Wisconsin bureaucrats will cushion the bump when the Milwaukee
Parental Choice Program outgrows its enrollment ceiling this year,
the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel predicted recently. The MPCP now serves almost 15,000
of the city’s youngest residents. This is nearly the legal maximum
of 15 percent of students enrolled in the Milwaukee public
schools.
If the relevant regulators were sticklers for arithmetic, a run
on vouchers this summer would be likely. But the Department of
Public Instruction will reportedly employ fuzzy math to allow open
enrollment in MPCP through the end of August, even if the legal cap
is exceeded slightly.
The choice law’s likely reprieve surfaced in a pot aggressively
stirred by the Journal-Sentinel in a recent series that
covered the MPCP while questioning its premises. While the survey
strives for some objectivity, noting that many participating
schools are excellent, its central thesis is profoundly
anti-choice. The program proves, the paper says, that economic
theory is wrong to predict that parents will choose well.
The Journal-Sentinel reporters spent seven days
measuring the MPCP against an irrelevant standard — perfection —
and finding that it falls short. Some participating schools are
bad, they reveal, mystifying the mystics who think markets are
perfect.
A handful of the schools discussed are clearly sub-par. Even
voucher advocate Howard Fuller wrote to DPI to encourage
investigation of obvious negligence. But the paper’s own reporting
inadvertently indicates that the bad apples are sorted out fast by
market forces.
The Journal-Sentinel highlighted seven schools that left “positive
impressions” and seven others that appeared to be “questionable scenes.”
Most schools that left positive impressions with visiting
journalists had stood the test of time. Five of the schools praised
by the newspaper are seven or eight year veterans of the MPCP. Only
one school on the list, the Malaika Early Learning Center, was new
this year.
By contrast, the “questionable scenes” were overwhelmingly new.
Three of the seven listed schools were in their first year, and
another three had between two and four years in the MPCP. The only
well-established school to receive a thumbs down — the Harambee
Community School — is being torn apart by financial mismanagement,
not bad teaching or classroom disorder.
“Weaker schools in the choice program manage to survive — in
some cases, even thrive,” the paper asserts. But its own facts
suggest the opposite. They suggest that the market is working.
Schools that have survived five years in the MPCP appeared well run
to visiting journalists.
Moreover, enrollment trends supplied by Public Policy Forum
show that parents continue to separate wheat
from chaff. Hickman’s Academy Preparatory School and the Hope
Christian School, both on the Journal-Sentinel’s good
list, posted some of the MPCP’s largest student enrollment
gains.
THE JOURNAL-SENTINEL’S OTHER effort to
puncture the Perfect Market Myth is an expose of the processes by
which parents choose schools. “Gut Instinct Guides Parents’
Choices,” reporters complain.
Parents rely on informal networks when picking schools, the
paper reports, such as a church affiliation or a referral from a
family member. “The best thing is word of mouth,” Principal Paul
Hohl of the St. Sebastian School told a reporter.
Professor Paul Teske of the University of Colorado dismissed the
referral system as “just psychological attachment issues.” “If you
know a teacher or a person you like at a school,” he told the
Journal-Sentinel, “you get a feeling of social
attachment.”
But referrals are a time-tested market mechanism for making
complicated choices well. We choose doctors, dentists, and lawyers
in this way precisely because it is hard to represent their quality
— or their suitability for us — by any simple metric.
The paper implies that parents should be choosing schools based
on more objective criteria such as test scores, and it laments
their lack of passion for playing by the numbers.
But school average scores notoriously reveal more about the
backgrounds of children who attend a school than they do about how
much those children are learning. A school that caters largely to
impoverished children will have lower scores than a mostly middle
class school even if those children are showing great improvement
over time.
More critically, average scores reveal nothing at all about how
any one child will do in a particular school. The foundational
principle of school choice is that different children learn
differently. One child may thrive in a non-structured environment.
Another will learn more in a school with lower average scores but a
more disciplined approach.
The Journal-Sentinel quotes Dorothy Smith, who chose
three different schools for her children based on their different
needs. “Some kids need a little more umph than other kids,” she
sensibly observed.
Parents know this, and they aren’t looking for the school with
the highest scoring students. They are looking for the school at
which their child will score the highest. That these are two
completely different things is what the Journal-Sentinel
— and all those who think testing and sanctions can outperform
choice — seem not to understand.
THE SERIES ENDS WITH a call for “clearer and better answers” about how the
MPCP schools are serving students, the mantra of those who want to
condition the program’s expansion on the addition of bureaucratic
weights and measures.
If the Journal-Sentinel reporters are right, then
perhaps 10 percent of the MPCP schools are not doing the job they
might. But
over 20 percent of Milwaukee Public Schools are now “in need of
improvement” under the No Child Left Behind Act. If these numbers
mean something, they mean that a parent-driven market is about
twice as good at eliminating poor schools as the public system. If
they mean nothing, then parents are right to choose schools in a
subtler, more subjective way.
Milwaukee’s voucher kids are doing all right. The market is a
dynamic process, and school closings, like flu symptoms, are a sign
that the MPCP naturally resists poor quality. Wisconsin lawmakers
should ease the enrollment cap on its flagship school choice law
without regulating away the variety it needs to succeed.
