Critics of school vouchers defend public schools as a source of social integration, warning darkly that private schools breed elite isolation. Have these critics been to Milwaukee recently?

According to a new study, religious schools in Milwaukee that participate in the city's private school choice program enjoy a higher rate of racial integration than do its public schools.

Former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Howard Fuller and education consultant George Mitchell conclude in the report that 50% of Milwaukee public school students attend racially isolated schools, which are defined as schools with 90% white or minority enrollment.

Only 30.1% of students at religious schools that use vouchers fall into that category.

"A majority of these choice students have enrolled in schools where, previously, many students were from more affluent white families," Fuller and Mitchell wrote.

In other words, vouchers are serving as a catalyst for racial harmony in Milwaukee schools once beyond the reach of minority parents. How then, can those who fret over racial division argue with this?

Minorities benefit overwhelmingly from Milwaukee's voucher program. They constitute 85% of voucher recipients. And it was largely minority support that generated political momentum for the program's passage.

In the 1970s, black parents, upset with Milwaukee's failing schools, first floated the idea of vouchers, only to run into a political buzz saw from their supposed champions—teachers' unions and civil rights groups.

The idea, nevertheless, percolated over the next three decades, as forced busing and other public education nostrums compounded the problems of Milwaukee's underclass.

The persistence of Wisconsin state Rep. Polly Williams, who spoke forcefully for minority parents, ultimately overcame the intransigence of the teachers' unions.

"Choice," she commented memorably, "is the best thing that has come around for my people since I've been born. It allows poor people to have those choices that all those other people who are fearing it already have."

This report on racial integration is just the latest piece of evidence confirming Williams' judgment.

Earlier studies illustrated the positive effect of vouchers on test scores and graduation rates.

And according to audits filed with the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction, Milwaukee's voucher schools are suppressing costs to far greater effect than the public schools.

The annual cost per student in Milwaukee public schools is approximately $9,500; last year 39 of the city's 82 "choice" school's spent less than the voucher amount of $4,894 per student. Taxpayer funds actually came back to Wisconsin's government because of this efficiency.

The arguments against vouchers, always threadbare, unravel even further. Public school teachers and administrators hostile to vouchers resemble doctors practicing bad medicine.

But thanks to Fuller and Mitchell's findings, low-income minority parents can say to them: "Physician, heal thyself."