Summer 1998 (v3#1)

School Vouchers:
Teacher of the Year gives Milwaukee experiment a failing grade

On September 25th, EPP sponsored a forum featuring Bob Peterson, Wisconsin Elementary School Teacher of the Year 1995-96. Peterson, a 5th grade teacher at Milwaukee public school La Escuela Fratney, is also co-founder and editor of Rethinking Schools, a national publication that promotes education reform. He joined us to share his first-hand experience with the Milwaukee voucher experiment. What follows is an edited transcript of his remarks.

My objective tonight is to give you, first, a brief overview of the Milwaukee voucher program. Then I’m going to outline six arguments of why vouchers in general and the Milwaukee voucher program are really disastrous, and then I’m going to offer some thoughts about strategy.

Vouchers have been synonymous with Milwaukee since 1990 when Wisconsin began an experiment that allowed low income children to use publicly funded money to attend non-religious private schools within the city boundaries. Until last fall, when Cleveland started a program, Milwaukee was the only program of that kind. This original program was upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1992 on the grounds that the law was narrowly drawn to affect a small number of kids living in poverty, and did not include religious schools. It was limited to 1% of the total school population in Milwaukee ... approximately one thousand [students]. At first actually less than that enrolled in the program.

The program was initiated by Annette "Polly" Williams, an African-American legislator from Milwaukee, who raised the issue out of frustration with what she considered the white dominated school system in Milwaukee. Some of her criticisms were on the mark. She found a lot of support amongst conservatives including Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation...our Republican Governor and our Democratic Mayor, and ultimately the Catholic church. Those forces, working together, went back to the legislature and expanded the voucher program in 1995 to include religious schools and to include 15,000 students.

The religious school expansion was put on hold until the constitutional questions could be resolved. ...The Court of Appeals has ruled that the expanded voucher program violates the state constitution separation of church and state. The Governor, however, along with well financed legal counsels, are appealing through Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and we expect a decision within a year. The lower courts also ruled that at the beginning of this year, 97-98, the voucher program must return to it’s original, non-religious [version].

Approximately 1,650 students are receiving vouchers of $4,300 per student. In the first five years of the program, 73% of the voucher students were African-American, 21% were Latino, and 5% white. Interestingly enough, had the voucher program been expanded, the racial composition would be completely different because within the Catholic Archdiocese elementary schools in Milwaukee there’s only 10% African-American, and 5% within the high schools. The Milwaukee [public] school system is about a quarter white, 60% African-American, 11% Latino, and the rest Asian and Native American. The voting population in Milwaukee is about the opposite, about 75% white, and unfortunately they don’t support the school board bond or building referendums.

We have in Milwaukee right now one of the better urban school districts in the country. ...We have also one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation...very segregated by race and class. We have the Bradley Foundation, probably the wealthiest right wing foundation in the country. We have a Democratic mayor who used to call himself Socialist and now is a strong voucher advocate. We have a teachers union that recently reaffiliated with the NEA, [which] it had left before because the NEA was too progressive. ...We have Howard Fuller, an African-American former superintendent who used to be a Marxist, Pan-Africanist. He’s now a national advocate for vouchers, and he’s based out of Marquette University. And of course we have Rethinking Schools, which started on my kitchen table eleven years ago, and we try to write about these things. So the school politics in Milwaukee is pretty interesting when you put all those people together and mix it up.

That’s a brief overview of the Milwaukee voucher plan. I’m going to talk about six arguments against vouchers, and this is important not only because of the locally based voucher programs being promoted, but also on a federal level...there’s about six different versions of voucher plans being considered. I believe that in the long run, the private voucher system in education would be an unmitigated disaster. Here’s six reasons, but there are many more:

Vouchers As Diversion
Voucher proposals and programs are really a diversion from some of the difficult issues that we have to wrestle with. The proponents of school vouchers...have managed to direct the conversation about improving schools into narrow straight jackets of vouchers, ignoring the more fundamental issues of quality and equality in education. In Wisconsin, the legislative debate, the newspaper columns are dominated by this issue while fundamental problems go unattended.

My students, like most students attending urban schools, are crowded into classes with too many bodies, in older facilities that often lack libraries, art rooms, and [adequate] electrical wiring, with teachers who are relatively new and some of whom have inadequate training. Yet my students’ counterparts in the suburbs have smaller class sizes, newer facilities, teachers with more experience and more money being spent on them in their schools and in their homes. These and other issues, such as developing programs to hire and retain teachers of color, funding parent involvement [and] school site counsels, have been ignored by the major pro-voucher proponents like Newt Gingrich, Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation, and others. The bottom line is, by advocating simplistic solutions of vouchers to complex educational problems, they’re evading public responsibility for all children, including the Juan’s and Latisha’s in my classroom.

But vouchers are also a diversion in another sense. In Wisconsin, voucher proponents portray the argument like this: vouchers equal more choice for parents, more choice equals getting into private schools, private schools equals better education than public schools, and public schools will have to become better because of the competition. Very simple. As my father used to say, if every complex problem has a simple solution, then it’s wrong. The problem is that vouchers as an educational reform proposal are vacuous, there’s no content there.

If there is anything that I have learned in my three decade struggle for better education is that what goes on in the classroom, the quality of the teacher, the quality of the teacher-student relationship, the quality of the curriculum and the methods of instruction, are central to school reform. And yet voucher proponents are silent on these matters.

Marketplace Argument
The second argument is from the marketplace. And of course voucher proponents assume that the marketplace will create quality education for everyone. ...By increasing competition, bad schools will go out of business, new schools will start, and the best schools will flourish. When I hear this argument I think of the children I work with everyday and how the marketplace is affecting their lives.

Let’s take the issue of health care for my students. Last year one of my students missed several days of school. When he finally did come back, he was still sick. I asked if he had been to the doctor, he said no. A phone call to the mother and we find out that, of course, she can’t afford to send her kids to the doctor. The marketplace has left nearly forty million people without health insurance in the United States, including a lot of my students. Or take the issue of employment. Between 1979 and 1987, Milwaukee area corporate leaders eliminated 50,000 union wage, manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate in Milwaukee is 5.5 times greater for African-Americans than for whites. ...What could be a more basic need [than] food? The marketplace has provided fancy mega-grocery stores in the suburbs in Milwaukee, very large supermarkets. [There are] very few large supermarkets in the inner city, but many small stores with higher prices, lower quality. My students do not need an extension of the marketplace in education. If anything they need more controls on the ravages of the marketplace in other areas of their life.

Ironically, it’s the Milwaukee voucher program itself that has demonstrated most dramatically that it takes more than a voucher to run a school. ...Part of the rhetoric of the voucher movement, however, was that public schools are so bad that just about anybody could do a better job and private was always better than public. New private schools were started and then new private schools started failing.

The most glaring examples of this were in 1995 and 96 when a law was changed to allow 100% of the students in a particular school to be voucher students. ...Of the dozen private schools that started that year, two of them closed unexpectedly mid-year, amid charges of inflated enrollment figures and missing or fraudulent financial records. Two other schools were unable to regularly pay their staff, leading to an exodus of teachers and students. One of the closed schools, the Milwaukee Preparatory School, may have been obligated to return up to $300,000 to the state due to exaggerated enrollment figures, but that audit could not be completed because of missing financial records. The school’s founder abruptly left town in December. He was later arrested in Texas and found guilty of criminal fraud.

Milwaukee Journal columnist Dennis McKeon likened the initial enthusiasm and naiveté of voucher supporters to this Mickey Rooney movie from the 1950’s, where teenagers would rent a barn, learn a few songs and put on a show. He wrote, "In Milwaukee it’s ‘I got it, come on kids, we’ll open a school!’" Thanks to school choice, almost anyone can start a school on a hope and a whimsy, a few classrooms in which to put the kids, enough stationery to write to Madison for money. There’s almost no rules. ...Call it no fault education, just don’t go so far as to call it a solution to public schools. It’s been pointed out by some people that it’s actually easier to open up a school under the voucher plan than to open up a tavern in Milwaukee. And we have a lot of taverns in Milwaukee. Anyway, it’s frightening.

Dual School System
The third argument I want to look at briefly is the question of [vouchers creating] a dual school system. There’s two issues here: one is the issue of stratification and the other is accountability. Our society of course is deeply stratified already. The question is, do social policies decrease the stratification or do social policies increase that kind of stratification? Despite the voucher supporters’ rhetoric...private school voucher plans, even those with legislative state guides like Wisconsin’s, allow schools to choose students. They talk about parents choosing, but actually it’s schools choosing. That is the essence of a private school, they’re not open to every one. If vouchers are implemented on a wide scale, private schools, even though they receive public money, will pick and choose their students so that those left for the public schools would be those who are the most disadvantaged.

The Milwaukee experience is key here because unlike many voucher proposals...the Milwaukee plan purports to guard against this kind of problem. It limits the vouchers to low income students, 1.7 times the federal poverty level, about $26,000 for a family of four. It states that vouchers must cover the entire tuition and mandates that schools can’t discriminate against applicants, so it has some nice safeguards built into it. But upon closer inspection, these kind of safeguards are somewhat hollow. First, there’s actually no procedure to accurately check things out. It’s solely based on the statements of the family. Secondly, few of the now thirty voucher schools in Milwaukee accept kids with exceptional needs, effectively excluding over 10% of the Milwaukee student population. Third, several of the schools have what are called "registration fees" of up to $475. These fees led state legislator Polly Williams to call for new legislation to outlaw such practices. Fourth, these private schools also can choose students by requiring parents to meet fundraising quotas. If you don’t have the time or expertise you’re out. Fifth, those parents most likely to take the initiative to choose a school to get a voucher are a select group in the first place. And sixth, and most importantly, if a kid gets into a private school, at the first hint of a problem, poor attendance, academic or discipline problem, there’s nothing that prevents that school from kicking the student out.

There’s another aspect of duality...that has to do with accountability. On the one hand, we have public schools that, despite their problems, are overseen by elected officials, and remain accountable to the public in a variety of ways. ...On the other hand, we have a private school system funded by the public with minimal to nonexistent accountability and oversight. Again the lessons of Wisconsin are instructive. ...For example, [private] schools are not subject to open meeting or open record laws or to make public their budgets or their employee wages and benefits. ...There’s no requirement that there be a governing board of directors at the school, which is rather alarming considering that the voucher proponents favor parent involvement. Most importantly, there’s no way to judge whether or not a school is succeeding. Voucher schools currently do not have to participate in any schoolwide testing programs, nor do they have to publicly report any test results that they might administer. They’re not obligated to report the number of dropouts, suspensions or expulsions. Indeed, the original voucher legislation of 1990 said a school could get renewed funding if they did one of four things: show that at least 70% of the pupils in the program had advanced to the next grade level each year, or the average attendance rate had been at least 90%, or at least 80% had to demonstrate significant academic progress, or at least 70% of their families had to meet parental involvement criteria established by the private school. In the most recent version of the legislation those accountability criteria were taken out.

Then there’s the issue of teacher certification. In Wisconsin, voucher school teachers don’t need to be certified, nor actually do they need to have a college degree. Now, I grant that certification doesn’t mean that you’re a good teacher. I know certified teachers who are lousy, and as a whole issue I think teacher unions in particular have to address holding ourselves accountable in terms of a profession. However, to institutionalize not having certification in schools to me is an absurd policy. Let’s improve the certification process, let’s make sure teachers are well trained and held accountable, but let’s not just throw it all out. It came to the point of absurdity a year ago when a legislator had the audacity to suggest that all new private school teachers that were hired in Wisconsin should be included in a law that applies to public school teachers that says you have to do a background check on a person to make sure that they’re not a child abuser. The Wisconsin Association of Manufacturers came out and testified against applying that to private school teachers, because it was undue government interference in private school affairs. There is literally no accountability, zilch when it comes to these schools.

Church State Separation
The fourth argument is the issue of separation of church and state. This [deals with] both the first amendment of the United States Constitution and with state constitution issues as well. Our state constitution in Wisconsin actually is more restrictive than the first amendment, saying that no public money should benefit organized religion and that no public person should be forced to support an organized religion. In mid-January this year, a Madison judge ruled that Wisconsin’s attempt to expand the Milwaukee voucher program to include religious schools was a violation of our state constitution, both because it impelled taxpayers to maintain a religion and because public monies were used to benefit that religion. That was appealed to the Appeals Court, it was upheld and now it’s going to the Supreme Court. It’s a brilliant ruling...[the judge] said, "We do not object to the existence of parochial schools or that they attempt to spread their beliefs through their schools. They just cannot do it with state tax dollars." Voucher supporters have argued that an expanded Milwaukee voucher program would not provide government support for religion, but merely help parents choose the best school for their child. [The judge] used a religious school’s own promotional materials to dismiss such a view. He cited mission statements such as this one: "The continuing purpose of St. Matthew Evangelical Lutheran’s Church and School is to go and tell the pure gospel of Jesus Christ for the conversion of unbelievers and the strengthening of believers in the faith in Christian living." ... How it will all turn out with the state Supreme Court, we are not certain. But one thing is certain, of the private schools in Milwaukee, 85% of them are religious schools...so if the courts do limit the voucher plan to non-religious schools, it will prevent a major expansion obviously.

Vision of Democracy
My fifth argument is about the democratic vision or lack thereof of the voucher proponents. Voucher schools stand in opposition to the democratic vision of this country, a vision that seeks to provide a quality education for all children as an essential prerequisite for participation in our society. ...Schools are the place where children from a variety of backgrounds come together and, at least in theory, learn to talk, play and work together. Schools are by no means equal and play a significant role in maintaining our highly stratified society. At the same time, public schools are less unequal than any other institution. There’s no comparable arena in this country where there is a vision of equality, no matter how much that vision is tarnished or cracked, where people of different backgrounds interact on a daily basis. [It] certainly doesn’t happen in our segregated neighborhoods, nor in the workplace where there’s no pretense that people come together as equals, nor in our churches. It was clear to early thinkers like Thomas Jefferson that education was a public responsibility, that was essential in creating and sustaining a democratic society. ...We need to reclaim that vision and insure that all sectors are full participants...in hopes of creating a better society.

But private school voucher plans take us in the exact opposite direction. They basically argue that what is needed is for you to look out for yourself and for your own kind and the hell with the rest of them. Throughout our society, people are withdrawing into their private selves, giving up identities as members of the community, giving up our responsibilities as a nation. ...Instead of dealing with the problem, they seek individual solutions, trying to act as a protected island within a turbulent sea...which in turn will only aggravate those problems.

Conservative Right Agenda
Finally, the sixth argument against vouchers has to do with the conservative right ...Anyone looking into the voucher movement soon comes across the central theorist: Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation. The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation’s assets of $461 million make it the country’s most powerful conservative foundation. It has poured millions of dollars into voucher initiatives. ...Its president, Michael Joyce, has proclaimed vouchers the only educational reform worth pursuing, and Joyce has used his millions of dollars to try to make vouchers a reality. ...He has given over $5 million to Partners Advocating Values in Education (PAVE), a Milwaukee group that provides partial vouchers to students at religious schools as part of a strategy to build support for publicly funded vouchers. He’s also funded $4.5 million to Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, whose main educational forum is vouchers. When Tommy Thompson our governor wanted to develop a "dream team" of lawyers to defend vouchers for religious schools, the Bradley Foundation agreed to pay $350,000 to hire Kenneth Starr, the White Water prosecutor. ...Obviously, I’m not saying that everyone who supports vouchers is [conservative right]. What I’m saying, though, is to look at who’s really funding and who’s really pushing this politically.

Strategy
In conclusion, I just want to mention a few thoughts about strategy. One is that, while we should vigorously uphold the promise and entitlement of public education, we must be steadfast in our belief the institution does need deep restructuring. It’s no accident that voucher proponents...are targeting the most distressed urban districts for their voucher plan. I believe teacher unions have a particular responsibility to adopt contracts and legislative initiatives so that they are truly leaders in efforts to reform our schools and society and not recalcitrant defenders of the status quo.

Secondly, I think as we craft a proactive agenda, it’s important that our position be identified with the positive democratic traditions that are part of our nation’s history. ...It’s absolutely crucial to claim the high moral ground on this issue and make it clear that the right wing voucher advocates are subverting a strong American tradition. And I believe it’s time again to view the school house as the center of community life. ...Schools should be constructed and renovated so they can serve the entire community from youngest toddlers to oldest adult in a variety of recreational, cultural and social service ways. ...In Milwaukee, when we look around at some of the devastated communities, [where] the factories have moved out, many of the small stores have gone under and the churches have consolidated and moved out, the school is one of the remaining institutions there. It has to become a real community institution, a focal point of conversation, of activity, of political discussion. Most importantly, I think the sense of community has to be rekindled. There could be a place for community meetings that’s safe with adequate child care, with facilities to put democratic notions of community action into practice. Parents sometimes hesitant to get involved in children’s education might feel more comfortable if they were already coming to the facility for other reasons.

Thirdly, we need to name our enemy, but we have to be precise when we do so. There’s no question in my mind that we must be explicit about the powerful forces behind the voucher movement. ...But at the same time it is important to unite with the sentiments and the frustrations of individual families who have sought alternatives to public school, because mistreatment and miseducation of their children is real.