Sure, let's "lift the cap" so we get more of this

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has withheld initial payments to ten of 115 schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program:

In most cases, the schools did not submit required financial reports by the deadline. [. . .]

Schools that did not submit a financial report by the deadline were: DJ Perkins Academy of Excellence, Excel Learning Academy, Family Montessori School, Howard's Learning Academy, Ida B. Wells Academy, Kindergarten Plus, Malaika Early Learning Center and Veritas Academy.

Officials at the state Department of Public Instruction, which oversees the voucher program, said they received a report from Kindergarten Plus Tuesday, but have not yet released the checks.

Two other schools, Bridge of Hope Christian Academy and Loving A Generation Preschool, did not submit required student lists. Ida B. Wells submitted neither the student list nor the financial report, according to department officials.

While you may be tempted to dismiss the problems here as a few pieces of missed paperwork, let's remember that DPI is authorized to shut down voucher schools for only two reasons--if the school is physically unsafe, or if the school is financially mismanaged. The thinking, apparently, is that mismanagement of the checkbook is a red flag for mismanagement in the curriculum, and that's why we don't need academic standards. The administrators at these schools, then, know how critical these deadlines and pieces of paper are; any schools that can't handle it shouldn't be trusted with students. This guy, for example, should never have been allowed to run a school. Now he's in jail.

This is the problem with an ever-expanding system of virtually unregulated voucher schools--more and more storefront, fly-by-night operations will open with the hopes of scoring some of your tax dollars, and more and more of them will be unable to meet even the state's embarassingly loose criteria for success. Last year, the first year DPI could stop payments in this fashion, only four schools missed the deadline, compared to this year's ten. And what makes this worse is that not all of this year's problem schools are even of the storefront variety--some, like Veritas, are established schools with people who should know what they're doing at the helm.

So, what happens if these schools never get it together? And what of students in schools who could meet the paperwork deadline, but would fail any objective measure of academic quality? (Check this this directory of schools for an eye-opening read about where your tax dollars go.) The students, in these cases, are the ones who truly lose out. They don't get back the time they lost in mismanaged, underperforming schools. Even if they make their way to an MPS school (with no money attached, since it's long past third Friday), they will be behind their peers; MPS schools and teachers will have to work doubly hard to make sure they don't get lost in the shuffle and can catch up by year's end. In the marketplace, there are always winners and losers, and it frustrates me to no end that some in this state want to keep funding loser schools.

Now, in the end, for many of these schools, it probably is just a missed deadline, and paperwork will eventually make its way to DPI. But this story should remind us just how little assurance we have in this city that there are standards of quality in place to make certain that our tax money is well spent, that this second taxpayer-supported school system is worth the cost. "Lift the cap," the other side says, so that what? More students enter the black hole that is the voucher program? More schools miss even these rundimentary deadlines? No thank you.