Letter to Editor, The Nation

As the only person who represents the entire City of Milwaukee in public education, I vouch for vouchers.

Barbara Miner’s attack on Milwaukee’s model redefinition of public education compellingly demonstrates the angst of white professionals clinging to the title "progressive" while denying poor parents schools they want. As a report on Milwaukee, however, her article fails fact.

Ms. Miner claims the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program "drain[s] money and support from the public schools." In Milwaukee’s ten years of vouchers Milwaukee Public Schools revenues have increased from $564 to $934 million. Per pupil spending has risen from $5,563 to $8,718.

Support for MPS has never been stronger. Last spring an unlikely coalition of Milwaukee business leaders, advocacy groups, teachers’ and administrators’ unions, religious organizations, Milwaukee Catholic Schools and the MPS board secured MPS budget increases exceeding $25 million in Wisconsin state aids, $45 million for class size reduction, and $170 million in property tax-free bonding authority for new Milwaukee public schools.

Harvard and Princeton studies have found significant academic improvement among choice students compared to peer cohorts who remained within Milwaukee Public Schools. The much-misquoted author of the Department of Public Instruction’s early program evaluations, University of Wisconsin Professor John Witte, has concluded that choice deserves an extended and wider implementation.

Ms. Miner’s claim that choice schools are unaccountable contradicts the findings and evidence of the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau’s findings this February. The audit bureau determined that choice schools were accredited, used standardized tests and other forms of student assessment extensively, and developed high loyalty, trust and satisfaction among parents.

The claim that choice schools provide fewer transportation or exceptional education services (services to physically or cognitively disadvantaged students) than MPS omits the embarrassing reality that MPS administers a two-tier service system, severely restricting ex ed, transportation, Title I and other programs to MPS students, despite legislative intent and court rulings that these programs should serve all qualifying children, regardless of the educational sector in which they are enrolled.

Tellingly, Ms. Miner ignores the most important issue of whether the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has helped Milwaukee Public Schools improve. Even the former MPS board, endorsed and financed by the Milwaukee teacher’s union, acknowledged that MPS was a better system because of choice’s external competition and pressure. Specialty programs have more than doubled, in-school childcare is now the norm, and accountability measures have risen steadily.

Milwaukee voters have overwhelmingly supported choice. Both mayoral candidates in the Spring 2000 elections supported it. The MPS School Board elected last spring is committed to a strategy of competition rather than traditional complaint. In the entire ten years of the program not one Milwaukee legislature has proposed eliminating it.

Ms. Miner is correct on one item. "[T]here is little doubt that many low-income parents…support the idea of getting public money to go to a private school." As she implies but cannot bring herself to admit, poor parents do not want school choice or quality public education. They want both.

So should we.


John S. Gardner At-Large Director Milwaukee Public Schools