Those who would loot Wisconsin tax dollars from the public education system and move them into private/corporate school coffers are hard at work in this state.
On Mother's Day I diaried my outrage at one of the ALEC bills that's being rammed through the legislature: AB110, the "Special Needs Scholarship Program Act." (Piratizing Special Education in Wisconsin: AB110)
Today, I'd like to turn to another wing of the corporatist assault on public education in Wisconsin, the attempt to mushroom the longstanding Milwaukee voucher program.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice program has been in place since 1990. In its original incarnation, it was sold as an opportunity for children of low-income families who were being ill-served by the Milwaukee public schools to attend non-religious private schools instead, and see if that would lead to better outcomes. Quoting from the Executive Summary of a UW-Madison 1995 report:
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, enacted in spring 1990, provides an opportunity for students meeting specific criteria to attend private, nonsectarian schools in Milwaukee. A payment from public funds equivalent to the MPS per-member state aid ($3,209 in 1994-95) is paid to the private schools in lieu of tuition and fees for the student. Students must come from families with incomes not exceeding 1.75 times the national poverty line.
The first five years of the program had some reasonable restrictions and good data collection in place, which enabled the creation of the report linked above. But look at what happened in 1995 (again from the report above):
The legislation was amended as part of the biennial state budget in June 1995. The principal changes were: (1) to allow religious schools to enter the program; (2) to allow students in grades kindergarten through three who were already attending private schools to be eligible for the program; (3) to eliminate all funding for data collection and evaluations.
So it started out with non-religious schools only, but then the religious schools were added in. And simultaneously, the data-collection funding was removed! How... convenient.
In addition:
Schools initially had to limit choice students to 49% of their total enrollment. The legislature increased that to 65% beginning in 1994-95.
Somewhere later along the line, that percentage limit was eliminated entirely. There are now voucher-accepting private schools in Milwaukee whose enrollment is
one hundred percent voucher-students.
Up through 1995, when the data was actually collected and analyzed, results were inconclusive as to whether or not the vouchers led to better outcomes. In general, achievement (as measured by standardized tests) was no different than the public schools. Parental satisfaction with the voucher program was high, though.
To Wisconsin's credit, a standardized-testing requirement for voucher-students was recently instituted once again, so at least we have some data to work with. We now have results from the 2010/11 testing, to compare voucher and non-voucher students... and the comparison is unimpressive enough that we should be very wary of any further expansion of the voucher program.
Here's the topline, with numbers from the WI Dept. of Public Instruction (see also a 3/29 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article, sourced from the same numbers, Choice schools not outperforming MPS):
Choice students: 55.2% proficient in Reading
MPS low-income: 55.3% proficient in Reading
MPS overall: 59.0% proficient in Reading
Choice students: 34.4% proficient in Math
MPS low-income: 43.9% proficient in Math
MPS overall: 47.8% proficient in Math
You can see that the Choice students have similar performance in reading as their income-level peers in the Milwaukee public schools, and have quite a dismal performance in comparison to their MPS income-level peers in math.
But wait, even this is not apples-to-apples. It gets worse.
You see, very few students who use the vouchers have disabilities. The figure is under 2%. However, among their income-level peers in the Milwaukee public schools, nearly 20% have disabilities!
So let's remove those students with disabilities, to get the true apples-to-apples test-score comparison that the Journal-Sentinel missed. Here's the DPI table with the disability data. If you go to the table itself, look for the All-Grades compilation in the last row of the table, and the right-hand columns to get the percentages, compare the "Choice, No SwD" against the "MPS-FRL, No SwD." That's your apples-to-apples, no disabilities, and choice vs. low-income (FRL= free/reduced lunch), as summarized below:
Choice, No SwD 55.8% proficient in Reading
MPS-FRL, No SwD 64.3% proficient in Reading
Choice, No SwD 34.8% proficient in Math
MPS-FRL, No SwD 49.9% proficient in Math
Check it out. Suddenly the reading proficiency comparison is crappy too, and the math comparison is even worse.
And what does Governor Walker intend to do about this? Why, lift enrollment caps, and expand the program to other areas of the state -- and eliminate the testing requirement again before anyone notices how bad it makes the Milwaukee voucher schools look!!
He announced as much on Monday at a national conference thrown by the DeVos family and the American Federation for Children. (Well, OK, he swept the testing-data part under the carpet, but still.) Read teacherken's diary from earlier this week to connect the dots how the billionaire DeVos family and their religionist/corporatist co-conspirators are trying to dismantle and privatize public education in this country...
The conference attendees lapped it up. There were some folks back home in Wisconsin, though, who were taken off guard -- namely the Republican representatives in the areas where the voucher expansion would take effect! As explained by Ruth Conniff, in a piece called Scott Walker's School Voucher Overreach:
But what did surprise people was Walker's announcement during his speech that he plans to expand Milwaukee's voucher program to other cities, including Racine, Beloit, and Green Bay, "because every one of those communities deserves a choice as well, and with this budget that's exactly what they're going to get."
This was news, for example, to the President of the Wisconsin State Senate, Republican Mike Ellis of Neenah (
Republicans voice concern over voucher expansion):
Ellis said he hadn't thought Walker wanted to pursue the expansion of voucher schools.
“I’m amazed at this. I didn’t see this coming,” Ellis said.
Apparently lifting the income cap is on the table too:
"We have problems with the elimination of the income threshold because the idea behind this program was to help poverty-stricken students who don't have the wherewithal to go to private school," Ellis said. "This is a complete blowing up of that concept. Throw this (new proposal) in and I have to do some serious thinking about the rest of this."
Two other Republican state senators, both facing probable recall elections in July, were blindsided as well:
Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, a key GOP lawmaker on education issues, said he wanted to talk with leaders in Green Bay before deciding on Walker's proposal.
"I'm not interested in dumping something on them that they say, 'No, we're not interested in having this,'" Olsen said.
Sen. Rob Cowles (R-Green Bay) said he was suprised by the proposal, didn't know much about it and wanted to seek more information from constituents.
I hope that their pushback can stop the worst of this, but I'm afraid that it won't -- because it appears that the idea may be to slip the biggest part of the expansion into the budget, where it would be pretty much impossible for Wisconsin Republicans to vote against it. Which, of course, makes it unbeatable despite any push-back from Wisconsin Democrats. We've seen that dynamic a lot in what's been passing here lately!
Meanwhile, the legislation expanding the program to Milwaukee county instead of just MPS, and lifting the enrollment caps, passed the Assembly on Wednesday.
I'll close this diary as I closed my last one. Our biggest response to the piratizing of Wisconsin's education system (and so much more) must come at the ballot box -- first in the July senatorial recall elections, and then when we recall Scott Walker himself.
Scotty, we're coming for you!
And then they came for the children,
Hard to believe but it's true
Schools and good health
might take from their wealth
So tell me what are you gonna do?
Scotty, we're coming for you!
-- The Kissers