Accountability II: Short Version

Somewhere in the 137 screens of text below is the nut of the argument against the current Republican plan for "accountability" in Milwaukee's voucher schools. Thinking that you all might want a shorter post to link to and quote from, here it is, in brief:

Most importantly, the program will only test a representative sample of students from MPS and voucher schools. I am not a statistician, but I know enough social science to recognize that representative samples can produce valid data. But I have serious concerns about that part: For one, I am concerned that schools will be allowed to opt out of the study. The sampling is supposed to cover that, I know, I know; but if the only schools participating are ones with above-embarrassing test scores, the researchers will have to work hard to make the sample representative.

For two, and perhaps most importantly, while the study this time (as opposed to the 2003 proposal) involves the state WKCE exams, the study will not in any way at any time provide any kind of comprehensive picture of how individual schools perform on those tests. While the samples will provide an idea of whether the voucher program overall is better or worse or comparable to MPS, the study does not one damned thing to paint a picture of how well the individual schools that parents have to choose from are doing at present or over time.

Right now on the Milwaukee Public Schools home page, you can find the district's report cards and download the reports for any school and for any racial or other subgroup. If this study of the voucher program goes through with sampling, there will be no comparable set of data for the schools in the program. When parents hear whatever the answer is from this study, whether it be that voucher schools are great or that they are weak, they will have no way to know whether or not the particular school they are choosing is reflective of the program as a whole.

MPS has some dynamite programs, many of them. Even within bad schools, there are pockets of success in distinct programs that draw from that population. It would simply be a fallacy to suggest that because MPS's fourth-grade reading level, as a whole, is low, that every MPS school fails its young readers. The same will hold true if this voucher study is the only information we have--it would be a fallacy to suggest that any individual school a parent wants for a child is as good or as bad as the overall study results show the program to be. Yet the pro-voucher folks insist that there is no need to collect or make public data on voucher schools the way we must, by state and federal law, do in MPS.