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"At my old school, the environment I was in
was the same outside the school and inside
the school," says Destiny, dressed in Hope's
tie-and-jacket uniform, her braids pulled
back with a headband. "Here, the school's in
a bad neighborhood, but the environment in
the school is really loving." Hers is
the sort of story Milwaukee's school-choice
advocates cite when touting the oldest and
largest voucher program in the country. Now
it's expanding, but 16 years after it began,
the policy is still controversial and has
shown few documented benefits.
Proponents say it gives options to
low-income kids who might otherwise be stuck
in failing schools, and that the competition
for students is good for all Milwaukee's
schools, both public and private. Critics,
meanwhile, cite the money the program drains
from public schools and the highly uneven
quality of the private ones, which aren't
held to the same standards.
As one of the few programs in the country,
Milwaukee offers a high-stakes test case for
both camps. Yet researchers are only
beginning to take a comprehensive look at
how successful it's been.
"Now quality is emerging as the key issue,"
says Dan McKinley, director of Partners
Advancing Values in Education (PAVE), a
scholarship program for Milwaukee children
that has been generally supportive of
vouchers. "Advocates are getting past the
ideological posturing, saying 'choice will
fix everything.' Parental choice is a
precondition for a quality education, not a
panacea."
Choice is something lower-income Milwaukee
parents definitely have. Families who make
below a set income can get a voucher (worth
up to $6,500 in the coming school year) to
send their school-age children to a private
school, including a religiously affiliated
school. In addition to some 125 schools that
participate in Milwaukee's program, there
are numerous charter schools in the city,
and an open-enrollment program through which
a few thousand students attend suburban
schools.
The quality question - how to weed out the
private schools that even voucher advocates
admit are bad ones - is something that Mr.
McKinley and others hope will be addressed
by new rules.
In March, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D)
signed a bill that raises the cap on the
number of voucher students from 15,000 to
22,500 and also requires accountability
measures - such as standardized testing and
accreditation - for the first time from the
private schools in the program.
It's a step everyone agrees is needed.
Voucher supporters had envisioned a system
in which parents would choose only good
schools, so the worst ones would fall by the
wayside due to market forces. But that
hasn't proved to be the case.
The voucher program has given new life to
venerable Catholic and Lutheran schools in
the city, and has spurred the creation of
dozens of new schools - many of them
religious - that rely solely on voucher
students. All told, about 70 percent of the
voucher schools are religious. Some of those
schools, like Hope, show signs of
excellence, but not all.
In one of the worst instances, a convicted
rapist opened a school, which has since shut
down. Reporters from the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel tried to visit all 115 schools then
in the program last year, and found a mixed
bag. Nine schools refused to let reporters
in, and the paper cited "10 to 15 others
where ... the overall operation appeared
alarming when it came to the basic matter of
educating children."
One school was opened by a woman who said
she had a vision from God to start a school,
and whose only educational background was as
a teacher's aide. Others had few books or
signs of a coherent curriculum. Yet they've
been able to enroll students.
Some of the worst schools - including four
this year - have been shut down, often for
financial reasons, and voucher proponents
hope that the new requirements will make it
tougher for bad schools to enter the
program.
"The reality is that when you look at the
research, parents choose schools for a lot
of different reasons," says Howard Fuller,
head of Marquette University's Institute for
the Transformation of Learning. He's a
former Milwaukee schools superintendent and
a prominent advocate of the city's choice
program. "We need to be focused on making
sure [every school] is excellent."
But critics say it's too little, too late.
"We need to ensure that what the public is
paying for is a high quality education for
kids," says Nancy Van Meter, director of the
American Federation of Teachers' Center on
Accountability and Privatization. "After
this many years there ought to be some hard
data, and there's not."
Studies done in the early years of
Milwaukee's program, before the state
stopped requiring yearly reporting from
voucher schools and before religious schools
were allowed into the program, showed little
difference in student achievement among
voucher students, but measurable improvement
in parental satisfaction. A new five-year
study was just announced by Georgetown
University in Washington.
Nationally, studies on vouchers have been
mixed. A few showed signs of improved
student achievement and evidence that
competition improves public schools. Others
showed negligible difference. "The evidence
to date is very mixed," says Jack Jennings,
director of the nonpartisan Center on
Education Policy. "For [the] sake of kids
... it would be good to have an objective
analysis."
Smaller voucher programs currently exist in
Washington, D.C. and Cleveland, while
Florida and Utah have specialized ones that
target students with disabilities. A larger
Florida voucher program was declared
unconstitutional by that state's supreme
court earlier this year.
"People feel good about having choice," says
Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and
economics at Stanford University. "But most
of what they're having is the choice to move
into a private school that is not so
different from the public school they left."
Still, some students say the program can
make an enormous difference. "Everything has
room for improvement, but if this works now,
let's give it a chance," says Charles Green,
a senior at Messmer Catholic High School,
who will go to New York's Columbia
University next fall on a full scholarship.
Messmer gets about 80 percent of its
students through vouchers. Students put the
name of the college they're shooting for on
their locker, and the daily attendance rate
- often higher than 95 percent - is posted
by the entrance. Nearly 90 percent of its
students go on to a four-year college every
year, says principal Jeff Monday.
Like all schools in the program, it can't
use selective criteria to admit students.
Its imposing brick building couldn't be more
different from Hope Christian School,
located in a shabby strip mall in one of the
city's worst neighborhoods. But that doesn't
stop Hope from offering a positive
alternative to the neighborhood public
schools.
Students there go to school for extended
hours, call teachers on their cellphones if
they have trouble with homework, and attend
school on some Saturdays.
Marchelle Hicks says she didn't know what to
do with her son Orlando at his old school -
he was getting failing grades and the school
insisted he go on medication for
attention-deficit disorder. She found out
about Hope's rigorous, no-excuses curriculum
through a brochure in her door, and enrolled
him in fourth grade there this year.
"He's an 'A' student," Ms. Hicks says
proudly. "Now we don't talk about testing or
medication.... His whole attitude of going
to school has changed." |
