Voucher School Briefs

• Following the news last week that vouchers for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program would likely be rationed next fall, I had a good and mostly productive argument with Paul from the Electric Commentary: Read posts one and two.
  
  
• The number is now two. That's two schools ever, in the 16-year history of Milwaukee's voucher program, that have been closed by the state because they could not meet bare minimum requirements to actually be called schools. It worries me that some of these kids will end up at my school, after having lost a semester of opportunity:

  In her decision, the examiner wrote that a Northside student testified that class time was spent "doing crossword puzzles and shooting dice." She also wrote that Northside officials testified that the school's curriculum is not finished and that it takes about three years to complete curriculum development. "Northside did not establish the point in time that textbooks were purchased for use at the school, nor the point in time when pupils began receiving instruction using such textbooks," the examiner wrote. [. . .]
  
  When reporters visited the school, at 4840 W. Fond du Lac Ave., on Tuesday, founder Ricardo Brooks said the school is still open, although no students appeared to be present. [. . .] Brooks is a former administrator from Academic Solutions, a voucher school closed down by the state last year.
  
  In December, a group of former teachers and administrators alleged in interviews with the Journal Sentinel and a letter to state officials that students at Northside regularly smoked pot, skipped school and shot dice without fear of punishment. "It's not a school," said LaTrina Cooper, a former co-principal, in a previous interview. "It's a holding place for students who I guess couldn't make it in (Milwaukee Public Schools). It's like a detention center. . . . We even had a student who rolled a (marijuana) blunt in front of the teacher in a classroom."

  I wrote about this story twice last fall already, so I won't belabor it any more, except to renew my call that all schools new to the voucher program should have a full academic year behind them before they start taking vouchers. That would have saved us hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on Northside.
  
  
• Eugene Kane, because he's apparently not in enough trouble with the blogs already, decides to lie in today's column about voucher advocate Howard Fuller (my bold):

  School choice is in the news again. [Governor Jim] Doyle wants to stop further enrollment because the population has hit the cap of about 14,500.
  
  This galls Fuller to no end, partly because he thinks Doyle is playing politics by appeasing the teachers union instead of doing the right thing.

  While Kane, through Fuller, does lay into Republicans (for voting "for school choice and [. . .] against everything else that black people need to better themselves"), he ignores the nearly two years that Doyle has been offering to compromise with Republicans in a way that would raise the cap. Moreover, Kane is trying to give J-Dizzle agency that he doesn't have: State law, not Doyle or the governor's office, sets the cap and demands an end to further enrollment, and, at any rate, the enforcement is handled by the Department of Public Instruction, not the executive. So by my count, that's at least three ways in which bolded sentence above is flatly untrue.
  
  The Amtal Rule covers how the rest of the column is too nice to Fuller.