Milwaukee's Experiment - vouchers for religious schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

National Catholic Reporter, March 26, 1999 by Erik Gunn

Ahmuty also says, however, that it's not clear how well informed choice families are about their opt-out rights, and what to do should they be violated.

There have been complaints in the past of parochial schools pressuring families with children enrolled to increase their own church attendance, Ahmuty told NCR. So far, no such case has surfaced among choice participants.

It's also true, however, that it would only take one set of parents aggressively pursuing an exemption under the opt-out provision, and one school to resist that claim, to set the stage for litigation that would raise fundamental issues of church/state separation.

Some Catholic observers believe the opt-out provision is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that Catholic schools can't have it both ways: They can't claim to be pervasively religious and at the same time take public money.

"In our documents, the bishops of the United States have always claimed that religion pervades every aspect of our schools," Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Curry of the Los Angeles archdiocese told NCR. Curry's academic background is in church/state relations, and he has written on the implications of voucher plans for religious schools.

"We can't expect public funding to support a pervasively religious activity. Therefore, the bulk of what we do in our schools will be entirely secular, with perhaps some religious component before or after the school day."

"I'm not saying I'm against vouchers," Curry said, "but I am for being clear about what they mean." He added that when he has voiced these concerns at bishops meetings, he has been surprised at the response -- bishops from across the usual ideological divides, he said, have approached him to say they share his views.

For educational theorists, the ultimate question about vouchers remains: Do they work? The lack of stringent oversight in the Milwaukee program, some critics say, makes getting an answer to that question difficult.

The choice legislation calls for a small degree of oversight by the Department of Public Instruction, and no curriculum requirements. Indeed, for choice backers that was part of the point: to let parents be the direct arbiters of quality, rather than saddling private schools with the sort of mandates that were blamed for stifling innovation in public schools.

The law implementing choice did require that, for schools to continue participating from one year to the next, they would have to meet one of four standards: Have at least 70 percent of choice students advance one grade level; maintain an average attendance rate of at least 90 percent for choice students; show that at least 80 percent of choice students demonstrate "significant academic progress" through whatever means the school chooses; or show that at least 70 percent of families of pupils in the program meet the school's own parental involvement criteria.

Practically speaking, the criteria are so broadly drawn that "everyone gets back in" to the program, according to Brad Adams, who oversaw the choice program for the state Department of Public Instruction until this past summer. "These are private schools, and there's virtually no oversight."