Voices on Vouchers

This morning's Milwuakee Journal Sentinel's letters-to-the-editor section is all about vouchers, the cap and the crisis related to it, and everyone from Howard Fuller to Patrick McIlheran. Since you've been putting up with my own bloviations for some time now, I thought I would point you to what real, blog-less people might think on the issue.

I'd also like to highlight two letters in particular, from education professionals. The first is from the President of the Urban Day School, a long-established and successful private school participating in the program. He writes, in part,

We have more than 500 choice students at Urban Day and are one of the original seven schools to enter the choice program in 1990. Though Urban Day has a solid reputation and has educated thousands of Milwaukee's inner city children, the school would lose hundreds of seats under the cap. This uncertainty is troubling to schools and threatening to parents.

Choice is no longer an experiment. It has proved itself year after year. At Urban Day, we see evidence in high attendance rates and graduates who go on to attend Milwaukee's finest high schools.

Schools like Urban Day are a part of the solution. They are producing the educated young people we all want. Such schools, their students and their parents deserve support.

He points out two of the most serious problems raised by the recent discussion of vouchers, the cap, and DPI's rationing plan that offers no protection established schools and current students. One, he notes that this voucher program is "no longer an experiment." I would say it is not an experiement for him, and for the students in his school. But what about all those kids at Northside, or any one of the 18 or so other schools that the pro-voucher Journal Sentinel labeled as questionable in its series on vouchers last spring? Is it right that taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for schools like those? Does he really think that those seat-of-the-pants operations deserve the same respect and deferrence his school gets?

Second is the new rationing plan that DPI has offered after the first, fair plan, which would have saved all of Urban Day School's seats, was rejected by the very voucher supporters now targeting Jim Doyle and DPI because of the crisis this new plan will cause. UDC's president should call George and Susan Mitchell and ask them why some of the groups they bankroll stopped the plan that would have kept his successful school on the right path.

The second letter I want to highlight is from a high school teacher in Oconomowoc, who echoes thoughts about Patrick McIlheran's Sunday column that I also expressed:

Parents and students at my school have asked me many of the same questions raised in Patrick McIlheran's Jan. 15 column ("Students want to know why learning's wrong").

My students ask me why they have to take standardized tests when we could actually be learning something useful at testing time. They want to know why the Republican-controlled Legislature continues to support revenue caps even though they threaten an education that works by forcing annual program and staffing cuts.

President Bush must believe our public school parents are intellectually unequipped to make a decent choice about their child's education. Why else would he have supported an ever-burgeoning federal reach, in the name of accountability, into public education? Only a small percentage of our student body chooses to leave our district; some even enter through the open enrollment program. But I guess Bush knows better than our parents whether our district is working.

If parents and students are the true measures of accountability, as McIlheran suggests, let's ditch "No Child Left Behind." If not, then apply it and other state and federal laws to voucher schools. Until a universal accountability standard exists for public and private schools, this taxpaying public school teacher will never support tax-paid vouchers.

Well said, sir. Politicians who fall all over themselves to cut public school budgets rush to support increases in funding for the unaccountable shadow school system that is the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Voucher supporters flee from anything that would allow a real one-to-one comparison to the public schools in terms of performance assessment. Even the new bill offered by Republicans that would put a "study" in place doesn't require any voucher school to test anyone, and if they do, they don't have to use the state tests. Any results from any such study would be utterly meaningless.