Home : Response to “After Milwaukee”
By Susan Mitchell, School Choice Wisconsin
In “After Milwaukee” (The American, October 2008), Rick Hess slays a straw man.
He first argues that Milwaukee’s experience with school choice shows that “aggressive reforms to bring market principles to American education have failed to live up to their billing.” He then provides an excellent description of why Milwaukee reforms fall far short of a genuine marketplace.
His second point undercuts his first. Neither school choice programs in Milwaukee nor elsewhere in the country come close to the market principles that he outlines. Consequently, the real impact of a bona fide educational marketplace in America remains untested.
Milwaukee deserves a closer look before education reformers declare defeat and move on. Even limited parental freedom has produced results. These results are not widely known and frequently are overshadowed by an echo chamber that repeats inaccurate information.
While the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) gives low-income parents educational freedom that they never had before, it does not represent aggressive market reform. Private schools that participate receive about one-half the taxpayer support provided to the city’s public schools — $6,700 per pupil compared to more than $13,000 per pupil for 2008-2009. An enrollment cap excludes a majority of Milwaukee students from participation and creates great uncertainty for schools as they attempt to plan for the future and consider expansion. A separate cap on family income further limits the number of students eligible for the program. Private philanthropy is the primary source of capital for new schools, expansions, and other remodeling.
Even with these limits, parental freedom produces results. In independent studies, three scholars have concluded that school choice has a positive impact on public schools. Another scholar has shown that MPS has experienced a clear gain in graduation rates. And a rigorous longitudinal study underway at the University of Arkansas will examine the very question that Hess says is settled.
Notably, Hess fails to mention any of this high quality research in his analysis.
Other important research receives decidedly short shrift. For example Hess observes, “While research suggests that some participating students benefit from private school vouchers, these results may largely reflect the ability of students in places like New York City or Washington, D.C. to find empty seats in established parochial schools.” This dismisses in one sentence a large body of high quality, “gold standard” research that includes several cities other than New York and the District of Columbia. In analyzing this research, a Brookings Institution commission concluded the it “favors a positive conclusion about the effects of choice on student achievement.”
By omission, Hess appears to discount potentially important evidence from international research. For example, Martin West and Ludger Woessmann earlier this year addressed whether there is a causal relationship between private competition and student achievement. They reported, “Our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading and to lower total education spending…”
Hess makes a number of claims that don’t stand up to fact checks. For example:
• He quotes a magazine article as a basis for his claim that “since the implementation of the voucher program, reading scores across all Milwaukee schools are falling." In fact, MPS students scoring proficient or advanced on Wisconsin’s Third Grade Reading Comprehension Test grew to 71 percent from 50 percent between 1998 and 2005. More broadly, in ten of 15 categories, MPS students experienced test score gains between 2003 and 2006 in reading, language arts, math, science, and social studies.
• Hess incorrectly states that a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report on troubled MPCP schools included a school “launched by a convicted rapist” and one “whose director over-reported its voucher enrollment and used the funds to purchase two Mercedes.” In fact, neither school was cited because both already had been removed from the program as a direct result of legislative and administrative efforts strongly backed by school choice supporters. Of the seven schools actually cited as “questionable” by the newspaper, three have been removed. Another nine schools declined a request for an on-site visit. Three of those have been removed.
• As evidence of MPCP shortcomings, Hess says that, “Wisconsin headline writers have had a field day, with Milwaukee Magazine and The Capital Times (Madison) featuring the likes of ‘The failure of school choice’ and ‘Whoops, we goofed: school choice doesn’t work like its supporters promised. Gulp. Now what?’” In fact, those stories actually were based on a widely discredited research report that had nothing to do with the MPCP. This is a perfect example of how the echo chamber spreads bad information.
• Hess also observes, “Milwaukee…reminds us that high-performing schools are (like so many nonprofits) ill-equipped to expand in response to demand.” Yet he fails to note that despite the substantial financial disadvantage that MPCP schools face, they have raised $126.6 million to remodel, expand, and build new schools in the MPCP. The result has been a total of 114 projects, financed almost entirely with private funds. In addition, more than thirty per cent of the 122 schools currently in the MPCP have started operations since the program began.
• Hess states that MPS “enrollment has remained stable; it was 92,000 in 1990 and 91,000 last year.” His use of data points is misleading. The following table shows: MPS enrollment when the very small original MPCP was enacted; MPS enrollment the year before the program was expanded substantially to include religious schools; and MPS enrollment last year. The decline since the expansion is significant.
Year - MPS Enrollment
1990-1991 - 92,061
1997-1998 - 101,963
2007-2008 - 87,360
• Hess asserts that the MPCP “enrolls nearly 20,000 students in more than 100 schools, yet this growing marketplace has yielded little innovation or excellence.” Despite their financial disadvantages, MPCP schools are trying merit pay, longer school weeks, online courses and other changes. One important measure of results is the study on graduation rates cited earlier that shows that MPCP students graduate at a rate twenty per cent higher than do MPS students.
In Milwaukee, we see: higher graduation rates for those who choose; public school improvement; private investment to build schools in economically distressed neighborhoods; and educational freedom for many parents. Some education reformers will conclude that that is not enough. Others of us argue that a stronger program — one that actually resembles an “aggressive reform” — may well lead to even better results.
Recent developments in Milwaukee may increase the opportunity for removing some of the barriers that remain. There is a growing and much broader recognition that the traditional public school structure is broken and requires fundamental change. Indeed, MPS must change or be replaced by another system to deliver public education.
This almost certainly would not have occurred without the MPCP and other educational options. These programs have helped to change the debate in a fundamental way. Judging them a failure is premature.
Sources
Hoxby, Caroline M. “School Choice and School Competition: Evidence from the United States,” Swedish Economic Policy Review, Number 10, 2003.
Greene, Jay and Greg Forster. “Rising to the Challenge: The Effect of School Choice on Public Schools in Milwaukee and San Antonio,” The Manhattan Institute, October 2002.
Chakrabarti, Rajashri. “Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee,” Journal of Public Economics, Forthcoming (Available at http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/economists/chakrabarti/index.html).
Warren, John Robert Ph.D., “Graduation Rates for Choice and Public School Students in Milwaukee: 2003-2007,” School Choice Wisconsin, May 2008.
Reports of the School Choice Demonstration Project are at www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP/Research.html.
Greene, Jay. “The Effect of School Choice: An Evaluation of the Charlotte Children’s Scholarship Fund Program,” Education Matters,. 2001.
Cowen, Joshua, “School Choice as a Latent Variable: Estimating the “Compiler Average Causal Effect” of Vouchers in Charlotte,” The Policies Studies Journal, 2008.
Howell, William, Patrick Wolf, David Campbell, and Paul Peterson, “School Vouchers and Academic Performance: Results from Three Randomized Field Trials,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2002.
Wolf, Patrick, “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After One Year,” U.S. Department of Education, 2008.
Greene, Jay, Paul Peterson, and Jiangtao Du, “Effectiveness of School Choice: The Milwaukee Experiment,” Education and Urban Society, 1999.
Rouse, Cecilia, “Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1998.
Barnard, John, Constantine E. Frangakis, Jennifer L. Hill, and Donald B. Rubin, “Principal Stratification Approach to Broken Randomized Experiments: A Case Study of School Choice Vouchers in New York City,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2003.
Hill, P. T., “School choice: Doing it the right way makes a difference,” A report from the national working commission on choice in K-12 education, The Brookings Institution, 2003.
West, Martin and Woessmann, Ludger. “’Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School’: Historical Resistance to State Schooling, Contemporary Private Competition, and Student Achievement across Countries,” June 2008, Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) Working Papers Series.
“Milwaukee’s Public Schools In an Era of Choice,” School Choice Wisconsin, February 2007, available at www.SchoolChoiceWi.org.
West, Martin. “No Choice in Milwaukee!??: Remarkable Finding by an Un-credible Study,” Education Next. Spring 2008.
“School Choice and Community Renewal,” School Choice Wisconsin, July 2007.
Kisida, Brian, Laura Jensen, James C. Rahn, and Patrick J. Wolf, “The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Baseline Report on Participating Schools,” The School Choice Demonstration Project, February 2008.
Print File: Response to “After Milwaukee” PDF
date posted 10/8/2008
