Milwaukee’s Public Policy Forum:

In a report released last week that did not get press other than a post on the education blog of the Journal Sentinel, the Legislative Audit Bureau rehashed the first-year findings of the School Choice Demonstration Project’s study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Interestingly, the Bureau found the study’s data cannot provide information about performance in individual schools. In response, a prominent school choice lobbying group has called for test scores to be reported annually on a school-by-school basis.
The overall findings, released last February, were not as positive as education reform supporters had anticipated. The Audit Bureau re-analyzed the data and confirmed these findings. For example, the sample of choice students in the private schools had lower reading scores on state standardized tests than a matched sample of MPS students at three of six grade levels. At all six grade levels tested, the private school students scored lower than a random sample of MPS students. In nearly all cases, however, the differences were not statistically significant.