Voucher Questions, Budget Woes

Did anyone else find the tone of this Q & A on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program condescending? Not that the information was bad; it just felt patronizing. Anyway, I'm glad to see more of this in print (my italics):

Q. What's wrong with the DPI's rationing formula?

A. Key elements driving it are numbers that often bear little resemblance to reality - how many students schools (including proposed ones that won't actually open next fall) claim they could enroll next fall. In the past, only a handful of schools have made accurate predictions in January. Some have made wildly inflated claims. Under the DPI rationing plan, the wilder your claim, the more you would be rewarded with seat allocations. The most accurate schools would be hit hardest.

Q. Couldn't they come up with a different formula?

A. Sure. And they did a while back. It allowed current students to continue in their schools, gave preference to their siblings in new enrollment and so on. But key voucher advocates and Republican legislators argued that it still didn't work and that no rationing plan would work. They put the kibosh on the plan.

Elsewhere in the paper this morning, fellow MPS teacher Diane Hardy touches on another corner of the funding argument. In my head there's a very long and complicated post about how much education really costs; when it will make it out of my head, I don't know. But Hardy touches on a couple of points:

MPS has comparable per-pupil spending to its neighboring districts. We "only" get about $3,000 less per student than the Nicolet district. Multiply that by my school's 1,600 students, and there is a serious gap.

One voucher supporter told me that his school spends less than MPS does per pupil. What he failed to mention is that most choice schools can choose who they let in.

Special needs programs such as those in MPS are not offered at most choice schools. Nor do we know if choice schools are succeeding since they are not accountable in testing as public schools are. There are choice schools that offer support for students with learning disabilities, but public schools carry the burden of educating children with special needs. At Rufus King High School, we have programs for deaf students, the mildly and severely autistic, as well as all learning disabilities.

Many people do not consider the cost of programs for the blind, the physically disabled, English as a Second Language, teen parents and myriad programs that support poor, abused, addicted and homeless students.

Some of these programs MPS implements because we are required by law (voucher schools aren't), some because it's good policy or sound pedagogy. Either way, it simply costs more to educate children from distressed backgrounds than it does to educate the wealthy--one study says 40%more. Paul Soglin is having a discussion on schooling and its context, the 85% of the time students are not in school between the day they are born and their 18th birthdays. A community's poverty rate is one of the biggest predictors of educational success--something I've discussed before. I'm interested to see where it goes, and how much of the post in my head he ends up writing for me.