New study finds school choice is ‘like skipping a grade’ for working-class kids, yet critics would slam the door
A major party’s likely nominee for governor, state Rep. Francesca Hong, says she favors good schools. “Every child deserves a strong and comprehensive education,” her platform says.
So why, as a matter of policy, does she want to close the particular schools providing measurably great education for working-class kids?
She did so again the week before the primary election. When an interviewer noted that 30,000 students in Milwaukee alone rely on school choice, she conceded merely that she’d be “sunsetting” school choice Milwaukee only after the rest of Wisconsin: “So that would be around 2030.”
Why would it be ever? By coincidence, as Hong calmly discussed upending the education of 61,000 modest-income Wisconsin kids, a new study was showing just how strong an education those kids get thanks to school choice.
Find two equally matched kids — same age, same family income, same home language, same part of the state, and, crucially, the same performance on the state’s Forward exam — and watch as one child goes to a district public school and the other to an independent school using a school choice voucher. After four years, compare their learning growth via that Forward exam.
The result: Among most Wisconsin children, using school choice put the typical kid 1.15 grade levels ahead of his public school match. In Milwaukee, using school choice for just two years puts a child 1.35 grades ahead of her peer.
The key is time, said the authors, Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and economist Scott Niederjohn of Concordia University Wisconsin. The benefit of a stronger school didn’t hit right away but accumulated over several years: “We see a clear stepping up pattern as years of exposure increase,” they wrote in a peer-reviewed version.
“Over the course of four years, we see over a year of additional growth” in one of a pair of kids who in every measurable way started in the same place, Flanders told the Badger Institute. The benefit of school choice is massive: “Essentially, it’s like a kid skipped a grade.”
Such a boost is especially poignant when you realize that these aren’t rich kids. Wisconsin’s choice program is limited to families earning no more than about twice the poverty line in most of the state, or 3 times in Milwaukee or Racine — $63,000 for a single mother with one child, for instance.
The new study uses the same method as the state-mandated School Choice Demonstration Project that wrapped in 2012, before choice went statewide. That study found that in Milwaukee, vouchers meant higher high school graduation rates, and later analysis found it boosted college enrollment and reduced the odds of being arrested as a young adult. WILL’s study finds the benefit works elsewhere in Wisconsin, too, where public schools “are three and four and five stars” on the state’s quality measures, said Flanders.
Why such a big benefit? That’s beyond the study. Flanders can speculate: Maybe it’s better discipline. Maybe choice frees a school to try different techniques. What is known now are the results.
Why would anyone, much less a politician claiming to be devoted to the “working class,” want to close off such opportunity? It isn’t just Hong: State Sen. Kelda Roys, endorsed in the governor’s race by a teachers’ union, promises to kill school choice. Milwaukee County exec David Crowley, said to be the pro-voucher Democrat, merely says grudgingly of a program that more than 30,000 of his constituents use that he “does not believe it can be eliminated overnight.”
Why not eliminated never? Statewide, only 31 percent of 8th-graders can read at grade level, so parents who can’t afford private school tuition or a house in a high-performing district would appreciate better options.
Hong claims school choice costs too much. That’s absurd: While each Milwaukee Public Schools pupil costs taxpayers about $23,000 per year, taxpayers’ total spend on an 8th-grader’s school choice voucher this past year was $10,877. That’s why even Hong says she’ll phase out the program: The fiscal blow to districts and taxpayers of immediate closure would be crippling as public schools try to fund an influx of students.
Her talk of wiping out choice by allowing no new students is similarly nonsense: It means schools already on a fiscal shoestring would lose 10 percent of their revenue each year, likely collapsing them swiftly and, in Milwaukee, sending a flood of 30,000 kids into a district that manages to teach only 9 percent of its 4th-graders to read.
Who’d benefit from that? Not children.
Perhaps this just amounts to a stubborn clinging to an ideology that rejects institutions independent of government.
Hong adopts a phrase ginned up by teachers’ unions: “Public dollars belong in public schools.” Never mind that such a sentiment cuts out parents’ choices. When getting children into schools puts them more than a full grade farther along, the phrase should be, “Education dollars belong in schools that educate.”
Patrick McIlheran is executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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