Still a Bad Deal

The full story on the expected cap deal for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program provides some more details (see my initial reaction, below), and I'm still not convinced it's a good deal for parents or taxpayers:

The expected agreement largely accepts Doyle's position on accreditation, giving schools three years to comply.

But Doyle had proposed that all voucher students take the state's standardized tests of educational proficiency and report school scores publicly, as is required of all public school students, and the agreement would not include that. Voucher leaders have long opposed such a step.

The agreement is expected to give support to a study of the voucher program to be conducted primarily by researchers from Georgetown University and to be privately funded. Voucher supporters have long sought such a study, while critics claimed it was not enough of a step toward accountability.

Again, I applaud the accreditation (it was my idea, after all), but the plan to give the state's imprimatur to the Georgetown study is misguided. I wrote about that here: This plan does not do a thing to get more information into the hands of parents--the "informed consumers" of this market-based system!--about how well or how poorly individual voucher schools do. Parents will still have no way to really know whether their neighborhood voucher school is really any better or worse than their neighborhood public school.

That has to stop. As I wrote yesterday, DPI's closing of schools proves that the system is broken, not that it's working. Parents should be shutting these schools down, but the parents simply aren't getting the information they deserve.

This is a bad deal, people.