schoolinfosystem.org
Joanne Jacobs: Louisiana students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools did worse in the first year, then improved, concludes a University of Arkansas study. After three years, voucher students were doing as well as similar students who hadn’t switched; low performers did significantly better in English. The Indiana study looked at […]
Joanne Jacobs: Louisiana students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools did worse in the first year, then improved, concludes a University of Arkansas study. After three years, voucher students were doing as well as similar students who hadn’t switched; low performers did significantly better in English. The Indiana study looked at […]
Amber Walker: On Monday night, in a 7-0 decision, the Madison School Board approved the district’s $494,652,025 preliminary all-funds budget for the 2017-2018 school year. The Madison Metropolitan School District highlighted it’s balanced operating budget — representing $390,045,697 of the total funds — will result in a $15 per hour minimum wage for the district’s […]
The Economist: This is not the end of the story for vouchers, however. In both Milwaukee and Washington, voucher schemes get similar results to the public schools but with much less money. Under the DC scheme, each voucher is worth $8,500 a year, compared with $17,500 to educate a child in the public school system. […]
The statewide voucher program, in its first year, is at capacity, with about 500 students receiving vouchers statewide, according to the department. Of those, 79 percent did not attend a Wisconsin public school last year.
The program’s enrollment limit will rise to 1,000 next year. The statewide program exists in districts outside of Milwaukee and Racine, which have had programs for years.
Seventy-three percent of students now attending private schools using a voucher were already enrolled in a private school last year, according to the department. Twenty-one percent of students were from public schools. About 3 percent did not attend any school and 2 percent were home schooled.
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he would probably support adding a preference given to applicants from public schools given those numbers.
“If the students are performing at or better than they were in the schools they came from, then that would be a compelling case to offer more choices like that to more families across the state,” Walker said. “If the majority are not performing better, you could make a pretty compelling argument not to.”
Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said work on an accountability bill is wrapping up and he hopes it will begin circulating for sponsors by the end of this month. He hopes hearings will be held in late summer and early fall with a bill sent to the governor by the end of the year.
“I hope that everyone comes away happy that this is the right thing to do,” Olsen said. “The voucher people want a bill like this because they’re only as good as their weakest school.”
Olsen said the bill will not only apply the report card system to schools participating in the voucher program, it will also make changes to the report card for public schools.
The report card released last fall didn’t measure high school student growth, because it was based on one test taken in 10th grade. The state budget the governor signed Sunday expands high school testing to grades nine and 11. The accountability bill will ensure future report cards include those tests, Olsen said.
Democrats have been skeptical that Republicans will follow through on holding private voucher schools accountable. Earlier this year Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, compared talk of a bill to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
In February, Walker told the State Journal editorial board that he hoped to sign a voucher school accountability bill before the budget was approved. That didn’t happen, but Walker said there was push back from the Legislature.Much more on vouchers, here.
Students who received vouchers to attend private or religious schools in Milwaukee improved their performance in mathematics and reading last year but still lagged behind public school students, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction found that in the second year of testing last fall, about 40 percent of Milwaukee voucher students showed they were proficient or advanced in math, up nearly 6 percent from last year. Nearly 49 percent of local public school students and 78 percent of public school students statewide reached that mark.
I find discussions of the per-pupil funding level of different types of Milwaukee schools usually turns into a debate on how to make a true apples-to-apples comparison of per-pupil support for the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). While basic differences in MPS and MPCP schools and their cost-drivers make any comparison imperfect, the following is what you might call a green apples to red apples comparison.
DISCLAIMER: if you not interested in school funding, prepare to be bored.
Per-pupil support for MPS
Note I am not trying to calculate per-pupil education funding or suggest that this is the amount of money that actually reaches a school or classroom; it is a simple global picture of how much public revenue exists per-pupil in MPS. Below are the relevant numbers for 2012, from MPS documents:
…….
Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP.
State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee’s school voucher program and those in the city’s public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers’ expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.View the 950K PDF report, here.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: “Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn’t perform better in state tests”, “Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools”, “Choice schools not outperforming MPS”; Spend 50% Less Per Student.
Latest tests show voucher scores about same or worse in math and reading.
Students in Milwaukee’s school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
The scores released by the state Department of Public Instruction cast a shadow on the overall quality of the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which was intended to improve results for poor city children in failing public schools by allowing them to attend higher-performing private schools with publicly funded vouchers. The scores also raise concerns about Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to roll back the mandate that voucher schools participate in the current state test.
Voucher-school advocates counter that legislation that required administration of the state test should have been applied only once the new version of the test that’s in the works was rolled out. They also say that the latest test scores are an incomplete measure of voucher-school performance because they don’t show the progress those schools are making with a difficult population of students over time.
Statewide, results from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam show that scores didn’t vary much from last year. The percentage of students who scored proficient or better was higher in reading, science and social studies but lower in mathematics and language arts from the year before.Great. Now Milwaukee has TWO failing taxpayer-financed school systems when it comes to educating low income kids (and that’s 89 per cent of the total population of Milwaukee Public Schools).
Statewide test results released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction include for the first time performance data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which involves about 110 schools serving around 10,000 students. There’s a total population of around 80,000 students in Milwaukee’s school district.
The numbers for the voucher schools don’t look good. But the numbers for the conventional public schools in Milwaukee are very poor, as well.
In a bit of good news, around the rest of the state student test scores in every demographic group have improved over the last six years, and the achievment gap is narrowing.
But the picture in Milwaukee remains bleak.The test results show the percentage of students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who scored proficient or advanced was 34.4 percent for math and 55.2 percent for reading.
Among Milwaukee Public Schools students, it was 47.8 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Among Milwaukee Public Schools students coming from families making 185 percent of the federal poverty level — a slightly better comparison because voucher students come from families making no more than 175 percent — it was 43.9 percent in math and 55.3 percent in reading.
Statewide, the figures were 77.2 percent in math and 83 percent in reading. Among all low-income students in the state, it was 63.2 percent in math and 71.7 percent in reading.
Democrats said the results are evidence that the voucher program is not working. Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, the top Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said voucher students, parents and taxpayers are being “bamboozled.”
“The fact that we’ve spent well over $1 billion on a failed experiment leads me to believe we have no business spending $22 million to expand it with these kinds of results,” Pope-Roberts said. “It’s irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to Milwaukee students.”
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who is developing a proposal to expand the voucher program to other cities, took a more optimistic view of the results.
“Obviously opponents see the glass half-empty,” Vos said. “I see the glass half-full. Children in the school choice program do the same as the children in public school but at half the cost.”Only DeFour’s article noted that voucher schools spend roughly half the amount per student compared to traditional public schools. Per student spending was discussed extensively during last evening’s planning grant approval (The vote was 6-1 with Marj Passman voting No while Maya Cole, James Howard, Ed Hughes, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss and Arlene Silveira voted yes) for the Urban League’s proposed Charter IB School: The Madison Preparatory Academy.
The Wisconsin Knowledge & Concepts Examination (WKCE) has long been criticized for its lack of rigor. Wisconsin DPI WKCE data.
Yin and Yang: Jay Bullock and Christian D’Andrea.
Related: “Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”.
On my show last night — which re-runs at 10pm tonight on FBN — I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC’s public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.
The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.
Unfortunately, it’s also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:DC also has a “state” level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called “capital” projects.
But those aren’t included in the regular spending figures.
Related: Education: Too Important for a Government Monopoly. Joanne has more as does Mark Perry.
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student. The DC budget morass illustrates the necessity of K-12 budget clarity in all cases, including Madison.
Kayla Huynh But Wisconsin students remain behind years after the public health emergency disrupted learning, according to a national study on academic recovery this month. The average Wisconsin student is over a third of a grade level behind in math and half of a grade level behind in reading compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to results […]
WILL: Since at least 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has made changes that obscure the true performance of schools, making it harder for Wisconsin families to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Today, Senator John Jagler (R-Watertown) and Representative Bob Wittke (R-Caledonia) introduced new legislation (LRB-0976) aimed at restoring transparency and accountability […]
by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found. In North Carolina alone, we identified 39 of these likely “segregation academies” that are still operating and that […]
Peter Arcidiacono, Karthik Muralidharan & John D. Singleton: We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment […]
Alan Borsuk: “Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, […]
Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken: We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of […]
A curious WPR article: The Kickapoo Area School District passed a resolution this spring calling for lawmakers to stop using public tax dollars to fund private school vouchers. The district is also asking that public spending on private school be outlined on property tax bills. During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district […]
Dave Zweifel Many educators complained at the time that the entire voucher program would serve as a foot in the door to eventually undermine the public school system — a system that had served the country since colonial days and was credited with representing the true melting pot among children from different cultures, races and incomes. […]
WILL: Decoupling public school funding from choice funding is a win-win from the perspective of both public-school districts and choice/charter schools. School districts will no longer face the uncertainty of voucher enrollment numbers when crafting their budgets for the upcoming school year. In an era of declining enrollment across Wisconsin, this additional stability is important. […]
Will Flanders: It’s an unfortunate reality that demographic factors historically play a large role in student performance; any honest assessment of how schools and school sectors are performing must take those factors into account. Much of the reporting on school performance, though, ignores this reality. This report endeavors to incorporate these factors through rigorous statistical […]
Michael R Ford and Fredrik O Andersson In this article, 25 years of data are utilized from nonprofit schools operating in the United States’ oldest and largest private school voucher program to test theories of isomorphism. We find that startup and religious schools belonging to an umbrella organization such as an archdiocese are particularly likely […]
Molly Beck: Gov. Tony Evers says he opposes abolishing the state’s oldest school voucher program through a lawsuit filed by some of the governor’s strongest supporters. Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, said eliminating the taxpayer-funded voucher system in Milwaukee could have “traumatic” effects on the nearly 30,000 students who attend more […]
CJ Szafir: Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom. Families […]
Wall Street Journal: This has been the year for school choice—from vouchers, to homeschooling, to pod schools with parents who use education savings accounts. The winners include charter schools, as union-run K-12 schools lost hundreds of thousands of students during Covid-19 who haven’t returned. Yes they do. The trend holds for states of all sizes […]
Matt Barnum and Alicia A. Caldwell: When Doug Ducey signed an expansive and unprecedented school choice law as Arizona governor last year, he pitched it as a way to help students escape struggling public schools. “Our kids will no longer be locked in underperforming schools,” Ducey said in a statement at the time. “We’re unlocking […]
Elizabeth Findell: The word spread parent-to-parent during a Little Dribblers basketball game in the school gymnasium. The superintendent had sent emails—several—warning that school-choice efforts under way wouldn’t be good for their East Texas school district of 554 students. The target of Superintendent Brandon Enos’s advocacy was a special session of the Texas Legislature called by […]
Duey Stroebel: A couple months after the bipartisan agreement over shared revenue and education were enacted we are already seeing the effects. Besides the record increase in public school resources of $1.2 billion, the deal included the passage of Act 11, which significantly increased state payments to school choice and charter schools. Until earlier this year, voting on education […]
Nicholas Kelly: Education was a big winner of a bipartisan agreement in the recently enacted state budget. Public schools will receive an increase of more than $1 billion. Per pupil spending for Wisconsin’s private school choice programs will grow by $2,000 to $3,000 per student. Even after these historic funding increases, state payments to schools in the […]
Will Flanders and Cory Brewer: The recent article by Wisconsin Watch, “Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices,” suggested private schools that participate in Wisconsin’s school choice program can discriminate against students. The article specifically alleges that choice schools “expel” students with disabilities, without providing a single example of when this has occurred. […]
Wall Street Journal: These changes bring the scholarships to 73% of per-pupil union school funding from about 61%, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). It’s the biggest school-choice advance in the state in years. Charter schools also get a per-pupil boost of $1,727 to $10,991. A voucher program for special needs […]
Wisconsin coalition for education freedom: Wisconsin Watch has released its third article in a series attempting to discredit the great work choice programs do in Wisconsin. Their latest article misrepresents admission policies of choice schools while ignoring the fact that public schools often engage in admission practices that would be illegal for schools participating in […]
Phoebe Petrovic As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school. Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with […]
Baker A. Mitchell and Robert P. Spencer: The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources. But hundreds of American cities contract municipal services out to private companies, which generally aren’t considered state actors. The […]
David Blaska: As with all public schools in progressive-run cities, education is no longer Job #1 in Madison WI. “Equity” is. The Madison Metropolitan School District is poised to scuttle its advanced honors courses in order to make the racial numbers work. Either not enough black and brown kids are doing advanced course work or […]
John Hindraker: Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts […]
WILL-Law: The News: Attorneys with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee on behalf of Wisconsin Lutheran High School after the City unlawfully assessed the school for $105,000 in property taxes. The City is trying to tax Wisconsin Lutheran for a campus building that is owned by the school […]
Shannon Whitworth: I work at a high school where the majority of the students are from inner-city Milwaukee. They are confronted almost daily with some form of dysfunction, depravity, or violence. One day, some of my students challenged me as to why they should put a lot of effort into their studies when, from their […]
The Economist: Parents seeking government money to send their children to religious schools have won a string of victories at America’s Supreme Court. The dollars began flowing in 2002, when the justices let states provide parents with vouchers for religious schooling. In 2017 the court said states may not exclude church-based preschools from grants for […]
Will Flanders and Libby Sobic: For many years, Wisconsin has reserved the position of state superintendent of schools for someone steeped in union politics and promising the status quo. But over the past year, COVID-19 has turned many such situations on their heads and polarized politics in a way never seen before. The superintendent election […]
Cori Petersen: This past fall, many public schools made the decision to go virtual as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this wasn’t the case for most private schools. In fact, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, only 5% of private schools went virtual as of October. This is driving demand for […]
Todd Richmond: The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction violated state law when it withheld voucher students’ standardized test scores for a day last fall, a judge ruled Friday. School Choice Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm, sued the department in Jefferson County court in November. The lawsuit revolved […]
Chris Rickert: A group of parents and private religious schools is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to void a Dane County order barring in-person school for most students, saying the order issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic infringes on the right to worship and to an education. “This case challenges the authority of one […]
David N. Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart, Krzysztof Karbownik: Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending […]
Jon Gabriel: This week, reporters revealed that the state Department of Education released the personal information of nearly 7,000 families who use Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Worse still, they sent it to Save Our Schools, staunch opponents of the program and educational choice in general. ESAs enable parents, mostly those who have children with special needs, to […]
Dillon Rosenblat: The Arizona Department of Education likely violated federal student privacy laws when it released a spreadsheet that inadvertently named every parent with an Empowerment Scholarship Account in the state. The spreadsheet then fell into the hands of a group that opposes expansion of the program. The Yellow Sheet Report, a sister publication of […]
Do kids who attend private schools w publicly funded tuition vouchers do better than public schools? Research is mixed. Here’s a comprehensive look at the highs and lows in Milwaukee, which I wrote right as @BetsyDeVosED was rising to office. https://t.co/esSBjs5T7C — Erin Richards (@emrichards) September 16, 2019 .@betsydevosed was involved early in Wisconsin’s voucher […]
Eric Litke: Voucher schools are an ongoing point of contention in Wisconsin’s divided government, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers even promising to tighten or end the decades-old program. The system, which uses taxpayer money to send low-income students to private schools, has been tweaked and debated but ultimately expanded under Republican control in recent years. […]
Marisa Peryer: Established in 2015, the school is part of a nationwide network of 35 Cristo Rey Jesuit schools that predominantly reach students from low-income families. Students spend four days a week at the school, then one day a week at businesses across greater Milwaukee as part of the work-study program. The students are not […]
Will Flanders: Here are 5 findings for our upcoming report on school performance: 1. Milwaukee: Choice Schools Lead in Student Proficiency (even more significantly than DPI data suggests) Wisconsin’s private and charter schools, much maligned by Governor Evers and other leaders on the left, continue to succeed for Wisconsin students. Once schools are put on […]
Vicki Alger and Martin Lueken: Secondly, Pope’s latest perennial request to the LFB asks for only the program’s costs and doesn’t ask for a single voucher program savings calculation. That omission, however, didn’t stop dozens of media outlets from repeating the ominous headline that vouchers, along with charter schools, “consume $193 million in state aid.” […]
Tap for a larger version. Raw data [Excel Numbers] via Sara Hynek. Note that taxpayer supported K-12 school districts receive funds from a variety of sources, including federal taxpayer funds along with local fees. Madison plans to spend $518,955,288 during the 2018-2019 school year. That’s about $20,000 per student (26,917, which includes 4k), which is […]
Molly Beck: He said in the Milwaukee program especially, enrollment freezes in private voucher schools would disproportionately affect children of color living in low-income households. “Most of our families don’t have the kind of income where they would have realistic choices,” he said at the time. Under Evers’ proposal, voucher schools also would be banned […]
Corey A. DeAngelis: If only it were that easy. My just-released study — co-authored with George Mason University graduate student Blake Hoarty — suggests that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in two of the most highly regulated voucher programs in the country, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Ohio Educational Choice […]
Corey A. DeAngelis: If only it were that easy. My just-released study — co-authored with George Mason University graduate student Blake Hoarty — suggests that higher-quality private schools are less likely to participate in two of the most highly regulated voucher programs in the country, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Ohio Educational Choice […]
Corey DeAngelis: EducationNext just released its 12th annual survey of public opinion. The nationally representative survey, administered in May 2018, finds that 54 percent of the general public supports private school vouchers for all students. This result is up 9 percentage points (20 percent) from 2017. On the other hand, only 43 percent of the […]
Corey A. DeAngelis: These positive effects are all large. For example, the most recent federal evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program found that vouchers increased the likelihood that parents and students reported that the students were in very safe schools by more than 35 percent. Data from the state-mandated evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental […]
WILL: on K-12 Education Reform In almost every context, words matter. Public opinion on particular issues can shift greatly depending on the language used, and K-12 education reform is no exception. To help further understand this, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty commissioned Research Now Survey Sampling International to conduct a statewide survey experiment […]
Alan Borsuk: It’s a much different world for pretty much every school and school district in Wisconsin, both public and private. A few aspects of that, in thumbnail form: Without vouchers, a lot of current private schools would have closed or would never have opened. Competition for enrollment in Milwaukee and Racine — and increasingly […]
Alan Borsuk: Teachers and the teachers’ union. Don’t expect a happy workforce. The union has turned up the volume on its unhappiness and it remains a powerful force, even without the bargaining powers it had before Act 10, which dramatically curtailed collective bargaining for most public employees, including teachers. Beyond the union itself, it won’t […]
Patrick Wolf Here are the Newspeak translations: • “Large body” means “five studies,” selected out of 20 rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations that exist on private school choice in the U.S. The authors claim the commentary relies on six studies but one of the supposed studies is a commentary by Mark Dynarski and Austin Nichols […]
James Varney: It was a prolonged mystery that struck Wisconsin education reformers as more akin to a Kafka novel than American due process: Who was behind cryptic demand letters sent under the aegis of the Obama Justice Department, intimating without specific evidence that Milwaukee’s school-choice program was illegally discriminating against disabled kids? Now, after a […]
Tawnell Hobs: “The schools that have 20% to 30% voucher kids and 70% to 80% fee-paying kids, they look more like the private schools that we sort of put on a pedestal—that have very ambitious programs,” says Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas who has studied private-school choice programs […]
Erin Richards: In 2015-’16, Wisconsin was home to just over a million school-aged children. About 860,000 attended public schools. About 123,000 attended private schools: about 90,000 who paid tuition, and about 33,000 who used vouchers. About 20,000 children were home-schooled. Vouchers are taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies that help children attend private schools, the vast majority of […]
Will Flanders:: While creating an incentive to improve, school choice has not come at a cost to the public schools. If, as Taylor claims, school choice is designed to “siphon” money from public schools, it’s making a mess of the job. Per-pupil spending is higher today than it was before the start of the voucher […]
Alan Borsuk: Every school on the south side is in fear of what Augustine Prep will mean, a leader of a different school told me recently. Some are at least expressing good wishes. Some are not, especially privately. The biggest thing to watch over the next several years will be enrollment at a lot of […]
Karen Rivedal: Lighthouse Christian School, which has operated since 2004 out of Lighthouse Church at 5202 Regent St., will gets its own building at 6400 Schroeder Road, with space for up to 260 elementary students. The $3.6 million, two-phase project will increase classrooms from eight to 19 and will add a cafeteria, a library with […]
Linda Lutton: Under the draft proposal reviewed by WBEZ, individual taxpayers could choose to send up to $1 million annually to scholarship organizations rather than to the state Department of Revenue. Those diverted taxpayer dollars would fund scholarships to pay tuition cost at private or parochial schools, or to pay the cost for a public […]
Corey DeAngelis: The Actual Test Score Results – and Their Implications Even the latest experimental results, which show that voucher students in Louisiana and Indiana caught up with or did better than their public school peers on test scores, are less optimistic than prior voucher studies. However, there is not a clear theory for why […]
Molly Beck:: “The governor supports the K-12 education budget he introduced to the Legislature five months ago,” spokesman Tom Evenson said when asked if Walker would support the proposal. “It provides a $649 million increase in funding for our schools, bringing funding for K-12 to an all-time high. After visiting nearly 50 public schools this […]
Robin Lake, via a kind email: When my son attended our neighborhood public elementary school, he hid under a desk every day. His teacher regularly yelled at the mostly low-income students and typically ignored him – under that desk, he was out of sight, out of mind. He tested as profoundly gifted, but a constellation […]
Michael J. Petrilli, Richard D. Kahlenberg, and Kyle Spencer: Rick doesn’t believe that kids should be forced to attend the school their district assigns to them, usually the one closest to their house, or that private schools should be illegal. I don’t believe that tax dollars should flow to schools without any accountability for results. […]
Washington Post: CRITICS OF school choice could not contain their glee over a new study on the District’s school voucher program showing that students attending private schools did not perform as well on standardized tests as their public school counterparts. It is pretty rich that those who have railed against using test scores to hold […]
Wall Street Journal: President Trump has made a cause of public and private school choice, and liberals who oppose evaluating teachers based on student achievement are now hyping a few studies that have found vouchers hurt student performance. A closer look still supports the case for giving parents choice. More than 400,000 students in 30 […]
WILL: “Our study compared outcomes between all K-12 schools in Wisconsin – traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the choice programs. In doing so, it controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors such as race, poverty, etc. As we acknowledged, we did not control for special needs or learning disabilities because the data […]
Barato Britt: True advocates of choice through vouchers shouldn’t suggest vouchers to be the panacea, the proverbial be all end all for education in our nation, no matter how much our President or Education Secretary maintain this assertion. Vouchers, like all educational options, are one means through which we provide students and families the ability […]
Danielle Dreilinger: Measured like a school district, the Louisiana Scholarship Program earned 61.4 on a 150-point scale, Dunn said. That would be a D on the state public school report card, and worse than any public school system except for those in St. Helena Parish, Morehouse Parish and Bogalusa. No voucher program earned an A. […]
Annysa Johnson: Evers, 65, said his large margin Tuesday reflected Wisconsin voters’ commitment to public education. But he could face a tough fight ahead, he said, if Holtz attracts funding from school reform proponents across the country. “They both vowed to go after national voucher money, and I assume that will be Mr. Holtz’s M.O.,” […]
Molly Beck: “I think our track record is pretty good,” Evers said, citing decreased suspensions and expulsions, increased number of students taking college-level courses while still in high school and modest increases in reading proficiency. “Is it where we want? Absolutely not,” he said. Reading a key issuefor Humphries The state’s reading proficiency levels have […]
Erin Richards: Hungerman said he can’t fully explain the reasons behind the numbers. Maybe, he surmised, parishes that begin to accept vouchers experience leadership change and new priorities. Maybe vouchers caused parishioners to change churches. Maybe parishioners, knowing that their parish has a public funding stream, are less likely to donate, or perhaps they don’t […]
Tony Evers (PDF): 1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction? I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher. I taught and became a […]
Erin Richards: Together, Travis Academy and Holy Redeemer have received close to $100 million in taxpayer funding over the years. The sum is less than what taxpayers would have paid for those pupils in public schools, because each tuition voucher costs less than the total expense per pupil in Milwaukee Public Schools. But vouchers weren’t […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: DPI-crafted school report cards are the primary means we have of discovering and comparing outcomes in Wisconsin schools. Schools in all sectors that receive public funding – traditional public, charter, and parental choice private schools – now all use the same annual Forward exam for students and will […]
Emma Brown and Perry Stein: The push toward school choice is deeply unpopular with advocates for traditional public schools, including teachers unions. “The general population of the United States of America needs to be watchful, and needs to be making sure there’s accountability there for where this money goes,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the […]
Molly Beck: He said school districts can save money because of reduced health insurance costs for staff and can be creative in retaining teachers, like providing bonuses. Humphries said in an interview that Evers was too focused on objecting to the expansion of private voucher and independent charter schools and not focused enough on raising […]
Doug Erickson: On the latest round of statewide tests, fewer than half of Wisconsin public school students in grades three through eight scored proficient or better in English language arts or math. The results, released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, showed 42.5 percent of students scored in those top two categories in […]
Danielle Dreilinger: Louisiana Education Superintendent John White has a radical solution to get 362 voucher students off waitlists: Enroll now, the state will pay later. These students have all been granted taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private school. But the budget ran short by about $2 million, generating anguish and attention for families that had already […]
Annysa Johnson: A proposal by a military-style voucher school to purchase a vacant Milwaukee Public Schools building is scheduled to go before the city next week. Right Step Inc., which is being sued by a group of parents for allegedly abusive practices, is proposing to open a boys-only campus for up to 150 students in […]
Annysa Johnson: Plans to build what is expected to be the second-largest private school in the Milwaukee Parental Choice voucher program passed its final hurdle at City Hall and could begin construction as early as April. Milwaukee’s Board of Zoning Appeals unanimously approved a special use permit earlier this month for St. Augustine Preparatory School, […]
Annysa Johnson: Third- through eighth-grade students in Milwaukee’s private voucher and independent charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in math and language arts, according to statewide assessment data released Wednesday by the Department of Public Instruction. But Racine public school students overall outscored their voucher school counterparts. And on the ACT, voucher schools outscored […]
Paul Hill: A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research is one of the relatively few recent studies reporting a negative voucher effect—students using vouchers in Louisiana learned a good deal less than similar students in regular public schools. The reason: students with vouchers had few good choices, since the available schools were […]
Molly Beck: More than 700 students in the Madison School District opted out in 2015, part of the 8,104 public school students who opted out statewide, a substantial increase from the 87 and 583 students, respectively, who opted out last year, state and school district data show. The surge nationwide in recent years represents a […]
Corey DeAngelis, Patrick J. Wolf: report we examine crime rates for young adults who experienced Milwaukee’s citywide voucher program as high school students and a comparable group of their peers who had been public school students. Using unique data collected as part of a longitudinal evaluation of the program, we consider criminal activity by youth […]
Chris Rickert: It’s as if taxpayers face paying for a voucher student twice — once through state taxes for vouchers, and again through district property tax levies for, well, I’m not sure what, given that the voucher students are no longer in the districts. Dan Rossmiller, government relations director at the Wisconsin Association of School […]
Annysa Johnson: They do not include individual district- and school-level data for public schools or the scores for private schools participating in the state-funded voucher programs. Among the highlights: The composite score for juniors who took the ACT was 20 on a scale of 36. That’s below the 22.2 reported in August 2015. Again, DPI […]
Vivian Wang: Laying down a new marker in the competition for school enrollment in Milwaukee, the School Board has approved a high-profile young educator’s proposal for a new charter school, after he promised to ramp up efforts to reverse the flow of students leaving the district for voucher schools and other options. Maurice Thomas’ planned […]
Matt Kullig: Ramirez has not said whether his proposed St. Augustine Preparatory Academy would participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but opponents have predicted the school would elect to educate students using taxpayer-funded vouchers and compete directly with the public schools for state education dollars. Ramirez said the goal of the school is to […]
Chris Rickert: But there’s still little doubt vouchers mean taxpayers are going to be on the hook for educating some indeterminate number of additional kids than they would be in the absence of vouchers. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Jim Bender, president of the pro-voucher School Choice Wisconsin. He notes that government […]
Molly Beck Overall, roughly $4.5 billion annually is devoted to general school funding in the proposed state budget. The cost for new students in the program over the next two years is projected to be about $37 million. In the last state budget, about $384 million was appropriated for the state’s three voucher systems. Rep. […]
Chris Rickert: From the way some of the more enthusiastic public school supporters talk, you’d think alternative forms of public education, such as voucher schools, were making millions on the backs of ill-treated kindergartners. The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voucher schools are not-for-profit, though, and it seems unlikely that any of them is, say, forcing […]