MILWAUKEE, WIS. — It’s disorienting to read whither-school-choice think pieces in national magazines and to see lines about there being “no Milwaukee miracle,” to see my town offered as evidence that choice is a flop.

You mean the Milwaukee in Wisconsin? The one with all the beer?

Because school choice doesn’t look like a failure here — not to the CEOs boasting about it, nor to the legislative enemies still trying to figure out how to lame it. Certainly not to 17,795 children learning by it.

As the ex-superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and now a big choice proponent, Howard Fuller, puts it, not every choice school’s great. But because of the ones that are, “there are lives being saved that would not be saved without choice.” You’ve got several hundred poor Milwaukee children going, this very morning, learning at the area’s premier co-ed Catholic high school, Pius XI.

About 300 more are at St. Marcus Lutheran, some as early as 6:30 a.m. and staying as late as 5 for extra study. Eighty-five percent are from poor families; 100% are at or above the state math standard by eighth grade.

And at the nation’s largest Catholic grade school, St. Anthony’s, more than 1,000 children, nearly all from Spanish-speaking families, will be surging ahead of their peers in nearby public schools thanks, in part, to a core knowledge curriculum unavailable in most of the city’s public schools.

“One hundred twenty-two schools are more than anecdotal,” as one Milwaukee choice backer put it.

Sol Stern, who is New York-based, touched off the latest soul-searching with an essay in City Journal. Mr. Stern concedes that most voucher students in Milwaukee are benefiting. But he says the program has produced no transformation of Milwaukee’s public schools.

It depends: Fewer than two-thirds of Milwaukee’s tax-funded schoolchildren attend a traditional government-run school. About one in four go to private choice schools. The program has transformed the sort of education available to the public via public dollars. This is in one city, but it is a success that is neither stagnant nor marginal.

It is not enough, says Mr. Stern. He argues that imposing market forces doesn’t necessarily improve education overall. He cites New York City’s public schools, where despite market-like incentives, fuzzy math, whole language, and dismal results prevail. He mentions Washington, where Catholic schools are in financial trouble, despite vouchers. And he mentions Milwaukee’s government-run system.

That system’s officials say it has improved a bit. Graduation rates are creeping upward. There’s emerging, peer-reviewed research — the latest is from a New York Fed economist, Rajashri Chakrabarti — showing that school choice has improved Milwaukee Public Schools. Then there’s evidence on the ground: Milwaukee Public Schools are desperately trying to change. They’ve rearranged many of its giant high schools into more manageable sizes. Other MPS schools are using direct instruction, phonics, Waldorf curriculum — there’s even a Montessori high school. If nothing else, it has become the presumed state of affairs that schools will vary greatly, market themselves, and be judged, loosely, on how well they do. If this situation is not universally embraced — and it isn’t — it is nonetheless The Way Things Are, against which the teacher’s union reacts, growlingly and defensively.

Not that this status quo is unassailable. Local businesses have rounded up more than a million dollars for a four-month blitz of ads and public speakers to promote school choice as “a unique asset no one else in the United States has,” head of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, Tim Sheehy, said. He sees it as a workforce issue.

But why sell the program locally? So more people appreciate it, says Mr. Sheehy, especially since it faces ongoing political threats.

A long-time professed foe, Russ Decker, is now the majority leader in the Wisconsin Senate. His power is such that he persuaded two leading Milwaukee Democrats to renege on a deal they’d made with Milwaukee’s mayor to stabilize the program’s funding.

Another Democratic Milwaukee lawmaker, Rep. Fred Kessler, felt emboldened last month to circulate a memo proposing “reforms” that would likely torpedo the program. One, for instance, would cut the state’s per-pupil grant to no more than what a school charges in tuition. This ignores that most choice schools are parochial and heavily subsidize tuitions via the collection plate. Such a change would ruinously make parishioners at poor, inner-city congregations subsidize the strangers to whom they’ve opened their schools — a dynamic Mr. Kessler appeared not to understand.

Or perhaps he did: His memo started off by noting his proposals could cut choice enrollment by 40%. This would jibe with the aims of teacher’s unions both statewide and in Milwaukee. Choice schools find themselves fending off political checkmates even as they educate an ever larger share of Milwaukee’s children. “Every year,” Mr. Fuller says, “we have to spend money, energy, and time just to continue to exist.”

Only now, putting an end to this by persuading Wisconsinites to value the program has become a seven-figure priority to local businesses. Far from a failed experiment, they’re seeing it as success worth defending.

They’ll do it, Mr. Sheehy says, mainly by showing how choice schools educate children. This makes sense. Mr. Stern’s second thoughts were about whether or not choice improves education generally. It’s an important question but not the only one. In thousands of particular cases, choice very much improves the one shot at education that young Milwaukeeans have.

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