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Tuesday the Washington
Post confused its readers with a befuddled attack on the
popular school-voucher
program
in Milwaukee, Wis.
Now, it is true that the state-funded Milwaukee voucher program
— which gives poor parents $5,300 to send a child to any school
that the parents see fit — has allowed parents who otherwise
were priced out of consideration the opportunity to send their children
to private and parochial schools.
But the Post is disingenuous when it implies that, after
attracting students to some private schools, the program is raising
any new or significant questions about the program's success. For
the questions raised about the program today are the same ones that
were raised decades ago when the voucher idea was first floated
by Milton Friedman. They are the same questions raised when the
idea was first debated in Milwaukee. And they are the questions
still being raised by obdurate voucher opponents, even after the
results are in and the program has been a huge success — popular
with parents, good for the kids, and ultimately good for the public
schools.
The Post reporter, Michael Fletcher, attempts to discredit
the Milwaukee voucher experiment by describing the schools that
voucher recipients attend as being "subject to only the most minimal
regulations, under the sometimes flawed theory that parents are
the best arbiters of education quality."
Forget for a moment that the vast majority of parents will be surprised
to learn that they are "flawed" in believing that they are the best
arbiters of the quality of their children's education. Fletcher
bolsters his claim by quoting John Witte, a University of Wisconsin
professor who has studied the Milwaukee voucher program and who
has been actively engaged in the debate over vouchers for some time.
Says Witte: "The mythology that private schools are all good is
crazy."
This is a classic red herring. What school-choice proponents are
arguing that "private schools are all good"? There aren't any. So
it does little good to recognize this point as "crazy" when no one
is making it. Voucher proponents simply want parents to have greater
flexibility and choice in where they can send their kids to school
— public or private.
Fletcher also states that "there's one thing [the Milwaukee parents]
don't know, however: whether the private schools attain their most
fundamental goal of providing a better education than the public
schools."
This assertion — and there's no polite way of saying it —
is false. Fletcher claims that Witte "found no significant differences
between the math and reading scores of voucher students and the
scores of low-income students who remained in public schools. Two
other researchers found increases in student achievement among voucher
students, but those improvements were not seen as significant or
involved too few students to be considered reliable."
But nowhere in the article does Fletcher mention Paul Peterson,
the Harvard researcher who has studied the voucher programs in Milwaukee
and elsewhere for years. Post readers might like to know
that Peterson has batted heads with Witte in the past and presumably
Peterson is one of the "two other researchers" Fletcher mentions.
Peterson, in fact, has addressed this very claim advanced by Witte
— and found it wanting. It is worth quoting him in full:
"A research team headed by John Witte of the University of Wisconsin
took a first look at test results from Milwaukee and reported that
students with vouchers got no discernible boost from attending private
schools: their math and reading s cores were no different from those
of the control group. But when my colleague Jay P. Greene of the
University of Texas and I looked at Witte's data, we quickly realized
he had drawn the wrong comparison. Instead of measuring students
in the school-choice program against those who had lost out in the
lottery, he had measured them against a sample of Milwaukee public-school
students from much more advantaged backgrounds who had performed
significantly better on earlier tests. In brief, Witte had compared
apples to oranges.
"Returning to the raw data from Milwaukee, and focusing on the right
two groups, Greene and I discovered that, after two years in the
school-choice program, students were just a small step ahead of
their peers. In a short time, however, they began to pull away,
and by the end of the fourth year they were performing 11 percentile
points better in reading, and 6 points better in math. Modest though
these results may appear at first glance, they are nevertheless
impressive. If such progress were duplicated among minorities nationwide,
it would reduce by as much as half the current disparity between
their test scores and those of whites."
Fletcher dips his toes into the controversies over other voucher
programs by stating — again, falsely — that "evidence
of the education benefits of voucher programs in Cleveland and Florida
is no clearer" than that in Milwaukee.
Part of the confusion over the success and efficacy of school choice
programs is due to the wide disparity in the kinds of voucher programs
in operation today--some are public, some private, some have large
numbers of students, some have very few students, etc.
Fletcher might be excused for falling prey to some of this confusion
as it continues to cloud the debate over the merits of school choice.
Alas, it was heartening to read in the Post piece that despite
the confusion, one of the central arguments advanced by voucher
proponents from the very beginning — a little competition will
prompt much-needed improvements in some public-education systems
— seems contested no longer.
Fletcher quotes Milwaukee School Superintendent Spencer Korte as
saying "we can't contemplate doing business as usual because we
have not done a good job in the past of extending ourselves to students
and parents. Now, we need to do it to survive."
Milton Friedman couldn't have said it better himself.
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