Vouching for Milwaukee's Schools
Re-examining the controversial school voucher program almost two decades after its inception

By Kyle Bursaw

Only about half of Milwaukee Public School fourth-graders performed at a proficient or advanced level on the math and science portions of 2006-07 state exams, according to the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s report “Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools: The Limits of Parent-Driven Reform.” Their peers across the state performed at an 80 percent achievement level.

The staggering educational gap between MPS institutions and their counterparts continues well into high school. “Only 68 percent of MPS high school students avoided dropping out and successfully earned their diploma,” the WPRI study reads, citing Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data for the 2005-06 school year.

And so, Milwaukee residents with school-aged children have a choice.

Specifically, since 1990, they have been given the choice to select which school their children attend. For those with high educational ambitions for their offspring, the choice is obvious – about one out of every 30 Milwaukee residents, or 20,000 students, takes advantage of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article published Nov. 9, 2008.

It has been 18 years. The children born in 1990, at the program’s inception, are now nearly done with high school. After all this time, however, there is no thorough research on whether the program has had any effect on the quality of Milwaukee students’ education. But that is likely to change in a few years, as University of Wisconsin-Madison political science and public affairs professor John Witte finishes a new study of the program.

Much growth has occurred in the program since Witte’s original research was cut off by the state in 1995. The number of students enrolled in the program has grown, especially since religious schools officially entered the proverbial mix in 1998. Today, there are more than 100 schools in the program, with more than half of them being Catholic and Lutheran and nearly three-fourths of the students in the program attending religious schools, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article “Religious schools are a top choice.”

If Witte can get the funding, his study will sample more than 1,000 students both in public schools and voucher-accepting private schools. The main sample group is the entire group of ninth-graders within the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program attending private schools – approximately 700 students.

It is too early in the study to judge the results, according to Witte, but test scores and achievement may not be the only important things in determining whether the program positively or negatively influences a school or its students.

“Schools are different in terms of what they provide different families who are looking for different things,” Witte explains. “Some families prefer neighborhood schools because they’re close, some families prefer very high-achieving schools even if their kids aren’t high achieving. Some people want racially mixed schools, some people want schools that are mostly their race. So it’s hard to say what’s better.”

But research is not the whole story.

One such example is Eboni, a young girl who attended Eastbrook Academy, a non-denominational Christian school, through the voucher program.

“[She] really struggled for two years and was quite behind academically, but she made really good friends,” said Julie Loomis, founder of Eastbrook Academy.