At a speech before school choice advocates in Washington D.C. earlier this week, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin unveiled a proposal to expand the Milwaukee School Choice Program to other regions of the state and to remove the income limitations that have restricted the program to only impoverished families in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
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A Little Background: Milwaukee is home to the oldest and largest voucher program in the country. Started in 1990, if the voucher program in MPS were considered a school district unto itself, it would be the sixth-largest district in the state. There are more than 22,000 students in Milwaukee who use vouchers, and the cost to taxpayers has been more than $100 million since the program was created.
The rationale for the program was that since the Milwaukee Public Schools provide an unacceptably poor quality of education, parents should be given vouchers to move their students to parochial and for-profit schools to obtain better results. The problem is that more than $100 million in taxpayer funds later, the results from voucher schools are no better than the MPS, and in some cases, they’re worse.
A review this year by the Department of Public Instruction found that voucher students scored at 55.2% in reading, while MPS students scored 55.3%, so the scores are about as even as they could be. But in math, voucher students scored 34.4% compared to 47.8% for students in MPS.
These figures confirm the findings from other researchers and other programs across the country: Voucher programs offer little, if any, improvement over the results from the existing public school system. And since vouchers are an economic drain on the school district where they exist, and since the Milwaukee Public Schools are trying to cope with the impact of an $841 million budget cut from the proposed Walker Budget, one has to ask one question.
Why would conservatives keep pursuing a program that is such an obvious and demonstrable failure?
Governor Walker provided the answer to that question in his speech the other day. Unless it’s escaped anyone’s notice, the Republican Party does not have a sterling track record with regard to protecting and uplifting the hopes and dreams of minorities. And so it should probably come as no surprise that their ongoing “concern” for the quality of education in the inner city was all part of a much broader and self-interested plan.
Expanding the program outside of Milwaukee County and eliminating the income limits means that white voters in the suburbs can get vouchers to send their kids to whatever batshit-crazy religious school they want, and they’ll get a tax break for doing it.
THIS is the moment they’ve been waiting on for twenty years. THIS is the reason for the faux-concern of the lily-white conservative caucus who don’t give two shits for minorities when it comes to creating jobs or providing health care. THIS is the reason why they’ve poured millions into a laughably ineffective program that supposedly benefits the inner city.
It’s because they never cared in the first place.
What’s next? You know what’s next. The next step in their plan will be to discover, much to their shock and dismay, that the voucher programs serving the inner city schools are not producing any measurable improvements. Horrors!
And in the interest of fiscal responsibility, ONLY those schools that can meet certain state testing criteria can be eligible to participate in the voucher program. In essence, millions in funding that was supposed to go to inner city schools will be successfully diverted to the affluent suburbs.
Simple, isn’t it? All it takes is a complete and utter lack of conscience.