Opening the Door to a Private Education with Public Money
Buried in the state budget is a little known provision that opens the door to using state money for private schools.
Under the “voucher program” parents in Milwaukee can send their children to private schools with money from the state. A ‘voucher’ is like a coupon. Parents use state money pay for private school tuition.
The idea was to give residents of poor schools a choice and spur competition – with the hope the public schools would improve. By most measures, this has not happened.
In June the voucher program expanded to Racine. Instead of naming Racine in the new law, the budget authors pulled together four criteria related to property value, cost of educating students, poverty and the size of the city.
By using this wording, the voucher program could be expanded to other cities. The consequences would be a huge drain on state money for public schools at a time when our schools are already struggling. At risk are small rural schools that
VOUCHSAFED: State's private school voucher program doesn't deliver the goods yet gets bigger
You want some of this?Sen. Kathleen Vinehout's earlier post here on the state's misbegotten private school voucher program is informative and well argued. Coincidentally, Milwaukee's independent, nonpartisan Public Policy Forum just revealed in an analysis that the private voucher schools serving that city's poor students aren't producing better math or reading scores than the city's public schools, which defect proponents insisted was a key reason for starting up the program.
This is the first such comparison since the state program began in Milwaukee nearly 20 years ago. That's because Republicans had long fought any requirement that voucher school academic performance be subject to measurement comparing their results to those of the Milwaukee Public