Smoking Gun?

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The New York Sun

This, at last, was the smoking gun, the think-tank plastique that could finish off school choice.

Except it wasn’t. A report last week from a Milwaukee-area free-market institute didn’t prove that “choice may not improve schools,” as one headline put it. The report didn’t even involve private-school vouchers.

Not that it matters. Evidence means little in the nation’s longest fight about school choice. Milwaukee’s 17-year experiment will educate 18,000 poor children this year, but the program’s foes couldn’t be less interested in the results, other than as a weapon.

So blogs and activists were repurposing the report from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. “It seems unlikely that [Milwaukee Public Schools] are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace,” wrote the report’s author. “Then how much is left of the argument for choice?” demanded one typical commentator.

But the report only asked whether it affected public schools when parents were given a choice of which Milwaukee public school to attend. It explicitly excluded what is most famously school choice: the ability of poor parents to take their state school aid to any private school in Milwaukee.

In fact, the report didn’t survey Milwaukee parents at all. It used data from several national surveys on how parents pick a school, then extrapolated the answers to Milwaukee’s demographics.

Compare this to a study in September from a Federal Reserve Bank economist, Rajashri Chakrabarti. Her peer-reviewed study asked specifically whether increased competition from private schools affected Milwaukee’s public schools. She used actual test data from Milwaukee. The finding: Competition improved public schools.

This study came and went with scarcely a ripple. Previous peer-reviewed studies have had no discernible effect on choice’s harshest critics. It’s safe to bet that any further studies won’t, unless they break the trend and indict choice.

This is no surprise. It is choice’s critics who are more damaged by contrary evidence.

Both sides are moved by ideology. Those opposed to choice usually argue that making children use a single system of government-run schools is best for social cohesion and pedagogy.

These arguments are hard to sustain, though, now that middle-class families inclined to use public schools have largely abandoned Milwaukee for suburbs. If anything, it’s public schooling that has stratified the economic geography.

Those favoring choice start with the premise that it’s good if parents can choose the kind of school their children will learn in. This plays better. You can say it without flinching. Insisting the public schools must hang on to every kid whose parents are too poor to escape sounds suspiciously like special pleading from a teachers union desperate to retain the power that let it win double-dip pensions.

Which, in fact, is the case.

So if one side says people should be free and the other says we can’t afford freedom, then it’s the latter that must bolster its unattractive case empirically. All choice backers have to show is that no one gets hurt. Opponents, by contrast, have always claimed choice is empirically harmful.

It costs the public money, they say — though a choice student costs taxpayers $6,500, compared to $10,000 in Milwaukee Public Schools. Private schools reject hard cases, critics say — though, by law, choice schools can turn away no one and must accept special-ed students under less favorable terms than public schools. The city’s largest choice school, St. Anthony’s, now teaches more than 1,000 children, virtually all poor and nearly all from families that don’t speak English. Far from turning away children who face these added hurdles, it has filled its building with them and bought a second. This is to accommodate demand, says Principal Ramon Cruz, from parents who felt public schools weren’t doing a good enough job.

Which is the real point. Backers have always aggressively fought the claim that choice would harm public schools, arguing instead that it would improve even them. So it does, argues the former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools, Howard Fuller: “The power to leave is a very important lever when you’re trying to make change.”

But the chief effect, Mr. Fuller says, is the most straightforward: Education gets better for children whose parents move them to better schools. He cites CEO Leadership Academy, run by a former Milwaukee public school administrator given to taking in hard cases. Eleven of the 12 children in last spring’s first graduating class were college-bound.

Not every parent will choose wisely. That doesn’t mean that none should be given the chance. “The program has proved its value,” Mr. Fuller says, “by the lives of children who have been saved.” Against which the opponents of school choice must seize empiricism where they can get it. Their alternative is to argue openly that poor parents in Milwaukee generally are too stupid to pick a school. That the growing popularity of choice in Milwaukee could lead to its spread panics foes. Already, there’s agitation in poor Racine, Wis., for a deal like Milwaukee’s. Utah will likely reject school choice in a referendum next month, but the wonder is that the idea went that far. Sooner or later, it will dawn on middle-class parents that for them, school choice shouldn’t mean changing your ZIP code. So choice’s political foes want it dead in Milwaukee, lest it catch on. “They just don’t believe a program like this ought to exist,” Mr. Fuller says, impinging on their power and money.

“No study is going to change their mind, period.”

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.


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