This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/tiny-and-terrifying-why-some-feel-threatened-by-wisconsins-parental-choice-programs/

Sometimes people lash out at the strangest things.

Take state Sen. Jeff Smith, an Eau Claire-area Democrat who is his party’s assistant leader in the upper chamber. He opined recently in the Cap Times, the more leftist of Madison’s newspapers, about how teachers deserve admiration and support.

But not all teachers, apparently: “It’s wrong,” he wrote, in a weird, one-sentence punch downward, “to pump money into a broken system, especially into a failed voucher school program.”

One sees these gratuitous swipes at school choice regularly in Wisconsin commentary, thrown ritually into any school-related discussion. Like the fizzled lawsuit by a Minocqua beer marketer trying to kill the program, they’re a reminder that while school choice in its public and private varieties may serve more kids than the state’s largest school district, its critics still resent parents having options and treat choice as if it were a threat.

Such swipes usually are no more informed than Smith’s. Wisconsin’s parental school choice options, for instance, aren’t “failed,” as the senator claimed. Enrollment in the program has grown by 86% in the past 10 years, even as the number of children in any kind of K-12 schooling has fallen about 4%.

About 6% of Wisconsin’s kids in any sort of school use the private-school parental choice program, and when you include children who attend charter schools independent of any district and answerable instead to parents, you’re at about 7.6% of Wisconsin schoolchildren. The independent-schools sector has grown by more than 7% a year on average since 2018, even as enrollment in district-run schools has fallen by a percentage point a year.

Offering an education attractive enough that parents with low to moderate incomes jump through bureaucratic hoops to get it in ever-increasing numbers isn’t “failing.”

For all this growth, however, more than nine in 10 Wisconsin schoolchildren attend a legacy district-run school, making it still more puzzling that critics should see choice as a threat. This holds especially true in Madison, home of the newspaper in which Senator Smith punched down.

In Madison, where the possibility of school choice arrived 23 years after Milwaukee, there are six private schools in the choice program that Smith calls “vouchers,” and those six schools enrolled 655 choice students in the school year just ended. The Madison Metropolitan School District, in comparison, has about 25,000 students.

Big ask

Perhaps Madison families will see some of the growth common elsewhere. Independent private schools in the city of Milwaukee educated about 29,000 children using choice grants last year, and those in Racine educated about 4,000. Nearly 19,000 kids throughout the rest of Wisconsin used choice grants.

Several more Madison schools have been cleared by state regulators to join the choice program in fall, including a second one to offer high school grades. This likely will be a blessing to Madison families looking for an alternative to a school district where, by the state’s most recent figures, only 41% of the students had been taught to read at grade level or better. By contrast, Madison’s largest private school in the choice program, Abundant Life Christian School, got 73% of its students to grade level or better in reading. 

Why Senator Smith regards this as “failing” is baffling.

When families take their children to Abundant Life or other independent options, $10,237 of state aid will follow each one, or $12,731 if they’re high schoolers — the entirety of taxpayers’ outlay. 

By contrast, in the most recent state figures, Madison Metropolitan School District spent a total of $17,944 per child in taxpayer money.

What’s more, the district may ask voters in November for another $600 million in spending, overriding the taxpayer-protecting limits set in law. The proposal would add $1,378 to the property taxes of a typical Madison home. The district says its budget is in dire straits because it used temporary pandemic aid for permanent expenses. It could have to cut its $589 million budget by about $2 million, or 0.4%.

Glimpse of an alternative

Perhaps the referendum will pass: I don’t dare predict, but observers say Madison voters are soft touches.

Still, if you’re as puzzled as I am why progressive commentators seem so threatened by a school choice program with one-sixteenth of the state’s pupils, with 2% of Madison’s kids, and with a taxpayer outlay per child that’s only 60% of what Madison’s government-run system spends to get its certifiably worse results, perhaps our answer lies in that referendum ask.

If enough taxpayers get asked often enough to pony up an extra $1,378 a year for a 41% success rate at teaching children to read, even the tiniest example of letting parents find a more effective, satisfactory alternative at more a more reasonable cost just might lead Wisconsinites to ask hard questions.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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