Public School Teachers and Private Schools

From the mailbag:

I am a retired Madison teacher and formerly a 25 year member of the MTI negotiating team.  I have been trying to find out some information for some time.  Maybe you can help me.  On public radio this week, there was an advocate of choice schools reciting some statistics.  He said that a study by MTEA found that 29% of Milwaukee teachers send their kids to voucher school.  Do you know that the actual numbers are?  I have heard various numbers like that ranging from 14 to 50%.

The program he heard was the Joy Cardin show with George Mitchell, the one I called into and wrote about Tuesday. And it's true--Mitchell said that "29% of MPS teachers with children send their children to private schools," calling it a long-term tradition.

But, because I am attentive to my readers, I took this fellow up on his question, and did some looking into it. As I found in my own conversation with Mitchell, it turns out he was not telling the whole story.

The 29% figure is real, if debatable. The number comes from a study by pro-voucher researcher Denis Doyle, published through the Fordham Foundation. The figure is based on Doyle's analysis of 2000 census data; just to give you an idea of where he's coming from, Doyle's analysis of 1980 census data was published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and his work on the 1990 data was funded by the pro-voucher Center for Education Reform.

Doyle's analysis had two components, studying the difference between public school teachers and the general public nationwide, and teasing out the data for America's 50 largest cities, including Milwaukee. Doyle found that in the nation's 50 biggest cities, 21.5% of public school teachers send children to private schools, about 4 percentage points more often than parents overall. Milwaukee's 29.4% of teachers sending kids to private schools was six percentage points higher than Milwaukee parents in general. Milwaukee ranked 20th of 50 cities in terms of difference between parents and population, and the study made no distinction between private schools and schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

But there are some other things going on here. Gerald Bracey, a crusader on the side of public schools and teachers, gave Doyle and Fordham one of his coveted Rotten Apple awards in 2004--the “If at first you don’t succeed: Fudge, Fudge Again” award, in fact:

When Doyle finally got around to showing the data, the 1990 data revealed that 12.1% of public school teachers use private schools compared to 13.1% of the general public. In his analysis of the 2000 census, the figure is down to 10.6%, and it’s only 7.9% if you don’t count teachers who send their kids to both public and private schools. For the general public it’s 12.1%, 9.4% dropping out parents who use both. [. . .]

Doyle calls public school teachers education “connoisseurs.” One would expect private school teachers to exhibit the same level of expertise, yet fewer than a third of private school teachers pack their children off to private schools, 29.5% in 2000, down from 32.7% in 1990. In fact, although 54.1% of private school teachers in 2000 had family incomes of more than $84,000 a year, only 31.1% of this group had children in private schools.

Of course, Bracey can't break down the private-school number by city, so we cannot make the direct comparison between Milwaukee's public and private school teachers, specifically. But it is important to note that the 29% number would probably be lower if you take out parents who send their children to both public and private schools, as Bracey found for the study overall. Plus, when George Mitchell said that it is 29% of Milwaukee Public Schools teachers, this is not what the report says; it refers only to public school teachers who live in the city, who may not all teach for MPS. More importantly, the number for Milwaukee is not significantly different than the number for private school teachers nationwide. If the public schools are good enough for 70% of private school teachers, why can't they be good enough for 70% of public school teachers without its being an issue?

But there's more to it than that: If you go back to discussions (see here and here, for example) about the creation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program in 1990, two proponents, Annette Polly Williams and Howard Fuller, were claiming--based on what, I admit I don't know--that fully half of MPS teachers were sending their children to private schools. These claims were a big part of the push behind the program's creation. If that 50% number is true--and, again, I'm just taking their word for it--that means that between 1990 and 2000, there was a 40% drop in the number of MPS teachers sending their children to private schools. I have no idea what the number might be now, but the trend seems to be downward.

Finally, and, cautiously, given my discussion of sampling the other day, a note on Doyle's methodology. It's actually worth reading the "Methodology" section in the report, since it talks about the census data being used. The Census Bureau releases 5% of the data for an area--like the city of Milwaukee--for study; the authors say that the incidence of teachers with children in the population is 2% of households. In other words, all the data on public school teachers in this study comes from just 0.1% of households in Milwaukee.