McIlheran Watch: Allow me to answer that question for you

Tomorrow is Sunday, meaning that everyone's favorite local conservative space-waster's column will be mucking up the Crossroads section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The topic of the column? What else--vouchers. That's three misguided and misinformed columns on this topin in a single month. (See MWatch for the first and second for more.)

This time around, Patrick McIlheran takes on his favorite bogeyman, the teachers union. As I happen to be an active member thereof, of course I have a keen interest in the particular hokum he's peddling. And it turns out to be nothing more than the same BS we've been hearing from conservatives for the last several weeks:

[W]e don't know what we're getting for our tax dollars because the governor said no. The Legislature has several times tried to commission objective studies of whether letting parents pick schools improves poor kids' lives. The governor has vetoed them all, vetoes desired by the teachers unions that spent seven figures to put him in office.

We may get such a study because a scholar at Georgetown University is rounding up academics and foundations on both sides of the school-choice debate to do one. Bring it on. [. . .]

[W]ith school choice, we do know what we're not getting for our tax money.

We're not getting the Mercedes-buying principal mentioned by the governor: Mandella School of Science and Math got thrown out of the choice program in 2004 by state authorities acting under a law instigated by school-choice advocates. So did Northside High School last week after a state examiner flunked it. So did three other choice schools, and 30 with dicey plans were kept from opening this year.

The abuses cited by the governor and likely to appear in radio ads were stopped by rules choice advocates sought.

It's the full gamut, no? Starting with Doyle is owned by WEAC and running through Doyle vetoed a study to All these closures mean there's accountability. All of them have been dealt with in these very pages to one extent or another, but it's worth reminding people:

• WEAC (and me!) wants the voucher program ended; Doyle has proposed expanding it. WEAC was just one opponent of the study bill's opponents, and the bill was bad to begin with . . .
  
• . . . because it would have provided no real information. The bill, most recently introduced, passed, and vetoed in last 2003, would have allowed any voucher school to opt out, and it would not have provided any data on any individual school, just on the program as a whole. It's great the McIlheran can cite data on MPS--as he does later in his column--but if he wanted to, he could have broken it down to tell us which MPS schools are best or worst. The study would not have done that for voucher schools, nor would the new Georgetown study. It also would have added no enforcement teeth, so we could learn that the program was doing badly and, well, that's it.
  
• As for closing schools, as McIlheran notes, DPI has not done it often, and all of them have been in the last two years. And none of the closures (including one yesterday, by the way) have been because the quality of education at those schools was poor. It's also funny to hear P-Mac giving credit for these measures to the pro-voucher side, as this is authority DPI wanted for years before the Republican legislature let them have it--and then only because stronger accountability measures demanded by the anti-voucher side were shot down time and time again.

McIlheran doesn't stop there, citing, as I noted, the bad test scores of MPS schools, and even going so far as to cite the 29% number I dissected earlier this week. I'm telling you--if P-Mac would just read my blog, he'd know the answers to all of his questions.

But I have to share with you my favorite line in the column:

Of course, nearly every choice school does give some kind of standard test, and many reveal the results to parents, the people with the greatest claim to know.

Wow! Many schools give results to parents. Many! That's accountability for you, isn't it? "Of course," I should write, "if you read the paper, you'd know that parents just don't use academics as a factor in their decisions."

And he closes with additional digs at my union:

Not that the [public schools are] not trying new things. It's resizing high schools, experimenting with curriculum, trying to oust bad teachers. But frequently opposing reforms sought by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos have been the School Board members elected with union support, and the union says it wants to defeat board members who support Andrekopoulos. Thus, the union asks parents to trust a system accountable to a board that's accountable to a union whose idea of reform is higher pay.

Again proving that he doesn't read my blog, McIlheran repeats spin that I've shown to be false before. For one, he should read up on backwards way the district is going about doing small schools. He should also learn himself a little something about Milwaukee's TEAM program, a union idea which, since its implementation, has helped bad teachers out of the system. And higher pay is not where our disagreement with the superintendent comes from; it comes from the unprofessional way he treats teachers, and the way he pushed a bad health-care package that is actually costing the taxpayers more money than the union's proposal would have, and the teachers less.

But that's okay, I suppose; if McIlheran could actually get his facts straight, I'd lose two posts a week making up for it.