What’s Wrong With the School Voucher Program?

After six years on the School Board, two years as President of the Board of Directors for an inner city charter school, and as a person with strong ties to district parochial schools, I have had the unique opportunity to see our state’s educational system from many perspectives.  I firmly believe that all children can learn, and that each child has a learning style all their own, so the more choices available to them, the better.  However, when private choices are publicly funded, they need to be held to the same standards as public education and be inclusive to children of all learning abilities. The funding should be equitable, sufficient, and sustainable.

, which expands the voucher program to families with household incomes of $75,000 dollars or less and now includes all of Milwaukee County and other Counties around the state, is not equitable, sufficient, or sustainable.  It excludes children with disabilities and special needs and it does not hold private and parochial schools to the same standards and accountability as public schools.

The voucher program was developed 20 years ago to allow poor, inner-city students an opportunity to attend private schools. Back then, only one percent of the Milwaukee Public Schools student population could participate in the voucher program (also known as the Parental Choice Program). Last year, more than 72 percent of all the students in Milwaukee private schools attended on taxpayer-funded vouchers. Moreover, for 22 of those private schools participating in the voucher program, 100 percent of their students use tax-funded vouchers, and half of voucher program schools had 94 percent or more of their students on vouchers.

Given these numbers, expanding the program to include counties and opening it to families with upper middle-class incomes, private and parochial voucher schools will be overwhelmed and short-changed.  The vouchers provide just under $7,000 dollars per student, which will not come close to covering the costs of educating high school students (the four most expensive years of a student’s K-12 education).

Worse, the budget stipulates if the voucher doesn’t cover the cost of tuition, the family must pay the difference. This will effectively eliminate poor inner-city students from being able to afford, even on voucher, a private high school education.  For all intents and purposes, our current legislature has negated the whole purpose of the Parental Choice Program.

Another glaring problem is the near total exclusion of special needs students from the school voucher program, which has drawn national attention – and a federal lawsuit.  In an interview on National Public Radio, Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney with Disability Rights Wisconsin, stated that very few students participating in the voucher program have disabilities (less than two percent), because most of the private schools are not equipped to accommodate special needs.  

According to Spitzer-Resnick, “The backlash effect is an ever increasingly-segregated by disability school system in MPS, which is not good for kids with disabilities or kids without disabilities because people should be in the environment that our general society is in, not in a skewed environment caused by this program. Even if there are schools that would accept children with disabilities with a special needs voucher there’s nothing in the bill that says they need to provide them with any special education whatsoever or need to have any staff that are capable of doing so.”

Our current legislature has manipulated the voucher system into an under-funded, overpriced, grotesquely segregated, and unregulated “choice” for parents.  And our elected officials are pouring our tax dollars into the horrible mess that they’ve created, rather than creating a more fair funding formula for all schools that would meet the needs of all students. It’s time to face the facts: so-called “school choice” is no choice for our children.