Private choice, public dumping - school choice issue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

National Review, Nov 1, 1993 by Daniel McGroarty

For four years, this Midwestern city has held the dubious honor of being ground zero in America's school-choice wars. The founders of Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program - polar political opposites Polly Williams, a black former welfare mother turned state representative, and Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin's staunch conservative governor - have fought battles with the state's education bureaucracy and teachers' unions in the legislature and the courts. Neither side is giving up.

In the meantime, the battleground is also a testing ground for competing predictions of how publicly funded, private-school choice programs will actually work. The findings are proving surprising. Take the "dumping" charge, the claim that parental choice will enable private schools to steal the cream of the public-school crop, leaving behind a caste of educational "untouchables."

Are Milwaukee's private schools stealing away the best and the brightest under choice? No. Even studies by an evaluator hand-picked by the adamantly anti-choice Herbert Grover, when he was Wisconsin's school superintendent, find that the average Parental Choice student is more likely to have been a disciplinary problem than a stand-out scholar at his old school - and was no better off educationally or financially than his old public-school peers.

But the dumping charge is not empty, just misdirected: problem students are being off-loaded - by the city's public schools.

While the Parental Choice Program gets all the ink, Milwaukee's public schools quietly run a larger private-school placement program, exiling more than a thousand students a year under a program called "Children at Risk." And they pay a premium - 80 per cent of the state's share of the per-pupil cost of education, compared to 50 per cent for a Parental Choice voucher.

Some of these "at risk" students are two years or more behind grade level. Some have drug problems; some are violent; some are pregnant or teen parents. What they have in common is that they are kids in trouble, sent packing by the public schools.

Technically, parents must request that a child be classified "at risk," but those familiar with the program say it doesn't work that way. Schools confront parents of problem children with a forced choice. In some cases, it comes down to accepting an "at risk" assignment or expulsion.

By law, the "at risk" designation requires a finding that all public-school options have been exhausted. The difference between that and school choice is that bureaucrats - not parents - choose which students to move into private schools. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Obstacles in the way of Parental Choice pose no problem for Children at Risk. For example, opponents of Parental Choice have done everything in their power to raise the walls of church-state separation. Not only religious schools but even independent schools with a "pervasively religious" atmosphere have been barred from participating.

Consider the case of Messmer High school, the once-Catholic school that was closed down by Milwaukee's archdiocese almost a decade ago, then reopened by parents and community members under independent control. Messmer, which graduates 98 per cent of its poor and working-class students and sends 79 per cent on to college, has thrice been denied admission to the Parental Choice program. One can only marvel at the thoroughness of the Wisconsin education authorities' inquisition: the eight-page inspection checklist admonishes investigators to check trophy cases for Catholic Conference trophies and to count crucifixes in the classrooms. In February Brother Bob Smith, a black Capuchin monk and former parole officer who serves as Messmer's principal, endured seven hours of interrogation by state education authorities in his effort to gain entrance to the choice program. Nonetheless, in late May, the authorities ruled the school "pervasively religious" and barred it from Parental Choice. For the record, Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction noted that the "C" in WCIAA - on the 1966 boys' basketball trophy - stands for Catholic.

Now, compare Messmer to Milwaukee Spectrum, one of several dozen schools doing heroic work with Children at Risk. Spectrum enrolls 65 pregnant teens, some carrying their second child. Spectrum, like Messmer, is not run by the Catholic archdiocese; its buildings and grounds were purchased for one dollar from the parish next door. There are a whole range of connections between school and church: the parish still uses Spectrum's cafeteria as a meeting hall, Spectrum's employees are eligible for coverage under the archdiocese's health insurance, and the school's assistant principal is a sister of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Girls who graduate from Spectrum receive a diploma signed not only by the school's principal, Steve O'Connell, but also by the principal of St. Joan Antida, a parochial school in the city.

Mr. O'Connell points out with mock admiration the way architects were able to disguise a cross built into the school's brick facade by building air conditioning exhaust vents into its arms. But not all outward signs of the school's religious past have been expunged. While it does not appear in the sketches of the school featured on Spectrum's promotional literature, the heavy stone cross that crowns the school still stands over the entrance.