This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/private-schools-in-wisconsins-choice-programs-prove-far-more-effective-with-taxpayer-money/
DPI numbers show public schools can do much better
Critics of school choice often lean on a talking point that goes like this: Wisconsin can’t afford two systems of schools, so we should have only one.
Of course the idea is nonsense. Wisconsin doesn’t fund two systems of schools. Wisconsin funds 420 public school districts. It funds about 2,200 public schools. It funds about 860,000 students, some 792,000 in traditional district schools and another 66,000 in about 400 private choice schools or several dozen independent public charters, with state money approximately following each from one school to another.
But taking those critics at face value, taxpayers might well ask: If we have to pick one system, districts or choice, why wouldn’t we pick the one that delivers better results for the money?
More realistically: Why can’t we demand better from the schools we have?
Wisconsin now has a glimpse into the comparative return on investment in schooling because a group that advocates for parents’ power to take their state aid to a private school went and looked at a lot of state data. Wisconsin’s school choice programs deliver much better results for a given amount of taxpayers’ money, according to School Choice Wisconsin, than do district-run public schools. Full report here.
You’d maybe expect an advocacy group to say that. But it’s not them talking so much as the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the agency run by a superintendent who ran for office vowing to kill off school choice.
Hostile as the DPI may be toward choice, it produces report cards scoring Wisconsin schools and districts on a range of metrics, including how well children can read or do math and how much they improve, distilling each school to a zero-to-100 score. The DPI also reports how much state and local taxpayer money each district spends.
All School Choice Wisconsin did was simple arithmetic.
Stunning arithmetic, really: In 2023-24, in the Milwaukee Public Schools, the average school scores 55.7 on the DPI’s report card. The average choice school in Milwaukee, rated only on its kids attending on a choice voucher, scores 70.8, remarkably better. Then, when you consider that, according to the DPI, Milwaukee Public Schools got $16,442 in state and local taxpayer money per child, while the choice schools got $11,905 per child, you divide points by dollars to find that each public dollar spent educating a kid in a Milwaukee choice school is 76 percent more effective than a dollar spent in MPS.
School choice is 41 percent more effective in Racine, and in the rest of Wisconsin, money going to choice is spent 33 percent more effectively than in district schools.
The usual retort from choice’s critics — “usual” because this pattern in DPI data has been noticed before — is to say, “If only district schools could do what choice schools do…”
Like what? Pick the best students? No: That hostile DPI prohibits choice schools from selecting students on ability. Children entering Milwaukee’s choice program generally are behind peers entering MPS, researchers have found.
Avoid disabled children? Again, no: State law requires choice schools to accept disabled children they can handle with minor adaptations. Independent researchers found that about 8 to 15 percent of Milwaukee choice students would qualify for special education if they were in MPS.
Pick rich kids? No, and that’s the remarkable thing. The rest-of-Wisconsin result finds that choice students scored a full 2 points higher on the DPI report cards — 71.8 to 69.8 — even though the district results included every child right up to those living in a $2 million house in Lake Country, while the choice students were all from families earning no more than 2.2 times the poverty line.
The children of poor and working-class families in choice schools were outperforming the average of all kids in Sun Prairie or Eau Claire or Menasha. Or Wauwatosa, though that one was close, at 71.3.
This means school choice is a good value for taxpayers, obviously. It’s good value, too, for the parents who choose what is, by the DPI’s numbers, a better shot. That’s why enrollment in choice keeps rising, even as the number of children falls.
But what does it mean for parents of the nine-in-10 students who remain in traditional public schools? Only this: You are right to expect better from those schools. You’re right to demand it, in fact.
How could they do better? That’s a book or three. Choice and public charter schools take a wide range of approaches, from classical to Waldorf. The uniting thread is that they listen to parents or they’re gone.
Wisconsin’s public district schools — and the districts that run them — would do well to emulate them. The simple numbers show that.
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.
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