When I hear Mitt Romney’s seductive rhetoric about school choice, I think back to the beginning of Milwaukee’s voucher program — the country’s largest and oldest voucher initiative.
In particular, I remember
Nov. 14, 1990. On that day, I learned an important lesson on the difference
between rhetoric and reality.
I dropped my two daughters
off at day care and began my job at the Milwaukee Journal. The city
editor, a gray-haired Irishman who filled every stereotype of the gruff
newshound, called me over. I was to do an on-the-scenes report at a private
school receiving publicly funded tuition vouchers.
Like most people, I hadn’t
given much thought to this new and unique initiative. Vouchers had been
promoted as “school choice” for poor black kids, and seemed a worthwhile
experiment.
I grabbed my reporter’s
notebook and headed to the school. I sat in on some classes, which seemed
little different than at schools across the city. But teachers approached me in
the hallways with vague stories of turmoil and advised I attend a parent
meeting the following evening.
I went to the meeting,
only to be blocked by a somewhat beefy lawyer. He told me, in no uncertain
terms, that it was a private school and I would not be allowed to attend the
meeting.
I huffed and I puffed, but
the lawyer was right. Private schools do not have to follow Wisconsin’s open
meetings and records laws.
I never found out what
happened at the meeting, although within a few weeks the teaching staff was
slashed by a third and the principal was gone.
I did, however, learn the
first of many lessons about school vouchers. In essence, vouchers are a
mechanism to funnel public dollars into private schools. They are an
abandonment of both public education and our country’s democratic ideals.
And now we have Romney
promising a national voucher plan to save American education.
Romney knows the term
“voucher” is politically toxic, so instead he uses the rhetoric of “choice.”
The heart of Romney’s agenda: students will be able to use federal education
dollars to attend any school—public or private, religious or non-sectarian,
charter or digital.
“I want the kids that are
getting federal dollars … to be able to go to the school of their choice,”
Romney said at the first presidential debate. It was not a new position, first
outlined in his education white paper last May. At the GOP convention, school
choice was the only K-12 education reform mentioned in Romney’s acceptance
speech.
Romney’s plan would launch
an unprecedented shift of federal dollars into private schools. It would also
be an about face from demands for increased accountability. By their very
nature, private schools do not have to follow the same requirements as public
schools in releasing information.
FALSE PROMISES
Milwaukee’s program has
long been a model for other cities and state programs, from Cleveland, to New
Orleans, Florida, and Indiana. Beginning in 1990 with 300 students in seven
non-sectarian schools, by 2012 vouchers had expanded to almost 23,000 students
in more than 100 private schools, most of them religious-based. In size, the
voucher program now rivals Wisconsin’s largest school districts, but with
minimal public accountability or oversight.
For more than twenty
years, supporters of vouchers for private schools have had a chance to prove
their assertion that the marketplace and parental choice are the bedrocks of
educational success, that unions and government bureaucracy are the enemies of
reform, and that vouchers will lead to increased academic achievement.
After two decades and more
than $1.27 billion in public funding, however, the Milwaukee voucher program’s
enticing promises have not materialized.
The first apples-to-apples
comparison between Milwaukee’s private voucher and public schools wasn’t until
2010, a testament to how difficult it is to demand public transparency from
private schools. State test results showed that students in private voucher
schools performed significantly worse in math and about the same in reading as
their public school counterparts. Recent results have been similar.
Nor has Milwaukee’s
voucher program met the promise of increased parental satisfaction. A
longitudinal study on achievement, in its final report, noted that only17.5
percent of the voucher students remained in a voucher school after five years.
The comparable figure for the public schools was 43.5 percent.
Fundamentally, however,
the issue of school vouchers goes beyond education achievement and parent
preference. Above all, vouchers are an abandonment of this country’s commitment
to public schools—a commitment rooted in an understanding that strong
democratic institutions require a citizenry educated not just in the three Rs
but also in their civic responsibilities.
Every state constitution
in the country enshrines the right to a free and public education for all
children—an honor that is not bestowed on other requisites for life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, whether housing or employment or healthcare.
In the current debates on
vouchers, there is strikingly little discussion of the relationship between
democratic values, civic responsibility, and public education. Instead,
education is treated as a mere commodity, with parents and children reduced to
mere consumers.
Do our urban public school
systems have deep-seated problems? Without a doubt. But at the end of the day,
they are the only institutions with the commitment, capacity, and legal
obligation to teach all children.
In Milwaukee, vouchers
have created separate and unequal school systems. The education of students
with special educational needs is just one example. The percentage of special
ed students in Milwaukee’s public schools is about 20 percent. At the private
voucher schools, the comparable figure is less than 2 percent.
“All together, the 102
voucher schools are serving a special education population that is equal to
what the Milwaukee Public Schools serves in just one of its district schools:
Hamilton High School,” Milwaukee superintendent Gregory Thornton noted last
year.
Vouchers were promoted in
the 1990s as a way to help poor black children escape failing schools. But that
rhetoric has disappeared in Milwaukee. Voucher supporters have expanded
vouchers to middle-income families and have made clear they want to make
vouchers available to all, including millionaires. Vouchers for poor children
was just a first step.
For more than twenty
years, I have listened to the voucher movement’s seductive rhetoric of “choice”
and “parent power.” If I didn’t know better, I might proclaim, “Sign me up
today!”
Milwaukee, however, has more
than two decades of reality-based vouchers. The lesson from this heartland
city?
Vouchers
are a vehicle to funnel tax dollars into private schools. Using the false
promise of “choice,” they are an unabashed abandonment of public education and
of our hopes for a vibrant democracy.
— — —
This opinion originally appeared on Common Dreams, a web-based, non-profit news center created in 1997 to promote the common good.
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