By Samantha Henig
Saturday marked the end of a seven-part series in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel looking at Milwaukee’s school choice program — the longest-running voucher program in the country. As controversies about charter schools, vouchers, and test-based accountability continue to divide our nation, this series provides a thorough look at how one city has struggled with those issues.
Three Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters, Alan J. Borsuk, Sarah Carr and Leonard Sykes Jr., spent five months visiting 106 of city’s 115 voucher schools, which enroll roughly 14,000 students using vouchers. (The nine schools that refused to admit the reporters are listed here, along with the amount of public money each received for this school year.)
Despite the size and longevity of the Milwaukee voucher program, research on the schools has dwindled in recent years. For the first five years of the program, the state commissioned University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Witte to assess how voucher students were doing. But since the expansion of the program in 1995, the state has stopped collecting data on the schools’ performances, so there has been little study of the subject, and recent research often relies on grossly outdated data.
So simply by entering these voucher schools and reporting back on what’s inside, Borsuk, Carr and Sykes have done something groundbreaking. Not only are they bringing back fresh and much-needed information, but they’re also presenting a challenge for researchers to come forward and do the same.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we hand over the trophy and yield the lectern for teary victory speeches, let’s back things up a little bit.
For those new to the Milwaukee voucher system, here’s a quick overview of how it works. Children who live in Milwaukee and come from families with incomes below 1.75 times the national poverty level can qualify to receive state-issued vouchers. The exact face value of the vouchers changes from year to year — this year, it is worth up to $6000 per student. Students can then use those vouchers toward an education at any private school in Milwaukee, including religious schools. Currently, more than 70 percent of the students using vouchers attend religious schools.
The idea of government-funded vouchers for religious schools puts many Americans on edge, and has gotten a fair amount of coverage recently. Just a few weeks ago, the Florida Supreme Court began reviewing the constitutionality of that state’s school voucher program. As in Milwaukee, the Florida law currently allows students to use vouchers at religious schools. But that law has been debated in the lower courts for six years because of its alleged violation of a provision of the state constitution that “No revenue of the state … shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”
These issues were already tackled at the national level in 2002, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Cleveland’s voucher system, which also allowed vouchers for religious schools, was constitutional. Of course, that only means that in certain cases, religious vouchers can be in accordance with the U.S. constitution — but determining legality at the state level is another matter.
Two parts of the Journal Sentinel series deal specifically with the role of religion in the voucher schools. The fourth part of the series addresses many potential concerns about allowing families to use vouchers for religious education. No, the program has not led to the creation of schools for bizarre, fringe religions — about two-thirds of religious schools that accept vouchers are Catholic or Lutheran, and those that aren’t Christian are Muslim or Jewish. (That means for now, at least, Scientologists are without a voucher school.) Yes, kids are allowed to “opt out” of religious education — but as it turns out, that’s rarely an issue. And no, religious schools that allow voucher students aren’t really any different than the religious private schools that have been operating in our country for decades. They still talk about Jesus, they still have morning prayers, and they still see religious teachings as one of their primary goals.
The fifth installment in the series looks at how Catholic schools have changed over the years, as their original parishioners move to the suburbs and Latino families move in.
The boundary between church and state isn’t the only debate that this series taps in to. There’s also the issue of accountability — something particularly hot right now thanks to President Bush’s much-discussed No Child Left Behind act, which calls for greater test-based accountability in public schools. But while public schools nationwide strain to make “adequate yearly progress” on standardized tests or suffer the consequences of being deemed a “failing school,” many voucher schools are slipping by completely unobserved, unaccountable, and unpunished. The voucher schools may be accepting public money from the voucher students, but they are nonetheless private schools, and thus are not held to the same standards of accountability as traditional public schools.
The Journal Sentinel series hammers home the lack of accountability for Milwaukee’s voucher schools. Part two of the series questions how easy it is to start up a voucher school, noting, “You don’t need any credentials to open a voucher school. Your teachers don’t need any, either. You don’t need to meet any detailed standards of educational progress or performance.” And part three calls attention to the factors parents take into account when choosing a charter school, which too often center on class size and gut instinct instead of any real evidence regarding student performance.
Of course, the theory behind school choice is that we don’t need test-based accountability, since schools are already accountable to the market. As the theory goes, if a school isn’t doing its job, parents will pull their kids out and find a better one, so the school will lose its funding (since funds come on a per-student basis) and will be forced either to close down or find a way to improve.
But a consistent observation for the Journal Sentinel reporters was that free-market theory has not become reality. As they wrote in part three, “Even the staunchest advocates of school choice admit today that the marketplace theory, which held that parents would pull their kids out of bad schools, or not choose them to begin with, did not pan out.” They back up their claim with quotes from experts as well as interviews with parents whose actions — failing to yank their kids out of troubled schools — directly contradict free-market theory.
Although the reporters did stress the need for more accountability within the choice system, they made few other claims so adamantly. This series did not attempt to prove that voucher programs are good or that voucher programs are bad. Rather, it dared to take the balanced (some might say “wishy-washy”) stance that is less fun to write and read, but so much closer to the truth: “Milwaukee’s school choice program is very much like a teenager — heartwarmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others, and the subject of myths, misunderstandings and ignorance, even by the adults entrusted with its welfare.”
That’s right, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had the gall, the audacity, the absolute nerve to dedicate seven entire articles to the finding that a few voucher schools are wonderful, a few should be closed down immediately, and a whole lot lie somewhere in the middle.
And God bless ‘em for doing it.
All too often the voucher debate, like so many other controversial issues, is reduced to sensationalism at the expense of accuracy. One front-page headline screams about a study finding that school choice has no positive effect; another shouts back a few weeks later about a new study showing that charter schools outperform traditional public schools. The articles, like the studies they cover, often speak in extremes, dusting right over the nuanced truth.
The Journal Sentinel series, however, resisted that temptation. For every story about a devastatingly bad voucher school — and believe us, some of these stories were truly upsetting — Journal Sentinel reporters told another about a school that was reaching out to parents, inspiring students, and doing things right.
Granted, the whole thing is highly anecdotal. If these seven articles were collated, bound and presented as an academic study, it wouldn’t win any doctorates. We would want the researchers to set clear standards for “failure” or “success.” We would take issue with the reporters telling us how few kids were present on a single day, and demand instead that they calculate average attendance over a set time period. We would expect them to count the number of books in each class, not just tally the classes that seemed to have none.
But Borsuk, Carr and Sykes are not academic researchers. These are journalists, and they are doing great journalism, raising as many questions as answers.
Now it’s up to the actual education researchers to step up and continue to study these schools.
Samantha Henig was a CJR Daily intern.