Here’s pretty much all you need to know. Wisconsin’s school choice programs were started in 1991 by then-Gov. Tommy Thompson. The initial program had 337 students. Today the expanded programs have a total of 42,000 students.
Those are votes just as clear as any vote cast in a ballot box. Tens of thousands of Wisconsin families would rather have their children attend a school other than their local public school. And, of course, these numbers only include those who take advantage of the voucher programs. Many more families simply pay double tuition — tuition at the private school plus their tax dollars that go to support public schools that they don’t use.
I like these choice programs for two reasons. First, they simply give families that could not otherwise afford it a chance to choose the school that is best for their child. And second, this should provide public schools with competition to provide them with an incentive to improve.
But pubic school administrators and teachers unions don’t see it that way. They don’t want to compete. They don’t want families to have a choice. They want kids — and the state funding that follows them — forced into the schools they control.
And this, oddly, is considered the “progressive” position. Why is denying less well-off families the same educational options that more well-to-do families have progressive?
Now comes a predictable lawsuit from a liberal group that was filed recently directly with the state Supreme Court, skipping the usual process that starts with lower courts. It’s predictable because now that the Court has a 4-3 liberal majority every liberal cause in the state that can afford a lawyer will be knocking on that Court’s door. That’s fine. It’s part of our system, but it doesn’t mean we have to agree with every cause. For example, I agree with the causes of fair legislative district maps and of freedom of choice on abortion while I disagree with attacks on school choice. (Note: Liberals and most Democrats will not give me a break for being right on two out of three of these litmus tests. Orthodoxy brooks no opposition.)
In a ludicrous statement, the plaintiffs in this case claim that giving parents a choice is a “cancer” on public education. “What started out as a small experimental program in Milwaukee in the 1990s has been transformed by our Legislature into a large and growing cancer on Wisconsin’s public schools,” the complaint says.
If something starts out as an experiment and now has grown exponentially because of parental demand, doesn’t that suggest that the experiment was a success? Public school administrators and teachers unions need to stop complaining and start competing. If you’re losing students, well, why is that? What are you doing wrong? How can you compete and recapture your market share?
The rhetoric of the complaint becomes even more untethered when the plaintiffs claim, “This parasitic funding system is pushing public school districts into an ever-worsening financial crisis, which is leading to what can only be described as a funding death spiral for public education.”
It’s just astounding to me that a public school system that has general local taxing authority — and which just got a large increase in state aids — can talk with a straight face about funding death spirals. Here in Madison we routinely approve every school referendum on offer and usually by a margin of two-to-one or better. Referenda in most communities usually meet with success, if not on the first try then on subsequent attempts. And yet it’s never enough. Nothing’s ever “fully funded” because if it ever got close the goal posts would be moved back. To these interest groups every problem could always be solved with more money and, since it is impossible to ever have enough money, no problem can ever be solved.
And all of this state and local money pouring into education is producing worse results. Test scores are consistently horrible, with roughly only four out of ten students competent in reading and math at pretty much every grade level. Scores went down even further because of COVID school shutdowns (in large part demanded by the teachers unions) but the numbers were dismal even before that.
And the response of the educational establishment is to blame the tests. When the latest dreadful performance of schools was reported last week, Superintendent Jill Underly said. “I am tired of politicians claiming that our children aren’t learning because they aren’t reaching a proficiency score.” (Underly, who won a statewide election, apparently does not count herself as a politician.)
But the scores are the only objective information we have on the performance of our schools. I’ve always been perplexed by the liberal mantra that it’s bad that teachers have to “teach to the test.” What’s wrong with teaching to the test? In other words, what’s wrong with expecting that students in certain grades meet certain benchmarks for fundamental skills, like reading and math? The education establishment attacks the tests because they don’t want to be held accountable for their failures.
Now, it’s no more fair to blame teachers and schools for bad test scores than it is to blame cops for the crime rate. There are bigger things going on beyond the schools that impact those results. But policing does have something to do with the crime rate. And how public schools are run, the values and priorities of school boards and the competence of teachers does play an outsize role in student performance. It’s not the whole story, but every failure cannot be laid off on lack of funding.
The Madison school district is euphoric that instead of losing another 500 students as they predicted, the district’s enrollment remained nearly the same as it was last year. That is good news. They have every right to celebrate. But now they need to drill down on that to try to understand why yet another year of losses, after more than a decade of them, didn’t happen. Is this some sort of statistical anomaly or can it be attributed to some specific policy or demographic trend? We probably won’t know much of anything until we see what happens over the next few years. But the spirit of the thing should be that of a business. We’ve been losing our market share and our lunch is being eaten by our competitors, so what can we do better?
And that’s the attitude that should be taken by everyone in public education from Underly on down. The parents of those 42,000 kids using vouchers are grading their performance.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
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I’ve heard, but haven’t really investigated, that voucher-funded schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. That they’re allowed to pick and choose what students may attend and that they’re not held to the same testing standards as public schools. Perhaps this isn’t true. It seems to me, if the State applies uniform standards to any entity receiving public funding; then I’m okay with school choice. In the absence of that; well, why should taxpayers subsidize private schools?
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Mark captured my concerns quite well. Competition is good. But if two teams play by differing rules, that is not competition.
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Here’s to hoping MMSD dies of this cancer, and to borrow a line from “Yellowstone”’s Beth, I hope it’s butt cancer. The unions should be ashamed at what they’ve become.
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To Mark’s point: my understanding is that public schools have to follow certain statutes that the private schools don’t and one of them is that schools must allow students with really bad behavior and mental and physical challenges in the classroom and dealing with those issues are eating up alot of teacher time and affecting how other students learn in the classroom. This is a challenge that I didn’t face when I was raising my daughters, but one my daughters are facing with my grandchildren and the costs to the teachers and the learning environment and other students is significant and ongoing and pervasive. So it doesn’t seem like a level playing field and taking away resources (funding) to deal with those challenges to let other parents pick and choose where they can send their children to school to avoid challenges like that, just creates a larger pool of elites. Public schools don’t have a fair way to combat that, so they will just continue to go down. I believe these relatively new laws that do mandate that public schools have to allow children to remain in the classroom no matter their challenges is one thing that is really hurting everyone.
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“And this, oddly, is considered the “progressive” position. Why is denying less well-off families the same educational options that more well-to-do families have progressive?”
But that’s not what Milwaukee’s school choice program does. It doesn’t offer poor kids entry to elite schools. It just spawned a new system of private schools that exclusively serve voucher kids.
There are good-faith arguments for school choice, but I feel like you haven’t really thought about this issue carefully if you really can’t understand the pitfalls that public school advocates are warning about. Many of the people and groups who support vouchers do so because they simply do not believe in public education. They view it as socialism (it is) and a gross intrusion of the state into a realm they believe should be dictated by family and religion.
Tests are good for assessing certain, basic skills and rote memorization. They’re not a very good predictor of college performance or job performance. The appeal of tests is that they are “objective,” but in our pursuit of an objective measure of performance, we often end up excluding the most valuable skills, which cannot be captured on a multiple choice test.
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I’ll admit that competition can be a good thing. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of Wisconsin’s voucher programs as they are currently structured. Here are the main issues I have with the current programs:
· I’m a firm believer in the separation of church and state. I am opposed to funding private religious schools with public tax dollars.
· Competition can be good, but the competition needs to be on a level playing field. If the state establishes standards for public schools and teachers, private schools should be held to those same standards if they get public money.
· If a student gets a voucher and leaves a public school, the public school should not lose more money in state aid than they received in the first place. This is a big problem for many districts, particularly “richer” school districts. The way the state’s funding formula works, districts with higher property values receive less dollars per pupil in state funding than districts with lower property values. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. But it is bad in terms of what it means in terms of vouchers, because the dollar value of a voucher is based on a state-wide average. I don’t have it in front of me now, but I believe one study showed that “rich” districts like Madison lose up to 5 times more in state funding than they received in the first place when a student transfers out of the public school and into a voucher school. At least in this regard, I agree with the plaintiffs that the current voucher system is a “cancer” on public schools.
· Even worse (but similar to the above bullet point), if a student has always been in private school but now qualifies for a voucher, the local public school district still loses the full value of the voucher in state funding even though they never received anything in the first place because the student was never enrolled in the public school.
Re: Your comments on school referenda
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said about the Madison Metropolitan School District board. I agree that the board needs to come to terms with the fact that a big reason students are leaving the Madison public schools is due to the policies of the board and administrators. I’ve always voted in favor of local school funding referenda in the past. Those days are over. I’m done voting for increased school funding until the MMSD board gets a grip on reality and changes their policies.
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Thanks, Gregg. Those are all valid concerns.
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Complicated and interesting discussion. I do appreciate the challenge to the ‘sacred cow’ status of public education, especially given the data. Thank you
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Yeah, this is why I’m advocating police-department-choice. Let’s bring some competition to encourage our poor performing police departments to do better.
This is in jest, but illustrates the idea that public institutions are public for a reason. If we want to privatize education, why stop there? If we don’t want to privatize other “low performing” public institutions like the police, why do we want to do it for education?
The answer isn’t the technical difficulty. I could in a week create a technical and operational framework for choice-law-enforcement. The answer is the politics of who is perceived to be involved in the professions. Just like how Act 10 couldn’t have been about saving $$ because public safety was excluded, school choice also isn’t really about education quality.
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All good arguments on the front end policy. But on the back end retail side, the families of 42,000 kids are opting for something other then their public schools. Why they’ve made that choice is something that needs to be better understood.
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I think a great way to improve MMSD, Milwaukee Schools and such is require the teachers to live in the district, i.e. eat their own cooking, or at least their children would be. Unless they send them to private schools. Then they could help elect get elected to the school boards people with common sense and not 1/2 baked ideas & foolishness.
Re: religious schools & tax dollar argument, I don’t believe that the G.I. Bill and Federal School loans, grants, and research dollars are prevent there.
Of course, we have competition at higher education, what’s wrong with doing the same at the primary level?
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