew up here struggling like crazy and nobody ever paid attention to their struggle, those kids will become the ones that terrorize you later.”

Since he first announced his candidacy for school board, Caire has been visiting neighborhoods to meet with parents and visiting schools to talk with children and teachers. He’s also been holding meetings with Madison’s diverse community groups and leaders. What the Madison community needs badly, Caire says, is a unifier who will help bring people together to get things done. He believes that he is that person.

“There’s a lot of people here in Madison doing great work … what we’re not doing is bringing it together. We need to create the synergy that ends up in something dynamic,” Caire says. “I tell people that I’m a social architect. I listen to people and I listen to what they think is really important and I try to weave those things together so at the end of the day, you can see yourself in the work and the outcome.

“Because when people feel connected to it, they stay committed to it,” he adds.