School choice in Milwaukee - school-voucher plan

Public Interest, Fall, 1996 by Paul E. Peterson, Jay P. Greene, Chad Noyes

The Milwaukee choice plan, as finally approved by the Wisconsin state legislature in 1990, provides approximately one thousand children from low-income families with a voucher that can be used to attend a private school. Though but a "modest proposal," in concept it has posed a major challenge to defenders of the educational status quo, for it is the first publicly funded program offering central-city families the option of choosing between government-run and privately operated schools. As one early proponent put it, "It was to be the tail that wags the dog - the entire Milwaukee public school system."

So worried were choice critics about the potential national impact of the Milwaukee experiment that they have rushed to judge its worth. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching claims that "Milwaukee's plan has failed to demonstrate that vouchers can ... spark school improvement." Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, declares that the "private schools [in the Milwaukee choice plan] are not outperforming public schools." The Texas State Teachers Association, an NEA affiliate, avows that "the results [in Milwaukee] have been dismal - test scores have actually declined." The head of Wisconsin's leading teacher organization echoes these sentiments. "The bottom line ought to be whether kids learn more ... and if you gauge it by that, it doesn't measure up."

All of these critiques depend upon an evaluation prepared by John Witte, which was widely circulated in unpublished reports and is now available in the collection, Who Chooses? Who Loses?: Culture, Institutions and the Unequal Effects of School Choice, edited by Harvard School of Education professors Richard Elmore, Bruce Fuller, and Gary Orfield. Witte makes two types of claims. First, he argues that "the Milwaukee program offers a long-term laboratory for empirically assessing" the claims of choice proponents. But, as we will show, this is hardly the case, for the Milwaukee program hardly provided any choice.

Second, he argues that the laboratory test provides evidence of failure. "This school experiment ... [has] not yet led to more effective schools Choice creates enormous enthusiasm among parents ... but student achievement fails to rise." After penning these words, Witte, in early 1996, released to the social-science research community the data upon which his findings are based. After analyzing these data, we found that the evidence supports parental enthusiasm rather than Witte's skepticism. The reading scores of choice students in their third and fourth years were, on average, 3 and 5 percentile points higher, respectively, than those of comparable public-school students. Math scores, on average, were 5 and 12 percentile points higher for the third and fourth years, respectively. These differences are substantively significant. If similar success could be achieved for all minority students nationwide, it could close the gap separating white and minority test scores by somewhere between one-third and more than one-half.