Few would dispute the fact that Milwaukee’s public schools have deep, unsettling problems. The Milwaukee Public School system has the highest proportion of dropouts and lowest test scores for fourth, eighth, and 10th graders in the state. Milwaukee itself is the most segregated city in America and has one of the lowest per capita incomes and highest child poverty rate of any major city. Taken together, these tragic realities practically guarantee a troubled school system.
Yet, that doesn’t mean we should be satisfied with failing schools. There are a number of possible solutions to the problem of failing urban schools. But the right-wing, free-market solutions to education reform have generally been to either promote vouchers or bash teachers’ unions. Vouchers are not an effective solution to our academic woes.
Milwaukee has been a national laboratory for citywide voucher and school choice programs for a while now. In 1990, Milwaukee began a program, originally only for families with incomes at least 175 percent below poverty level, where the school district would contribute a sum of money up to $5,000 — now $6,500 — to attend a private school of their choice in order escape from their failing neighborhood public school. It was originally limited to only about 1,000 students and secular private schools, but now there are currently about 17,000 students and 121 private parochial and secular schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
A consensus is emerging that the results of the voucher program have been very disappointing. Tenth grade test scores in Milwaukee have been basically flat for years while other grades’ scores have gone up and down annually with no consistent improvements. A new report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found the school choice program to be fundamentally flawed due to the lack of government oversight and the reality that many parents participating in the voucher program aren’t choosing schools based on academic criteria.
The fact that WPRI, a conservative organization with the motto “Wisconsin’s Free Market Think Tank,” arrived at this conclusion is telling. It found that only about 10 percent of parents of Milwaukee public school children participate in the MPCP, evaluate more than one private school and compare the schools they’re evaluating based on academic achievement data. The study did not, however, make WPRI rethink its support of school choice programs. It simply concluded that school choice programs do not constitute effective competition for public schools or incentives for them to improve since the school selection process is apparently rather arbitrary for many families.
This analysis is correct in that it advocates better government oversight of existing school choice programs as a good first step. But the real reason why vouchers don’t work gets to the heart of the question of why we have persistently failing public schools in the first place: Urban and suburban segregation and school vouchers aggravate this problem.
School vouchers encourage the cream of the crop of students, the ones who want to learn and have the most involved families, to leave their failing schools and have their tuition at private schools paid for. But what happens to the students who are left behind in the failing schools? Each class has proportionately more students who don’t want to learn and whose parents don’t care about their education. Schools lose funding because there are fewer students enrolled, and educational outcomes result in further decline.
This is the sad state of modern American education. Rather than address the roots of our problems, we’d rather pluck out the best students, put them in private schools or better public schools, and leave the rest to rot in failing schools. Education is not a competitive market; it’s a public good that we expect the government to provide for everyone, so we shouldn’t expect market-based incentives to solve the problems. The root of the problem is segregation of black from white, rich from poor and urban from suburban. Vouchers perpetuate the elitist notions that some children are not worth the effort and some schools are beyond help.
Luckily, there are some policy tools available for reducing urban segregation. The key is to provide incentives for suburban families to move back into the cities. This can require increasing the costs of suburban living through property and transportation-based taxes. It also involves integration of neighborhoods within cities. One way to achieve this is through housing vouchers in areas of a school district that lack particular demographic groups. When segregation within cities is decreased, there will be greater demographic diversity within the schools. Income diversity in the neighborhoods will stabilize property tax receipts and therefore school funding.
No one wants to trap children in failing schools when vouchers can give some an escape route. But it’s much worse to take out the very best students and leave behind a poor, uneducated underclass with no one to advocate for them. Concentrated urban poverty and failing schools are not problems that can be solved overnight, but the stakes are high enough to keep trying.
Ryan Greenfield ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and economics.
