When was the last time you thought about elementary school in anything but a nostalgic way? Thinking back, we usually envision our playmates, crayons, teachers and lunchtimes. One thing that probably doesn’t come to mind is the controversy over which school we attended. Back in the day, most of us didn’t have to think about where we attended school. We merely just matriculated wherever our school districts dictated.
As many know, this has all been changing for some residents in the Milwaukee area. Elementary through high school students from this area have been given the chance to attend schools where they have a much better chance at attaining a quality education than merely the luck of the draw.
Through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), economically disadvantaged students have the opportunity to attend a private school on the state’s dollar if they come from a family with a total family income of up to 1.75 times the poverty level. This has proven to be a highly-praised and successful, although controversial, program for its participants.
Wisconsin lawmakers are working to expand this program so that even more students who may be getting educationally short-changed by their current public schools may have the opportunity to improve the quality of their education. Just weeks ago, the Wisconsin State Assembly passed multiple bills that would develop the MPCP so that more families would be able to take advantage of its benefits.
One of these bills eliminates a few restrictions on the program. Currently, if a family’s income rises above 175 percent of the poverty level, its child is no longer qualified for the MPCP. Assembly Bill 259 eliminates this constraint. It sends a message to families that the state won’t punish their children for their economic progress. At a time when these families are already struggling financially, they need assurance that their children will continue to have the best possible education available to them.
This bill also makes two other notable modifications of the program. First, it removes the requirement that a student participating in the MPCP must have been enrolled in the Milwaukee Public Schools, a private school under the MPCP, or not enrolled in school at all. It also does away with the current restriction that no more than 15 percent of a school district’s enrollment may attend private schools under the MPCP. These inclusions translate into allowing more students to have the potential opportunity of attending a quality school. This would be a huge victory for Milwaukee-area parents, many of whom believe that taking away their access to school choice is synonymous with taking away their children’s chance to succeed.
So while the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has proven to be an important and controversial issue in Wisconsin recently, why should UW students be concerned with it? After all, our grade-school days have long since passed, and although nearly 2,600 UW-Madison students come from Milwaukee County, the majority of students here aren’t from the Milwaukee area.
Nonetheless, we can relate this program to the oh-so-popular and heated issues of diversity and equality on our campus. Instead of tackling these issues at the university level, the MPCP addresses them from a more bottom-up approach to try to even out the playing field for inequalities that may or may not have transpired in the past. Instead of allowing our young students to get a poor education early in life and later try to make up for it in their post-secondary years, this program is an essential opportunity to see that all students in Wisconsin have the tools to start out on the right foot educationally.
Howard Fuller is the director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, as well as the chairman of the board of directors of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. He has written, “For African Americans, the stakes are huge. If opponents of providing low-income, mostly African American parents with more educational power prevail, historical obstacles to advancement will be even more entrenched.”
According to Fuller, most African American high school freshmen in Milwaukee do not graduate within four years. To oppose the MPCP is to turn our backs on these students and to support a system that is absolutely failing them.
So while Wisconsin lawmakers have begun to make strides toward improving the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in recent weeks, the struggle is anything but over. The expansion bills are expected to win approval in the Senate, but Gov. Jim Doyle has all but stated that he will veto at least some, if not all, of them.
Yet, with all hope, these bills will become law and will help to make sure that more children of low-income families will have the opportunity in the future to be sitting where you are today.
Nicole Marklein ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science.