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November 2006
By Patrick McIlheran, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sure, school choice will remain, because both Gov. Jim Doyle and Mark Green favored it.
But elections don't make enemies go away, and the state's dominant teachers union still chafes at the idea that some children might escape its grasp. So choice will remain embattled.
That's fine: Public policy deserves debate.
But watch for myth-spinning. There are three particular claims every autumn by people who don't like letting poor Milwaukee parents use state aid to pay for private schools.
The silliest is that choice schools "cream" the best students, concentrating failures in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
No. The law is straightforward. Most schools in Wisconsin, public and private, can test students and select who gets in based on ability. This helps Rufus King High School, MPS' showcase, produce remarkably successful results: Students get in only if they show a certain academic ability.
Choice schools can't do that, at least to choice students. The only thing a school can ask a choice student is whether he lives in Milwaukee and whether his family's income qualifies. Thus, when a few years back, a ninth-grade boy wrote, "heep me! I cant reed" on Messmer High School's placement test, the school diagnosed him as needing reading help and took him. It couldn't legally say "no."
Another major contention by critics is that private schools educate kids for two-thirds of MPS' costs because they can tell parents a disabled child's needs can't be met.
Except public schools can say the same thing and do. Only a fraction of MPS' schools can handle autistic children, for instance. As an MPS Web site tells parents: "Certain schools may be better equipped to serve children with severe special needs."
And it's unfair to say choice schools aren't trying. "There are a lot of Lutheran schools with kids with special needs," says Judy Schultz, who heads Lutheran Special School, a program that since 1958 has been helping accommodate them.
Schultz's program includes elementary classrooms that share a building with Milwaukee Lutheran High School. Children with learning disabilities, with autistic symptoms, kids years behind from lead-paint poisoning all learn there, and many go on for a high school program at Milwaukee Lutheran. Beyond that, the program's teachers work with disabled children in other Lutheran schools.
The 27 children who attend on choice grants bring no more money than any other choice student, though their education costs more. Wisconsin public schools, by contrast, got $320 million in special education aid last year.
The Lutherans make up the difference with fund-raising under the belief that disabled children, too, can benefit from a Christ-centered education.
That, constitutionally, is an offering public schools can never match. Not that MPS is inferior for it, but Milwaukee is enriched by parents having the choice, particularly for troubled students.
Lanisha Harris' parents chose it. Harris was accepted by CEO Leadership Academy after she was expelled from MPS' Bay View High School. "I can honestly say I've done a total turnaround," Harris says.
She stands against a third myth, that public schools are stuck with troublemakers. They aren't: MPS expelled 309 students in 2004-'05, with some winding up at choice schools, which, by law, can't screen out kids who have been expelled.
"I don't look at their behavior reports or that stuff when they come in," says CEO's principal, Denise Pitchford, a former MPS administrator, in part because a student's records rarely reach her before the student does. Thus, kids get a fresh start.
Harris' days now start with praise and worship, then continue with classes and expectations. She says the academic load wasn't a big change, but the religious atmosphere was, as was the insistence of everyone, from Pitchford to her classmates, that she could succeed. She's now preparing to be the first in several generations of her family to go to college.
When the Journal Sentinel checked a few years ago, it could find no evidence that private schools were shuffling their problems onto public schools. Yet such untrue claims continue to circulate.
That poisons debate. The most relevant fact about choice students is the plainest: The picking and choosing was done by parents who were given a say over their kids' education.
Such power is a good thing. Wisconsin should embrace it.
The above column appeared in the November 8, 2025 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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