Teaching Tuesday: Don't Lift the Cap

Last week Jim Doyle smartly vetoed an increase in the cap on Milwaukee's voucher program. Right now the cap is 15% of MPS enrollment, and this fall will be the first year that we've hit the cap.

I didn't say anything about it here when it happened (saving it for today), but I did comment on the story over on the dark side.

What I said then was that, while there may be 1500 more students who want to participate in Milwaukee’s voucher program, there are not 1500 seats at good voucher schools.  Those new kids will likely find themselves at more of the fly-by-night outfits unique to Milwaukee: It is literally true that anyone with a building permit and a business model can open a school. And it happens every year, with those schools far more likely to fail, sending kids (without funding!) back into MPS who are a year or more behind.

My high school got a couple dozen students from Academic Solutions (with no additional funds accompanying them) when it closed:  They have kept fighting since they got here, they have graffittoed every stairway, and they are surprised every day that their teachers teach instead of show a video.  This stems directly from what they were allowed to do as that school slowly imploded; not only did they themselves lose a year of schooling, they are now trying to disrupt a significant portion of the schooling of public school students.

There are dozens of other voucher schools in Milwaukee that, if the truth came out, they’d be shut down just like Academic Solutions.  Think, for example, of the Learning Enterprise schools, all of which closed becuase they couldn’t pay teachers except the voucher school, which is hanging on until the last state check comes in May.

If I thought every one of those kids would get the kind of education they could get at Messmer or Marquette (or even Harambee, until they stopped paying their teachers, too), then I wouldn’t care so much.  But I have had these kids in my classroom who come from these schools that fail, and this program has not been fair to them.  They lack skills--academic and behavioral--that should be taught.  Unfortunately, there are no academic standards at all that these schools must meet; they are only closed following riots or financial scandals.

Jim Doyle used property taxes as his excuse to veto the bill. I think the academic standards is a much stronger argument. Think about it: Do we really want to send another 1500 Milwaukee students into schools that are not required to measure or report one single measure of student achievement? Where is the accountability?