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Not the Ticket: Why Vouchers Undermine Public Education
By Barbara Miner
Issue 121, November/December 2003
Jennifer Morales likens herself to the mother of 100,000 children. Yet only two of them are her birth children. Morales, 33, is the first Latina member of the Board of School Directors of the Milwaukee Public Schools. She views her public policy work as a logical extension of raising her two sons, nine-year-old Anansi and seven-year-old Cedro.
"A good public education system echoes a lot of the good characteristics of good parenting," she said recently over a cup of coffee, between rushing from her son's doctor's appointment, to City Hall, and later to a school board meeting. "It accepts children's differences, it meets the needs of all children, it develops shared values and a sense of responsibility for the broader community, and it teaches essential information and skills."
Milwaukee is home to the country's oldest school voucher program. Morales, like many people involved in schools here, often finds herself caught in one of the nation's key educational controversies: Should public tax dollars be used to fund private schools, including religious schools.
Morales wearies of the question-there is so much that needs to be done to improve public schools, from finding enough money, to ensuring smaller classes, to tackling the city's high poverty rate. Vouchers, she argues, ignore such crucial issues and call instead for people to abandon their commitment to public education and to the shared institutions that form the heart of our increasingly diverse democracy.
"I never blame parents who move their child from a public school to a private because it may meet their child's needs," Morales points out. "Just because we have strong shared institutions doesn't mean you have to take part in them. But the public schools serve, and will continue to serve, the majority of children. And just as I want to make schools better for my own children, as a member of the community, I have a responsibility to look out for other people's children as well."
The nation's first voucher program began in Milwaukee in 1990; parents here have a long history with the controversy. Under the voucher program, public tax dollars fund private education for almost 12,000 low-income Milwaukee children, most of whom attend religious schools. A similar program exists in Cleveland, and limited statewide programs exist in Florida and Colorado. A US Supreme Court ruling in summer 2002 upheld the legality of public dollars for religious schools, and now, across the country, vouchers proposals crop up with increasing frequency. While most proposals target low-income children, the ideological architects of the vouchers movement make clear that their goal is a universal system in which vouchers are given to all and in which, in essence, the public school system becomes increasingly marginal and irrelevant.
Turning Back the Clock
Supporters of public education note that vouchers turn back the clock on more
than a half century of efforts to provide legal protections for those previously
marginalized-from Title IX prohibitions against gender-based discrimination,
to the right to a bilingual education, to protections for students with disabilities,
to the demand that public schools respect the rights of gay and lesbian students.
In all these areas, voucher schools-by virtue of being private rather than
public institutions-can circumvent or ignore hard-won protections.
In the long run, establishing two school systems-one public, one private, yet both supported with tax dollars-will only expand the ability of private schools to choose the most desirable students, and widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This might help a small number of children and parents, but at the expense of the majority of families with school-age children.
For parents in Milwaukee, one of the key complaints is that voucher schools do not have to follow the same rules of accountability as public schools in a broad range of areas: from the services they must provide, to the release of information to the public, to the quality and certification of teachers. In Milwaukee, accountability is so lax that the state has not collected academic data from voucher schools for more than seven years.
Saphronia Purnell, a 39-year-old mother of three children ages 14 to 18, works with the community-based education reform group Milwaukee Catalyst. An African American, she is well aware that public schools often fail children of color. Her advice? Fight to improve the public schools.
"I don't see vouchers as solving the problems," she says. "My concern is the accountability piece-there doesn't appear to be enough accountability with vouchers, if any at all. A lot of the things required by [the Milwaukee Public Schools] are not required by the voucher program, and that is a huge concern."
Reasons to Be Wary of Vouchers
Milwaukee has more than a decade of experience to explain why they are wary
of vouchers. While there are slight differences in voucher proposals and
programs across the country, here are the key issues to be concerned about,
based on the experiences of Milwaukee parents:
A private school may not want to educate your child. If your child has exceptional educational needs or speaks English as a second language, you should be concerned. Private schools are not required to provide the same services as public schools. In Milwaukee, for example, only seven of the 86 participating voucher schools provided special educational services in the 1998-1999 school year-the only year for which there are even minimal academic data about the voucher program, due to a one-time-only report by the state's Legislative Audit Bureau.1 According to that report, only about 2 percent of voucher students had been previously identified by the public schools as requiring special services. In contrast, about 15 percent of Milwaukee public school students received special-education services that year. Further, most of the special-education students in the private schools had far less severe problems.2
Many private Milwaukee schools are quite explicit that they will not serve special-education students. The Mount Calvary Lutheran School, for instance, indicates that it "is unable to serve students who are unable to climb stairs, have severe emotional problems, are mentally disabled, or have other severe learning problems."3 St. Bernadette School will not serve students who are more than a year below grade school.4 Messmer High School, which is the main private voucher high school, explicitly notes that it has "no special ed classes."5
As for bilingual education, in 1998-1999 only two of the 86 voucher schools provided services for students who did not speak English as a first language.6
A private school may not offer the legal protections given public school students. There has been strong controversy in Wisconsin over the refusal of voucher schools to sign an agreement that they will abide by basic protections afforded public school students in the areas of free speech and due process, or by state laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or marital or parental status. (State laws already prohibit voucher schools from discriminating on the grounds of race, religion, color, and national origin.)
On a national level, there is particular reason to be concerned about vouchers and the rights of women and gay and lesbian students, particularly since most voucher schools are religious based. It is not just whether the rights of women and gay and lesbian students will be respected, but whether there is active promotion of homophobic and anti-female attitudes. Many fundamentalist religious textbooks routinely promote intolerance toward gay people and undermine the rights of women. With vouchers, public tax dollars can be used to pay for such textbooks.
Consider this rather typical statement from a high school current-events textbook published by Bob Jones University Press: "[Gay] people have no more claim to special rights than child molesters or rapists."7 The publisher's civics books also link homosexuality to abortion, and say that neither deserves any legal protections.
Vouchers may not lead to a better education for your child. No one knows whether voucher students are performing better, worse, or about the same as Milwaukee public school students because private schools are not required to release such data. As the Legislative Audit Bureau pointedly noted in its report, "some hopes for the [voucher] program-most notably that it would increase participating pupils' academic achievement-cannot be documented."8 One problem is that voucher schools, unlike public schools, are not required to give standardized tests. Even when they do, private schools are not required to release the scores.
Students with academic and disciplinary problems may face particular difficulties. While voucher schools in Milwaukee are not allowed to prohibit admission based on grades or previous discipline records, there are no protections once the child is enrolled; students who do not conform to the private school's standards can be asked to leave. Invariably, they return to the public schools.
The available evidence points to a private school system that includes good schools, mediocre schools, and substandard schools. In 1998-1999, 28 percent of Milwaukee's voucher schools were neither accredited nor seeking accreditation, or subject to any independent review of educational quality.9 Controls are so loose that, in 2000, it was revealed that the CEO of a voucher school had been convicted of raping a woman at knifepoint; the information came out only when he was in court on tax-fraud charges stemming from a treatment center for juveniles he had started and later closed. In sentencing the man to six months in jail, Circuit Judge Elsa Lamelas pointedly noted that the voucher program is so set up "that it is easy pickings for people who are not inclined to be honest."10
Voucher schools may not provide enough data for parents to make informed decisions. Milwaukee voucher schools do not have to publicly release data about test scores, suspension and expulsion rates, teacher certification, or teacher salaries. They are not required to hire college graduates as teachers. If a parent prefers that his or her child attend an integrated school with a diverse student body, it's not easy to get information on the racial breakdown of voucher schools, which are not required to release such data.
Vouchers drain money and support from public schools. In an era of declining state economies, school finances are particularly precarious. While every state has different funding mechanisms for public schools, the bottom line is that there is a political limit to how much taxpayers will pay for schools, public or private. Thus, vouchers inherently drain money away from public schools. Equally important, they siphon off support for much-needed reforms such as small classes, improved teacher training, more challenging curricula, and funding equity so that urban and rural schools receive money on a par with more affluent suburban districts.
Since its inception more than a decade ago, more than $250 million has been spent on vouchers in the Milwaukee program, while each year the public schools have faced millions of dollars in budget cuts.11 In the 2003-2004 school year, the cuts are so severe that all but the bare essentials are being eliminated from some schools-no more teachers of music, art, or physical education. Class sizes are being increased for core academic subjects; in some high schools it is not unusual for a classroom to have more students than desks.
How to Move Forward
Judy Thorsheim, a 56-year-old nurse and mother of three children ranging from
12 to 17 years old, has long been active in her children's schools, from
parent-teacher organizations to school-based governance councils. She also
works with the religiously based Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied
for Hope, which focuses on three key policy issues: reforming school funding,
providing in-state college tuition for undocumented students who complete
high school in Wisconsin, and treatment instead of prison for drug offenders.
Like many others, Thorsheim believes that school funding reform is absolutely essential so that poor districts, which tend to be concentrated in urban and rural areas, have sufficient resources to provide quality education to all children.
"Providing a sound basic education, as the Wisconsin Constitution mandates, is the basis of a democracy-everything from being able to vote intelligently to serving on a jury," Thorsheim underscored recently over a breakfast of eggs and hash browns, her fork punctuating the air for emphasis. "How can one discuss and evaluate complicated issues that come up in jury trial, from DNA evidence to psychological testing, without a good education?"
Thorsheim's advice to parents in communities debating vouchers: "Don't do it. Vouchers are an untested experiment without any controls."
One of the frustrations of parent activists in Milwaukee is that, because vouchers have been marketed as "choice," many people don't appreciate the threat that they pose. Who can disagree that public schools, especially in urban areas, fail too many students? But it would be shortsighted to abandon public education and accept the myth that vouchers and privatization are the answer. Public education has tried to fulfill our vision of a more democratic America with institutions responsible to and controlled by the public. The voucher movement betrays that vision. It treats education as a mere consumer item and asks us to settle for the "choice" to apply to a private school that, in the long run, does the choosing.
Morales, Purnell, and Thorsheim admit that the rhetoric of choice is very appealing. But they know that vouchers are not so much about choice as about allowing private schools to operate privately with public dollars, without a commitment to the broader common good.
Former schoolteacher Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, put it eloquently. Asked in a New York Times interview if he would be in favor of vouchers, he replied, "Only if you want to kill public education. That sucking sound you hear is the sound of public schools collapsing with the voucher system."12
NOTES
1. "An Evaluation, Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," Wisconsin
Legislative Audit Bureau (February 2000): 26.
2. Ibid.
3. Empowering People for Informed Choices (EPIC), website hosted by the University
of Wisconsin Milwaukee: http://epic.cuir.uwm.edu/EPIC/English/data/mtcalv.html.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. See Note 1: 25.
7. Frances Patterson, "With God on Their side," Rethinking Schools
16, no. 2: 4.
8. Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau report, auditors’ cover letter,
2 February 2000.
9. See Note 1: 30, 32.
10. Jessica McBride and Joe Williams, "Choice School’s CEO, a Convicted
Rapist, Sentenced for Fraud," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 4 May 2000;
www.jsonline.com/news/Metro/may00/choice04050300a.asp.
11. Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, "Milwaukee Voucher Program
Fact Sheet."
12. "Talking to the Teacher," New York Times, 12 September 1999,
section 6: 57.
Barbara Miner is a writer based in Milwaukee who specializes in education.
