School choice slandered - Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

Public Interest, Fall, 1994 by Daniel McGroarty

The questions surrounding test scores are overshadowed by the larger fact that many, if not a majority, of Choice students are concentrated in the early grades, having entered the Choice program as kindergartners. What Witte therefore calls the "last test" in a student's file may be, for many of the predominantly young Choice students, their "first and only" test, most likely taken in the second grade. Measuring changes in such early grades, with children engaged in their first encounter with "pencil and paper" testing and subject to "test trauma," may make results less reliable. Witte's own words put it best: "It is extremely difficult to measure outcomes or achievement for children at those ages." Yet this is precisely what Witte's reports do.

As the Choice program matures, examiners will doubtless shift their attention to graduation rates. Here, the Choice program will encounter what we might call a "structural" obstacle to success since--save for two "alternative schools" serving state-designated "at-risk" youth--there is no private high school for Parental Choice students to attend.

The absence of a Choice high school will become increasingly apparent in the years ahead. Many of the children in Parental Choice are still several years away from high school; few will be able to afford private high-school tuition. After eighth grade, many will find themselves with no option but to enroll in the MPS high schools that produce an abominable 32 percent graduation rate. Compare this to Milwaukee's inner-city Messmer High School, with its 98 percent graduation rate and an astonishing 79 percent of its seniors college-bound. Significantly, Messmer, a former Catholic school now independent of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, has sought and failed to win inclusion in the Choice program, denied by the DPI on the grounds that it is "pervasively religious."

Several years from now, access to Choice high schools would make moot the current wrangle over change scores and conventions of statistical significance. A program from which more than 90 percent of inner-city students graduate, compared to a public-school population where 60 percent drop-out, would remove any remaining doubt as to whether private school choice "works." Children who graduate instead of dropping out, children focused on college rather than the lure of the street--education researchers would finally understand what it is that has made Choice parents such fervent believers in the program from the beginning.

Without a Choice high school, however, the implications for the program are ominous. Milwaukee's Choice Program may be judged on its "graduates'" success rate in surviving a Milwaukee public high-school experience from which, to cite one sobering statistic, African-American students have a one in four chance of graduation.

Eliminate the positive

If many of Witte's negative conclusions, which critics find so quotable--are in fact questionable, another group of Witte's findings are solid--and surprisingly friendly to private school choice. Not so surprisingly, choice critics who eagerly invoke Witte's reviews to score Milwaukee's experiment are entirely silent on the positive findings in his reports. What makes this omission all the more interesting is that Witte's positive findings explode some of the most serious charges leveled against private school choice: