MILWAUKEE'S EXPERIENCE SHOWS VOUCHERS WORK

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Milwaukee's program offering school vouchers to low-income students has been running for 14 years, long enough for some eligible children to reach their senior year in high school.

Of course, in Milwaukee, many kids have long vanished from school by that age, which is one reason why the voucher program remains popular despite resistance from all the usual suspects.

School Choice Wisconsin commissioned a study of high school graduation rates from Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. Bottom line: For members of the class of 2003 using vouchers to attend private schools, the graduation rate was 64 percent. For those attending public schools, it was 36 percent.

Let it be noted that School Choice Wisconsin (schoolchoiceWI.org) and Greene have reason to be delighted that the numbers support their view that vouchers are a good thing. But that doesn't mean their numbers are wrong; indeed, the contrast is so stark that it could hardly have come about through some minor statistical fiddling.

Greene's method is to compare the number of students who graduated in 2003 with the number who entered ninth grade in 1999. For the private-school students, who were spread among 10 schools, there were 167 graduates of 262 who entered. The schools are larger than that, as Greene told me; those were just the voucher students. For the public-school students, it was 3,329 of 9,226. They attended 37 different high schools for which data are available, including traditional, charter and contract schools.

Among the public schools are six selective high schools that have academic requirements for admission. They managed a little better than the district as a whole, with a graduation rate of 41 percent, still far below the voucher students in private schools.

There is always a possibility that among the families poor enough to qualify for vouchers, the ones who actually use them are different in ways that are significantly related to educational achievement. But it is far less likely that the same kinds of differences exist between the families of voucher students and the families who choose to send their children to a selective high school. The private schools that accept vouchers are not allowed to impose academic requirements.

District superintendent William Andrekopoulos disputes Greene's figures, saying that the state's method for computing dropout rates puts the Milwaukee graduation rate at 61 percent. Maybe, though most state graduation rates are notoriously overstated.

Greene cheerfully admits that his numbers are estimates, because they don't track individual students who come and go. But he also observes that "it's hard to imagine how error could fully account for a 23-point gap" between private and selective public schools.

Another method for calculating graduation rates called the "cumulative promotion index" has been developed for the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Urban Institute (neither usually found occupying the same ideological territory as the Manhattan Institute, but equally concerned about dismal graduation rates, especially for minority students). That index uses promotion data for different grades in a single year to calculate graduation rates, and they come out a little higher than Greene's numbers. Even so, there is still an 18-point gap in graduation rates between the voucher students and those attending Milwaukee's selective schools. That's huge.

It would, obviously, be possible to do more precise studies. An editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quotes an internal memo in which Andrekopoulos himself describes a couple of them. The data could be adjusted for previous academic performance, for instance, or individual students could be followed through their four years in high school.

As the editorial points out, however, the information to do such studies is not available, because it has been blocked by the teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and by Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. Doyle has vetoed a plan to carry out a long-term study comparing performance of individual students who do use vouchers with a matched group of students who don't.

When Milwaukee's voucher program began, opponents prophesied disaster for the district. But it seems in fact to be doing better, according to a report last year from the American Education Reform Council. Though 12,900 students used vouchers last year (the program is capped at 15 percent of district enrollment) total enrollment increased 5.7 percent from 1990 to 2003. Test results improved. The dropout rate -- the official dropout rate, that is -- fell from 16 percent to 9 percent. And real spending per student, adjusted for inflation, rose from $8,520 to $11,772.

Two years ago, Andrekopoulos wrote to U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, "I think you will find Milwaukee Public Schools an especially interesting urban school district because our highly competitive market for school enrollment has made us very eager to give parents and children information and options in the neighborhoods where they live."

Vouchers created the competition. They work.