McIlheran Watch: Choose *This*

If it's Wednesday, it must be time for another installment in our ongoing series, "Patrick McIlheran Pulls Things Out of His Behind." (Robola is rubbing off on me.) I mean, it's one thing for McIlheran to dutifully repeat Republican talking points and Limbaugh's spininations, but today he made a big mistake. Today, he came to my house: Milwaukee's voucher schools.

"If it's January," he begins, stealing my clever device, "it must be time to squabble about school choice."

Gov. Jim Doyle will offer the Legislature his plan to allow more poor Milwaukee parents to take their state aid to private schools. In exchange, he'll want more aid for government-run schools, a trade-off he outlined in November and similar to what he wanted last winter.

Republicans will react as they said they would, noting the governor's asking for too much money for public school programs tangential to the issue, as they said last winter.

But the world hasn't stood still.

No, indeed. Since last winter, we've had, by my count, at least six voucher schools closed or threatened with closure by DPI for a variety of reasons. If the DPI were allowed to close schools for poor performance, that total would be much higher. Since last winter, McIlheran's own newspaper ran a really very good series on the choice program's first fifteen years, and found an alarming number of voucher schools unwilling or afraid to submit to any kind of public scrutiny at all. It also found that the marketplace was not at all working to improve the quality of schools, as most parents ignored school quality as a factor in deciding (a point made in a not-online-because-they-suck-Milwaukee Magazine article by guest poster Stephen Paske).

But of course the emerging negative perception of the choice program--public dollars down a black hole of indeterminate quality--is not what McIlheran is talking about. He is instead referring to the brutal beating last week of Samuel McClain by a mob of teenagers up past my bedtime, and the near-record number of murders Milwaukee tallied in 2005:

[Democratic Milwaukee Rep. Jason] Fields, in whose district the man was beaten, makes the link.

Violence will decline when children are raised better, he says. No provocation, much less any material deprivation, can justify murderous behavior, and no government program can make parents instill sound moral reasoning.

But what government can do, he says, is expand opportunities, most classically by education. The Milwaukee Public Schools are trying but are frequently unsuccessful. Of the children who enter its ninth grade, fewer than half make it to 12th grade. The district is trying to change, but a city that makes it onto national TV because of a mob beating needs anyone with bright ideas. And it would be particularly perverse to see those bright ideas, or the willingness of parents to take charge of children's lives, stymied because of some separate argument about other programs the governor is demanding.

"I would rather see a child in school, any school . . . than to hear news about them beating people up," says Fields. It is possible that more lawmakers than last year have gained a similar sense of urgency.

Yes, because the 10 or 12% of a students' life spent in formal schooling would make all the difference if the school were private? Look, I know that many students have good experiences in private schools. More students than ever before, in fact--McIlheran's dead-horse beating (he puts it in Fields's mouth, but it's his) smacks a bit of that old insanity definition. The Milwaukee Public Schools has more than 200 varied, creative, and innovative schools around the city and--though I cannot say for certain, since their identities are not public--I bet all of the students charged in the McClain beating regularly attend one of those schools. I mean, the beating happened at 10:30 at night over vacation, not the middle of the day when McIlheran's imagined truants are prowling the streets looking for their next hapless victim.

Then McIlheran shreds his last shred of creditbilty: "Thousands more poor children were educated at private schools"--didn't I just say that?--"their parents chose--some well, some poorly, but one 2004 study showed their graduation rate was double that of MPS." Pat Mac is refering to this study (.pdf), sponsored by the surely disinterested group School Choice Wisconsin (his newspaper's article on it is here). The study found that if you hand-selected ten private schools; applied a formula not used by a single local, state, or national organization for determining graduation rates; and compared the results of those ten schools to all of MPS; then the graduation rate at the private schools is higher. OMG! I never would have guessed!

Let us also be clear about some other things: Parents who are willing to let their 14-year-old children out at 10:30 at night are probably not the ones who would take advantage of the choice program. If they want to take an interest in their children's lives, let's see them start by setting a curfew. Choice students were among the teen victims of Milwaukee's murders this year. And the truancy rate--cited by McIlheran in his last paragraph--is a complete dodge: While it may be true that, according to the state's standard of five unexcused absences per semester, many MPS students are habitually truant, there is no way to guarantee that the will not repeat the performance in a voucher school.

Worse, we won't even know if they are truant in their voucher schools, since voucher schools don't report truancy rates.

So what does McIlheran want? Probably what every conservative fantasizes about during the commercial breaks: the end of public schools as we know them. Never mind that parents already have the right to choose any one of the hundreds of public schools in the city--schools that offer full accountability (even when the picture is ugly) and do not waste taxpayer money on a shadow system of unaccountable schools. Let's turn every school into a voucher school, he believes; let's turn the whole system into a shadow system, because the Ghost of Rioting Voucher Schools Past is safely in its grave now, and the Ghost of Evasive Principals Present is nothing to sweat over, either.

By contrast, read--or re-read--Renee Crawford's take on why there were so many fewer murders in 2004 than in 2005. It has nothing to do with vouchers, or schools in general:

I've seen what hope alone can do to an entire community drenched in despair. I can only imagine what a truly sustained effort to rebuild our communties for the long term might do to our society.

I will continue to fight for the glimpse I saw that summer. A glimpse of what could be if anyone cared enough to make it be.

While hope is not a plan, neither is shuffling more kids to fly-by-night, unaccountable "schools." The public schools can work miracles--I see some small ones every day--but we can't fix the 60% unemployment rate among African American men in the city; we can't fix the evaporated manufacturing base; we can't fix poverty; we can't fix homelessness; we can't fix drug addiction. Voucher schools can't, either, and saying they can is dishonest at best.