April 21, 2003

As a parent, activist and education writer living in Milwaukee, the home of the country's oldest and biggest school voucher program, I have one word of advice for those wondering whether to jump on the voucher bandwagon: Don't.

This month, Colorado approved this country's fourth voucher program, following citywide programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland and a statewide program in Florida.

Across the country, conservatives are pushing vouchers -- public tax dollars going to pay for private school tuition -- as a silver bullet that will cure all that ails public schools. In the last decade, conservatives have packaged private-school vouchers as an expression of choice and opportunity, competition and freedom.

If rhetoric were reality, I, too, would support vouchers.

But I've had more than a decade of experience watching Milwaukee's voucher experiment. Forgive me if I find the rhetoric nauseating.

More than $250 million has been spent on Milwaukee vouchers, including $60 million this year alone, and no one has a clue how the voucher students are performing academically. Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Public Schools are facing year after year of budget deficits -- $40 million for next year, with an even higher deficit after that.

One of the biggest problems with Milwaukee's voucher schools is the lack of any meaningful accountability. Currently, more than 11,000 students attend more than 100 private schools, most of them religious schools. Even though the schools receive public dollars (in fact, some voucher schools have no students paying private tuition) the voucher schools get to call themselves "private" and operate accordingly.

As a result, voucher schools do not have to give the same tests as public schools, and even if they do, they are not required to release the results. They don't have to be accredited and don't even have to hire college graduates if they don't want to. Nor do they have to provide the same services for special-education students or students who do not speak English as their first language. The voucher schools want the money but they don't want the oversight or the responsibility to educate all children.

Private schools, like private country clubs, don't have to answer to the public. That's why they are called private.

In Milwaukee, accountability is so lax that the state has not collected academic data from the voucher schools for more than seven years. Several years ago, when the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau did a one-time report on the voucher program, the report pointedly noted that "some hopes for the program -- most notably, that it would increase participating pupils' academic achievement -- cannot be documented."

In Cleveland, which has the country's only other sizable voucher program, a recent study by the Indiana Center for Evaluation in Bloomington, Ind., found that "results do not reveal any significant impacts of participation in the (voucher program) on student achievement."

While the lack of academic accountability for voucher schools is appalling, the diversion of much-needed dollars away from public education is intolerable.

Few could deny that our public schools, especially in urban areas, need to do a much better job. But rather than abandon public schools, the answer is to improve them and give them the money and resources necessary to do the job.

Why, when our public schools so desperately need more resources, should we divert money into private schools that don't have to educate all children and don't have to account for how they spend our tax dollars?

Former schoolteacher Frank McCourt, author of "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis," puts it eloquently. When asked in a New York Times Magazine interview if he would support vouchers, he answered, "Only if you want to kill public education. That sucking sound you hear is the sound of public schools collapsing with the voucher system."

For the sake of our nation's children and our future, we must save our public-school system.

Barbara Miner is a writer based in Milwaukee and specializing in education. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.