Wall Street Opinion Journal Monday, January 16, 2006
‘He’s Throwing Away My Dream’
Today it’s liberal Democrats who stand in the schoolhouse door.
Milwaukee’s innovative school choice program has become a beacon of hope for reformers everywhere. But the educational establishment has never accepted its success and is now striking back. A cap on the number of students that can attend the city’s private choice schools has been reached, and starting Feb. 1, education officials will implement a rationing plan to allocate the program’s available seats. That could disrupt up to 4,000 families and create such chaos among the participating schools that several could be threatened with closure.
In 1995, then-Gov. Tommy Thompson joined with state legislators to expand choice in Milwaukee to include religious schools, but a compromise set a limit on the number of participating students at 15% of the enrollment in Milwaukee Public Schools. Today that means some 14,500 students, and demand is now higher than that for the slots which give $6,351 annual scholarships to students opting for choice schools (The public schools’ per pupil spending is about 80% higher).
To make matters worse, the state’s Department of Public Instruction has decreed that it will apply the cap not only to the program as a whole but to each participating school. That is, if the cap is enough to meet only 85% of the demand for vouchers, then each choice school would be allowed to fill only 85% of its available seats. The highly regarded Messmer Catholic Schools would lose 248 seats and the acclaimed Urban Day School would be down 225 seats.
