School Choice Is Not the Answer

The choice in education is how do we get the best results in a democratic way in educating our children.  It is not public versus private.

The conclusion is simple: private education is superior for individual students when it has these advantages:

• lots of money per pupil
• very low ratios of students to teachers

The following are not essential but they sure help:

• fewer students from poor households
• the ability to weed out students who do not want to learn, regardless of income or race
• the ability to cultivate students from families that take an active interest in the child's education
• students who get sound medical attention
• access to computers

A private system with these advantages in its operation for just a few students is not my vision of education in a democratic society.  But that is the Milwaukee Choice program funded by my tax dollars.

Milwaukee's lessons on school vouchers

...Hers is the sort of story Milwaukee's school-choice advocates cite when touting the oldest and largest voucher program in the country. Now it's expanding, but 16 years after it began, the policy is still controversial and has shown few documented benefits...

...It's a step everyone agrees is needed. Voucher supporters had envisioned a system in which parents would choose only good schools, so the worst ones would fall by the wayside due to market forces. But that hasn't proved to be the case...

...Studies done in the early years of Milwaukee's program, before the state stopped requiring yearly reporting from voucher schools and before religious schools were allowed into the program, showed little difference in student achievement among voucher students, but measurable improvement in parental satisfaction. A new five-year study was just announced by Georgetown University in Washington.

This Christian Science Monitor story provides the valuable anecdotes about students previously failing in public schools who are now succeeding in a private school.

Sorry.  That is no substitute for overall performance.  After all, that is what led to the attack on public education.  Lack of overall performance.

We will get overall performance when:

• schools are properly funded and not dilapidated.
• students have peers that value education.
• there are low student teacher ratios.
• every student has access to a computer.
• students go to school well fed and healthy.
• we understand that educating a child is a 24 hour a day job.
• we appreciate that a students needs the arts and sports which the Greeks proved 3000 years ago.
• teachers are treated with the dignity and the respect they deserve, they are not baby sitters; and those who need to be fired are discharged.
• parents are made welcome in the school as partners.
• legislatures understand that real economic development is in funding public education.

Previous posts, some with solid documentation.

Milwaukee Conference On How To Obtain Skilled Manufacturing Employees

No Child Left Behind: Bush Nonsense Piles Up

Linking Teacher Pay to Grades. Let's Do It

From Wisconsin: "Bush-Take This Basketball and Shove It"

Misleading School Budget Debate

Myth Busting: Rosenbaum's Research, Gautreaux, Public Education at Its Best

Kids, Schools, and Cities Part II

This Ought to be the Headline on Every Paper

Kids, Schools, and Cities Part I

Gangs, Schools, and City Government

Public Education: Resources Matter, as Does Context - Milwaukee is NOT South Dakota

Teachers Strike in Madison: Thirty Years Later II 

Thoughts on Public Education and Right Wing Foolishness

Teachers Strike in Madison: Thirty Years Later

Public Education is Wonderful: Pay Your Taxes

Oh, and for those who can stomach it, there will be another post on education tomorrow. :)

Comments

[Russ Burkel]

Paul
The US Constitution does provide government monopolies with the exception of national defense. The school choice debate comes down to who makes the decision. School choice allows the parents to make the decision. Parents will almost always send their children to the best available school. If the public school is the best alternative it will gain students, if not, it will lose students. That's called competition, which is the basis of our way of life.
Now let's think about the taxpayer for a minute. MPS spends approx. $11,000 per student. Private schools receive approx. $6,000 vouchers. Milwaukee property taxpayers desperatly need the savings competitive education is currently, and will continue to provide.
Now let me ask, are you proposing parental choice in Milwaukee be taken away and given back to bureaucrats?

[Mgm]

Mr. Mayor:

Perhaps you are suggesting we are all taxed insufficiently to fund public schools with low teacher/student ratios. Perhaps you are only suggesting that WEAC is insufficiently powerful and misunderstood. Or that parents, regardless of how awful their schools are and how poor they are, should pay twice to send their children to schools the parents prefer.

[George Mitchell]

Paul,

Trying proposing that public school teachers be required to send their children only to public schools. In Milwaukee nearly at third of MPS teachers use private schools, compared to about 12 per cent nationally. When UW-Milwaukee surveyed MPS teachers in the late 1980s more than 60 per cent said they would not want their child to attend the school where they teach.

All Milwaukee's program does is give low-income families some of same choices that teachers and other middle class parents have.

There was a time when you would have been for this.

[Jay Bullock]

Mr. Mitchell, I've covered the public school teachers/ private school children issue before at my own blog, and your figures here--which you use quite often--are misleading.

While the national rate (using 2000 census sampling data) may be 12%, for the 50 largest cities, of which Milwaukee is one, the rate is about 22%, making Milwaukee's 29% not as much greater as you want us to believe. In addition, the number does not differentiate between MPS teachers and teachers in other districts who live in the Census Bureau's tracts for "Milwaukee," which is not limited to the city's boundaries, and that clouds the issue.

More importantly, the same study noted that only about a third of private school teachers themselves nationwide send their children to private schools--nearly an identical number to that of MPS. Seems like more private school teachers distrust the systems they teach in more than MPS teachers do theirs.

And that UWM survey is so laughably old . . . In my department at my school--the largest department save for special education--exactly one of our teachers was in the district in the late 1980s, out of 8 (in special ed it's probably only one of 16). According to MTEA (the Milwaukee teachers union), nearly two-thirds of MPS teachers have fifteen or fewer years in the district. A significant number of the schools in MPS today did not exist in the late 1980s, and many of the ones that did are now gone.

I'm not saying the results wouldn't be replicated today; but at least get a survey done today that shows that, or hang up that old one, please.

Read my full post from last January here:
http://folkbum.blogspot.com/2006/01/public-school-teachers-and-private.html

[Russ Burkel]

Mr. Bullock
Where teachers send their children to school is their decision. Likewise, where all other Wisconsin parents send their children to school is their decision also, not governments.
Now getting back to costs. Government is collecting $11,000 per student for every child in the City of Milwaukee public schools, without caps.
On the other hand, government is collecting $6,000 per student for vouchers, but have chosen to cap it at 15% of total student population.
The bottom line is simple, public education has priced itself out of the market. That's not a surprise. It simply confirms known economic fact, competion works, monopolies don't.
Deregulating education is the answer just as was the answer when the government broke up AT&T in 1984.