Last year, Wisconsin essentially expanded the geographical scope of its already- existing school voucher program by creating a new statewide school voucher program alongside the older program. Even so, the new statewide program was the result of legislative negotiation and compromise.
Part of this negotiation and compromise was explicit and some was implicit. Explicitly, the law creating the statewide school voucher program caps the amount of pupils permitted to participate in the program during the its first two years. Implicitly, those who passed the school voucher legislation expected future legislation that would provide more government oversight over voucher schools. Along those lines, legislation has been introduced in the Wisconsin Senate that purports to improve accountability over Wisconsin primary and secondary schools.
Rather than enact this highly flawed legislation, the Wisconsin Legislature should end the Wisconsin school voucher programs in their entirety.
Wisconsin created the nation’s first school voucher program and started accepting students in 1990. The purpose of the program was to help poverty-stricken Milwaukee children attend private schools with taxpayer-funded vouchers so they would, theoretically, get a high-quality education and thus improve their economic situation when they became older.
Additionally, the voucher program was geographically limited to students in Milwaukee whose families’ income was less than 175 percent of the federal poverty line and the program capped how many students could participate. Tangentially, but not insignificantly, the program prohibited taxpayer-funded school vouchers from being used at religious schools.
Yet Wisconsin’s school voucher program was only at its inception. By 2012, much had changed. The program had expanded into Racine, no longer had enrollment caps, and the income limit was increased to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, leading to almost 25,000 students receiving vouchers in 2012.
The program also permitted taxpayer-funded vouchers to be used at religious schools, leading to almost 21,000 of the 25,000 students participating in the school voucher program to attend religious schools.
School voucher proponents and privatization-oriented Republican state legislators in Wisconsin were not satisfied, though. Last summer, the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker created a new statewide school voucher program— a program that exists alongside the older program that covers Milwaukee and Racine. The new statewide program has enrollment caps, though, just like the original program did in 1990. The enrollment caps are a result of legislative compromise. As Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, said regarding voucher enrollment caps, “We are only one budget away from opening the flood gates.”
In order to create a new statewide school voucher program in 2013, legislators implicitly compromised that in the near future, the Legislature would improve and increase government oversight over private primary and secondary voucher schools.
To fulfill this compromise, legislation has been introduced in the Wisconsin Senate that purports to make Wisconsin primary and secondary schools more accountable to the public. But this legislation fails to do even that.
Reading the text of the senate’s school accountability bill, it becomes readily apparent what the bill’s intended purpose is: undermining public schools, specifically public schools in Milwaukee. The bill would require the Department of Public Instruction to give 5 percent of public, charter and private voucher schools a failing grade.
If a public school receives a certain amount of unsatisfactory grades, it must be either shut down or converted into a charter school. Yet, if a private voucher school receives unsatisfactory grades, the school is only restricted from receiving new voucher students. If this bill was really about making schools accountable to the public, failing voucher schools would be prohibited from receiving any voucher students.
Furthermore, the way the bill is currently written makes it easier for Milwaukee public schools to be shut down quicker than either charter or private voucher schools that receive unsatisfactory grades. As Dan Rossmiller of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards said, “The bill would begin to have an effect on public schools generally within three years and in Milwaukee, in one year, and it doesn’t look like anything serious would happen to any voucher schools until maybe 2020 or 2021.” Thus, this legislation would have the negative effect of displacing many Milwaukee public school students from their schools while failing voucher schools get a free pass.
The school accountability bill circulating in the Wisconsin Senate does not improve public accountability of our primary and secondary schools. Instead, much like the new statewide school voucher program, its purpose is to slowly undermine public schools and privatize basic education.
Instead of passing the school accountability bill, the Wisconsin Senate should pass legislation ending Wisconsin’s misguided experiment with taxpayer-funded school vouchers.
Aaron Loudenslager (loudenslager
