A paper from an insiders’ group offers bad-faith arguments about Wisconsin school choice and the “decoupling” reform that would increase transparency
A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed by the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials on the grounds it will, among other things, eliminate a source of “negative attention” that choice critics have long used to mount opposition.
Don’t fix the problem, in other words, because then there won’t be an unfixed problem to continue to complain about.
The reform WASBO opposes is logical and straightforward. All funding for Parental Choice Programs and independent charter schools would come from direct state aid, thereby “decoupling” school funding from local funding formulas and preventing any impact on local property taxes.
This is already how it works in Milwaukee, and school reformers are pushing for the same decoupling throughout the rest of the state.
In a recent piece disingenuously entitled “The Price of Parallel Systems,” the WASBO’s research director, Anne Chapman, writes that one of the problems with decoupling is that it would “make the fiscal impact of voucher schools effectively imperceptible to the typical taxpayer.”
“It would make public schools the only K-12 schools imposing an explicit cost on local residents through property taxes,” she writes.
In sum, it would shield the choice program, Chapman writes, from “the negative attention it has come to generate from property taxpayers.”
That negative attention is generated by school choice opponents trying to blame districts’ property tax rates on families sending their children to private and charter schools — choices that, in truth, save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
How choice schools actually save taxpayers money
Full transparency on all tax bills would include a lot more facts.
Chapman writes that Wisconsin spends about $629 million educating 58,623 Parental Choice Program students. She doesn’t do the math, but you can: That’s $10,730 per student.
Compare that to what taxpayers at every level made available to traditional districts in 2022-23, still the most recent figures: $16,989 per pupil, on average. In Milwaukee, the figure was about $23,700 per pupil; in Madison, it was $19,500. Every school district in Wisconsin had more in total taxpayer funding per pupil than did private schools in the Parental Choice Programs.
If those 58,623 students ended up back in traditional district schools over this past year, they would have cost about $1 billion a year to educate, or 58% more than taxpayers now provide.
Chapman’s paper is misleading, at best, in numerous other key regards:
Savings for taxpayers: She, for example, raises the issue of special education but fails to mention that private schools in the Parental Choice Programs by law cannot discriminate against students with specials needs that they can accommodate with “minor adjustments,” the same as is the case for any individual public school.
The truth is that private schools in the Parental Choice Program accommodate more than 5,000 students with special needs, many for no additional aid.
Transfers from private schools: Chapman states that “the majority of voucher recipients statewide are in fact switching from private schooling at personal family expense to private schooling at public expense.” She claims that “about two-thirds of voucher recipients in the first two years of the WCPC (the statewide school choice program) were already attending private schools” and that this past year, “95% of WPCP enrollment consists of students who did not attend a public school in the previous year.”
In other words, in the first years they had access to school choice, low- and moderate-income families who’d been scraping by to afford tuition or relying on others’ kindness instead turned to a voucher. This one-time event shouldn’t be surprising.
For later years, Chapman just misreads the data. When she says that 95 percent of choice students came from a private school, that’s because the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction counts every child who returns for another year as having come from a private school, regardless of whether they previously switched from public school. See the actual figures here: This past year, 80 percent of choice students simply returned for another year, their parents satisfied with the education delivered. Only 5 percent were new to choice because they switched from paying on their own.
Student improvement: Chapman asserts that “a growing body of research raises concerns” that private schools parents choose “do not generally improve student achievement compared to traditional public schools.” Two of her links are to lists assembled by the National Coalition for Public Education, a set of interest groups such as teachers’ unions, many directly connected to traditional district schools. The coalition is organized around killing school choice. They offer news articles that aren’t studies at all, studies that don’t address academic performance, or some that cherry-pick particular years.
While there’s ample evidence that private schools in the Parental Choice Programs and independent charter schools produce better results, the greatest testimony is that of parents, who affirmatively choose to keep their kids in schools that work for them.
Unfettered growth?
“The larger, long-term concern that policymakers will need to address,” writes Chapman, is that disentangling school choice from districts’ finances and levies could “help facilitate unfettered growth in spending on a parallel system of private K-12 schools that are not evenly distributed across the state.”
Chapman’s saying that because schools in the Parental Choice Programs aren’t evenly distributed, it isn’t fair that taxpayers statewide should fund them. So, would people who live far from a University of Wisconsin campus be exempt from having to subsidize it as well? In reality, it’s school choice that can spur growth in independent schools across the state.
But “unfettered”? That reveals what she and her association fear is that parents will continue to opt for choice schools. The association seems bothered that if children need educating and taxpayers want to help, any of those needs should be satisfied anywhere but in their district schools.
Remember, the goal of the Parental Choice Programs is not to replace the public school system. The Supreme Court found choice constitutional because it exists alongside the district school system — not as a duplicative “parallel” but as an alternative.
At no point does Chapman’s paper speculate about why parents are flocking to school choice — they are, with choice enrollment up 290 percent in the past two decades, even as traditional districts’ enrollment is down 9 percent, or 77,000 students.
At no point does the paper ask why school choice is so popular with Wisconsinites — and it is, in poll after poll.
Wisconsin does not, in fact, have “parallel systems.” It has 420 school districts, which compete with each other via open enrollment, and when a child moves from one district to another, public funding eventually follows. More importantly, only a portion of the total funding follows a child, which means most districts that lose more students than they gain through public school open enrollment end up levying property taxes for students they don’t educate. The paper is silent on that levy impact.
It makes a kind of sense that districts’ business officials would focus on districts or on their whole school district industry as the thing that must be protected from what they see as a competitor.
But for the rest of us, what Wisconsin has is not “parallel systems” but about 970,000 school-aged children. About 800,000 go to traditional district schools, others are homeschooled, some go to a parish school that parents pay for, some use parental choice, some go to independent public charter schools.
For the parents of each one of them, what needs protecting isn’t some “system” but that child’s future.
Wisconsin’s comparative openness to parental choice gives families the latitude they need to protect that interest. Further reforms, discussed in a way that centers on children rather than on systems or the adults running them, will help those families more.
And decoupling, which helps both districts and taxpayers, is a good next step.
Jim Bender is an Education Consultant to the Badger Institute and Patrick McIlheran its Director of Policy.
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