Milwaukee’s Example
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Talk about school vouchers in New York City is generally dismissed as some kind of libertarian fantasy. But in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, there have been school vouchers in place since 1990. Last year nearly 13,000 students were rescued from the government-run school system and allowed to attend private or parochial schools using vouchers in Milwaukee. A scholar at the Manhattan Institute, Jay Greene, this week released a new study comparing the graduation rates of the voucher students with the students in the government-run schools. The voucher students had a 64% graduation rate, while the government-run schools had an abysmal 34% graduation rate.
New York City’s graduation rate is below 50%. If that could be increased to 64%,it’d be cause for celebration. If vouchers can help, it seems to us that New York would at least want to consider them.
Granted, graduation rates aren’t the end-all and be-all of education. Some high schools graduate lots of students who haven’t learned anything. Others have strict standards that prevent students from graduating if they haven’t passed certain tests. But the difference in Milwaukee doesn’t seem to be that the government schools have high standards while the voucher schools are shuffling students along. The difference seems to be that students drop out of the government-run schools, while they stay in the voucher schools.
With a high-school diploma the bare minimum to gain entry into college or enter the workforce in the 21st-century economy, the least New Yorkers can do is to try to structure a system that produces a higher percentage of students who leave with that diploma and the skills it represents. A 30 percentage point swing like Milwaukee’s, translated to a million student system like New York’s, could mean tens of thousands of more New Yorkers each year who are high school graduates. Why don’t New Yorkers deserve this chance?