Vouchers by Another Name: Public Dollars (Scholarships) for Private, Sectarian Schools

NYTimes May 21, 2012

Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools

By STEPHANIE SAUL

When the Georgia legislature passed a private school scholarship program in 2008, lawmakers promoted it as a way to give poor children the same education choices as the wealthy.

The program would be supported by donations to nonprofit scholarship groups, and Georgians who contributed would receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits, up to $2,500 a couple. The intent was that money otherwise due to the Georgia treasury — about $50 million a year — would be used instead to help needy students escape struggling public schools.

That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year.

“A very small percentage of that money will be set aside for a needs-based scholarship fund,” Wyatt Bozeman, an administrator at the school near Atlanta, said during an informational session. “The rest of the money will be channeled to the family that raised it.”

A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.

“If a student has friends, relatives or even corporations that pay Georgia income tax, all of those people can make a donation to that child’s school,” added an official with a scholarship group working with the school.

The exchange at Gwinnett Christian Academy, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.

Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.

Milwaukee’s Education Privatization Explained: What’s the Difference Between Public Schools, Voucher Schools and Charter Schools?

What’s the Difference? Voucher schools, Charter schools, Milwaukee Public Schools

Published in May 2012 by the non-partisan Democracy and Education Research Group.  Email: democracy.education.milwaukee@gmail.com

Overview

In recent decades, there has been an expansion of the types of schools in Milwaukee receiving public tax dollars. In some areas, differences may seem slight. In other areas, there are significant differences. This is especially true in terms of students’ rights, public accountability, and democratic oversight.

There are three main types of schools in Milwaukee that receive public tax dollars:

• Private voucher schools, charging tuition but also open to students who receive publicly funded vouchers.
• Charter schools approved by the City of Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
• Schools overseen by the Milwaukee Public Schools district.

The voucher schools, by definition, are private schools and do not have to follow the same rules as public schools. Most provide religious-based education and may charge tuition to private-paying stu­dents and, in some cases, to high school students receiving vouchers.

The charter schools approved by the City of Milwaukee and UWM are considered public schools, but do not have to follow the same state rules, regulations and public oversight as traditional public schools. They are beholden to a “contract” (or charter), granted significant autonomy, and operate as independent entities. The schools are expected to provide greater academic results and innovation, although this has not necessarily happened in practice. Like all charter schools, they are non-religious and may not charge tuition. They are governed by privately appointed boards of directors.

The MPS district primarily oversees traditional public schools, including both neighborhood schools and a range of specialty schools and citywide schools, from language immersion to Montessori. The Milwaukee School Board also oversees charter schools that are part of the MPS but that have a specific “contract” or charter, often to provide a particular curricular focus. Finally, MPS oversees alternative and partnership schools. All MPS schools are non-religious and may not charge tuition. They are gov­erned by the democratically elected Milwaukee School Board. Most MPS schools also have school-based councils of parents, teachers and community members.

Details

Voucher schools

The biggest difference between voucher schools and charter and traditional schools is that, by defini­tion, voucher schools are private schools and can provide religious-based instruction. There are approxi­mately 22,300 students in Milwaukee receiving vouch­ers in the 2011-12 school year, mostly at religious schools. In 2011, for the first time Milwaukee students could attend a voucher school located outside the city.

While the voucher program initially began as an ex­periment promoting “choice” for poor people, a family of four with an income of $67,050 may now receive vouchers. The median family income in Milwaukee is $35,921.

Because they are private schools, voucher schools have limited public accountability and operate un­der different rules than public schools. For instance, voucher schools do not have to follow the state’s open meetings and records law. They do not have to provide information on staff qualifications, student suspen­sions and expulsions, graduation rates, and so forth to the public. Their meetings are not open to the public.

Voucher schools must accept students who require special education services, but they are not required to meet the students’ needs beyond what can be provided with minor adjustments. As a result, many students requiring special services leave voucher schools and attend a Milwaukee public schools. (Less than 2 per- cent of students in voucher schools are identified as receiving special education services, compared to about almost 20 percent in the Milwaukee Public Schools.)

As private schools, voucher schools do not have to honor constitutional rights of due process when students are suspended or expelled. Nor do private voucher schools have to follow Wisconsin law that

prohibits discrimination against students in a range of areas including, sex, pregnancy, marital or parental status, or sexual orientation. Voucher schools, howev­er, must follow federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

Charter schools overseen by the City of Milwaukee and UWM

There are seven schools chartered by the City of Milwaukee and 11 schools chartered by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The schools enrolled a total of approximately 6,500 students in 2011-12.

Information on the UWM charter schools can be found on the webpage of the Office of Charter Schools at UWM (http://www4.uwm.edu/soe/centers/char­ter_schools/). Links on the website provide data such as the name of a particular charter school, its address, when it was chartered, and its email and school web-site. Detailed data on special education students, racial makeup, curricular offerings and so forth is not easily accessible via the website. A 62-page annual report from 2009-10 is available through the website. The report does not indicate who appoints the staff and leadership overseeing the Office of Charter Schools, nor when and if the office holds meetings open to the public.

The only data available on the City of Milwaukee website specifically regarding charter schools is a phone number where one can get an application to become a charter school (http://city.milwaukee.gov/ CharterSchoolApplication.htm). The charter schools are overseen by a “Charter School Review Commit­tee” appointed by city officials. Meetings and deci­sions by the committee are not available on the City of Milwaukee website, nor is it clear where one can attain such information.

Limited data on individual charter schools, both for UWM and the City of Milwaukee, is available through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, but not for the schools as a group.

Milwaukee Public Schools

There are 175 schools within MPS in 2011-12, with 80,098 students. Schools include traditional schools, charter schools, and partnership schools. Charter schools include both district-run charters (instrumen­tality) and independent charters (non-instrumentality).

Information on schools, programs, enrollment and demographics can be found at the MPS website (http:// mpsportal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us). MPS is governed

by a nine-member School Board, which each member elected to a four-year term in public elections. The board holds monthly public meetings, in addition to committee meetings, open to the public.

The Milwaukee Public Schools is the city’s largest educational institution, and the only one with the com­mitment, capacity, and legal obligation to serve the needs of all the city’s children.

Overall, almost 20 percent of MPS students require special education services, and 10 percent are English Language Learners. The district offers Spanish/Eng­lish bilingual programs at 24 schools, and Southeast Asian/English Bilingual Programs at two schools. English-as-a-Second Language programs are available at the bilingual schools and an additional 14 schools.

MPS issues an annual Report Card for the district as a whole, and for individual schools. The reports cards are available publicly via the MPS website. Con­tact information for the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, agendas, meeting calendars and audio records of board proceedings are available at the MPS board governance website.

Attempts in Milwaukee to Put Schools in Unsafe Buildings for Profit

Bad Players, Shady Business Deals.

By Harriet Callier [hcallier@live.com] 09May2012 Milwaukee Community Journal

Welcome to new (Unsafe, Emotionally Challenging) School where “Gun Safety Will Be Practice at all times around the children.” Dieter insists on putting a school into this building because ‘it pays!’ He explains that he made some bad choices in other business deals with this building and he needs to make his money back.

While we want the best possible education for our children, parents and grandparents have a long list of factors to weigh in finalizing those decisions. Questions regarding physical and emotional safety should be on the checklist. Increasingly, Milwaukee Kindergartens and K4-12 schools are circumventing the rules to open under challenging—even dangerous circumstances. On May 15, another instance of this will occur if our elected officials do not hear to the contrary.

See Picture School Denied by Zoning board

Academy of Excellence – 633 South 12th Street (Case# 111483) also uses the name
Whole Village Institute and the side street address 1236 W Pierce. (Case#31075)

In late July 2011, Randall (Randy) Melchert, Anna Horneck and Matt Boutilier (File# 31075) were DENIED by the City of Milwaukee Board of Zoning and Appeals for their request to put a Christian school into a heavy industrial area above an air gun target practice business in a building that is owned by James (Jim) Dieter. Melchert has close ties to VCY Administration; Boutlier and Horneck have ties to Churches whose congregations meet outside of Milwaukee proper—as far away as Hartland, WI.

In the actual videotaping of the public hearing, Melchert was questioned regarding the safety and welfare of the children—ages 2 to 18+—who would occupy this school for the better part of a school day. Specifically, the questions related to the heavy flow of tracker trailer units to surrounding manufacturers and produce warehouses. A more telling question asked about the only entrance to the school’s space (to the left of the car in the photo) that empties directly onto the sidewalk/street for 120+ school children and 48 daycare children ages 2 – 4 years of age.

Melchert made every effort to explain away BOZA’s direct questions. What could not be captured here is was the emotional distress that these children would have been subject to with men in full-gear paramilitary camouflage and gas mask running throughout the building in actual target practice. The school shares the building with Airsoft Jungle Club. The guns and gear in the video and website closely resembles what we seen in the pictures of the war on Al-Qaida and Afghanistan. The Club requires everyone to fully acknowledge that “anyone stepping on the PROPERTY” should be protected with eye and body protection. Their videos show the Club making target practice use of the full range of the building.

So why the discussion about a BOZA denial. Dieter/Melchert are going back into the City Council for a permanent variance that would allow them to put children into this building. This time they won’t waste their story with the BOZA folks because they will talk directly to the a panel of Aldermen with the request to change the overall code of the building from heavy industrial to mixed use.

Nothing has changed with the makeup of the community—it is still a very active industrial area. What changed is the name of the school from Whole Village Institute to Academy of Excellence. Because it is a corner lot, Melchert uses the address for the front door where Dieter lists the side entrance. And no one is to be the wiser.

So how can we fix this. From where I stand, it is highly inappropriate to work to circumvent the legal processes—especially for a form of business that will be unmonitored for the most part as these schools have little to no reporting requirements that are released to the public. That concern takes a back seat to the fact that this will put children in harm’s way just to make a dollar.

Remember, nothing has changed in this business district to move it from a heavy industrial zoning. School buses and parents’ cars will all compete for parking and driving space in an industrial area that has no way of defending itself of children darting between parked cars. In fact to the contrary, this zoning change has capacity to take property out of play that is best suited for bringing real, family supporting jobs in large numbers into our communities.

But each of us have a voice that counts. Write or call the Alderman. The most recent appointments to the Zoning, Neighborhood & Development Committee are Ald. Bauman (rjbauma@milwaukee.gov), Ald. Bohl , Chair (JBohl@milwaukee.gov), Ald. Murphy (MMurph@milwaukee.gov), Ald. Wade (WWade@milwaukee.gov) and Ald. Witkowski (twitko@milwaukee.gov). The main number is 414-286-2221. This is scheduled as Item#5 on the Agenda at the 9am (City Hall, Room 301B) before the Zoning, Neighborhood and Development Committee.

Lastly, I strongly encourage you to remain informed and engaged. Women Committed to an Informed Community has held several forums throughout the city to get us up to speed on the Charter/Choice Program and how it best fits into each family’s decisions. The Committee invites you to come a Community Forum, Thursday, May 17, 6:00 p.m., Solomon United Methodist Church, 3295 N. Martin Luther King Drive.

Harriet Callier is the Senior Field Agent for ARACOPA Coalition for Social Justice. She is Chair of the Criminal Justice Committee for the Milwaukee Branch NAACP and an active member of the Education Forum with the Wisconsin State Conference of the NAACP. She is an active member of the Community Justice Committee of First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee.

Bradley and Walton Foundation Fund a Study of Milwaukee Vouchers

Bog Posting on Public education: this is What Democracy Looks Like

By Bob Peterson February 27, 2012

New Voucher Study Shows Need for Public Accountability and Transparency

A new report on the nation’s largest voucher program demonstrates why Milwaukee voucher schools should adhere to the accountability and transparency laws followed by the public schools.

The 225-page report was a longitudinal study that compared samples of voucher and public school students using “value-added” achievement data in reading and math. The authors – many of whom have made a career out of researching voucher and charter schools – concluded “in some grades” students who attended voucher schools from 2006 to 2010 “exhibited greater growth in reading achievement than a group of matched Milwaukee Public Schools students.” The differences in math were not statistically significant.

While voucher proponents hailed the study, a closer look at report shows inconsistencies and raises many questions.

For example, a major conclusion [page 4, Report 36] asserts “enrolling in a private high school through MPCP [Milwaukee Parental Choice Program] increased the likelihood of a student graduating from high school, enrolling in a four-year college… by 4-7 percentage points.”

But on page 16, Report 30, the report states, “that the majority of students (approximately 75%) who were enrolled in 9th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12th grade. … there is evidence that the students who leave MPCP for public schools are among the lowest performing private school students.”

In other words, three-quarters of voucher 9^th graders have left by 12^th grade, and the students who remain started out as higher achievers.

If we believe in educating all children, that shouldn’t be a source of pride. It also raises unexplored questions. Why do so many of the more-difficult-to-educate high schoolers leave the voucher schools? Are they “counseled out?” Expelled? Allowed to fall through the cracks? Is this a new form of creaming?

Given such internal inconsistencies in the report, it’s difficult to have confidence in the report’s conclusions.

The report was written by the School Choice Demonstration Project of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The authors didn’t provide an advance copy of the report to Wisconsin’s State Superintendent of Schools Tony Evers who is legally in charge of monitoring the program. As a result, the most widely read news story on the study that appeared on Monday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel didn’t quote him.

A few interesting facts came out in the reports.

• More than a third of the voucher students (36 percent) who were in the original student cohorts were missing and unable to be located by the fourth year of the study — literally, the researchers don’t know where they are because they are neither in a voucher school nor MPS. They may be in a charter school; they have moved out of the city. This calls into question any ability to make reliable conclusions.

• Only 68% of the teachers in the voucher schools have teaching licenses compared to 94% in the public schools.

• Based on the 2010-2011 WKCE test scores, the achievement gap between blacks and whites were significantly higher in the voucher schools than in MPS. (The report looked at  the gap in reading and math in both 4^th and 8^th grade.)

One final note. None of the report’s data is disaggregated by school. In other words, there are some good voucher schools and some lousy voucher schools — but the report’s authors don’t let the public know which are which.  The Milwaukee Public Schools, in contrast, releases data on a school-by-school basis, from test scores to mobility rates to attendance to special ed percentages.

The Arkansas report was funded by six foundations. Two of the most prominent are the Bradley Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, well-known conservative foundations that believe in a universal voucher system as an alternative to public schools.

It was the fourth and final year of the longitudinal study. Efforts to increase voucher school accountability were blocked earlier this month when the Republican-dominated Legislature removed the voucher schools from a proposed statewide reporting system.

New Bill Will Degrade Special Education in Wisconsin

Following is a call by the parent group I Love My Public Schools.

SPECIAL NEEDS VOUCHERS BILLS ARE BEING FAST-TRACKED NOW IN MADISON. DISABILITY GROUPS CONTINUE TO OPPOSE MODIFIED BILLS ­— CONTACT YOUR LEGISLATORS NOW!

New education bill AB110 takes funding for special-education services and educators from public schools, allows voucher schools to hire non-certified special-education teachers and services, and does not provide suitable funding to address the needs of moderately to severely disabled students. Skip to the bottom of this message for a call to action, or keep reading for more details on this fast-tracked legislation. AB 110 degrades the quality of special education for students in public and voucher schools.

Background: This past fall, AB110 was introduced in the Wisconsin Assembly. During the public hearing, all disability groups in Wisconsin opposed the bill. Legislators from both sides of the aisle recognized that this bill would not pass. Rep. Litjens, the sponsor of AB 110, has submitted a rewritten version. Disability groups in Wisconsin continue to oppose it for many reasons – described below. The biggest problem: the bill does not require private schools to have any special educators or related services expertise (e.g.,therapists) on staff. Sen. Vukmir has introduced the same bill in the Senate as SB 486. AB 110 will be voted on by the Assembly Education committee TOMORROW @ 10 AM. No testimony is taken during this hearing. Although no official announcement has been made, it looks like SB 486 will have a hearing during the afternoon of Feb. 28th.
The funding mechanism in AB110/SB486 is highly problematic:

• Wisconsin does not fund special education students on a per pupil basis. AB110 does does, withdrawing per-pupil funding for collectively used services such as teachers, aides and therapists, from public schools, making it more likely that special-education students in public schools will no longer receive the services they need.
• The bill does not provide a tuition cap: students with moderate to severe needs will not receive a voucher that covers the full cost of their education.

This will have three negative effects:

·         These students will be unlikely to find voucher schools that will serve them for the amount of their voucher.

·         The voucher program will likely appeal to families whose children have less complex disabilities, leaving increasingly underfunded public schools with a higher proportion of students with the most complex needs.

·         Low- and possibly moderate- income families who seek to attend a private school which has a tuition higher than the voucher amount will be unable to use the voucher, resulting in vouchers simply serving to subsidize families who can already afford to send their children to private school, rather than giving the monetary choice to families who cannot afford to do so.

While disability groups appreciate the reference to implementing the child’s most recent IEP, that reference becomes less relevant the longer the child remains in the private school (which the bill gives them a right to do through graduation or age 21 whichever comes first). In addition, there are no legal rights that go with that obligation. In other words, what happens if the child’s IEP is not implemented? The bill provides no remedy for that. Finally, as pointed in in point 4, below, without special educators on staff, how can parents have any confidence that private schools can actually implement their children’s IEPs?
This new bill does not require private schools to use DPI certified special educators or service providers.

TAKE ACTION! Please contact your member of the Assembly immediately to express your concerns about AB 110. If you do not know who your Assembly member is, you may call: 1-800-362-9472 or go to www.legis.state.wi.us  Also contact every member of the Assembly Education Committee and tell them why this bill does not meet the diverse needs of special-education students in Wisconsin. You can find a full list of committee email addresses here: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/w3asp/commpages/IndividualCommittee.aspx?COMMITTEE=Education&HOUSE=Assembly

We will alert you about the Senate Education Committee hearing that is tentatively scheduled for Feb. 28th in the afternoon, when the official announcement comes out. Please attend and testify if you can. If you cannot attend, please submit any concerns you may have to the chair of the committee, Sen. Luther Olsen at: Sen.Olsen@legis.wisconsin.gov or if your Senator is on the committee, please contact your Senator. The other Senators on the committee are Senators: Vukmir, Grothman, Darling, Vinehout, Larson and Cullen.
Thank you for your attention and intervention on behalf of ALL Wisconsin children with special-education needs, in ALL Wisconsin schools.

Best,

ILMPS parents

Voucher Chaos in Florida

McKay scholarship program sparks a cottage industry of fraud and chaos

By Gus Garcia-Roberts Miami NewTimes NewsThursday, Jun 23 2011

Christopher Vaughn spent three years in a McKay high school before discovering his credits were worthless.

From June 2006 through November 2010, the woefully cash-strapped Florida Department of Education (DOE) forked over $2.057 million to Julius Brown, former middle school basketball coach and cofounder of a string of obscure sports apparel businesses.

Michael McElroy

Sheldon “Klassy” Klasfeld surveys his kingdom, Academic High in Boca Raton.

Michael McElroy

Academic High’s graduation hall

The money was in the form of tuition vouchers for kids with physical and learning disabilities to attend the South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy, the Oakland Park K-12 private school of which Brown — a looming and lean former basketball pro with a slug-like mustache — was founder, president, principal, athletic director, and boys’ basketball coach.

As is customary with schools that receive the vouchers, provided by the John M. McKay Scholarships for Students With Disabilities Program, the DOE didn’t inquire about Brown’s curriculum or visit South Florida Prep’s campus to make sure it was safe for schoolchildren. In Florida, private schools essentially go unregulated, even if they’re funded by taxpayer cash. South Florida Prep also received at least $236,000 from a state-run tax-credit scholarship for low-income kids.

While the state played the role of the blind sugar daddy, here is what went on at South Florida Prep, according to parents, students, teachers, and public records: Two hundred students were crammed into ever-changing school locations, including a dingy strip-mall space above a liquor store and down the hall from an Asian massage parlor. Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the “campus” as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks.

The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students might consist of watching a VHS tape of a 1976 Laurence Fishburne blaxploitation flick — Cornbread, Earl and Me — and then summarizing the plot. In one class session, a middle school teacher recommended putting “mother nature” — a woman’s period — into spaghetti sauce to keep a husband under thumb. “We had no materials,” says Nicolas Norris, who taught music despite the lack of a single instrument. “There were no teacher edition books. There was no curriculum.”

In May 2009, two vanloads of South Florida Prep kids were on the way back from a field trip to Orlando when one of the vehicles flipped along Florida’s Turnpike. A teacher and an 18-year-old senior were killed. Turns out another student, age 17 and possessing only a learner’s permit, was behind the wheel and had fallen asleep. The families of the deceased and an insurance company are suing Brown for negligence.

Meanwhile, Brown openly used a form of corporal punishment that has been banned in Miami-Dade and Broward schools for three decades. Four former students and the music teacher Norris recall that the principal frequently paddled students for misbehaving. In a complaint filed with the DOE in April 2009, one parent rushed to the school to stop Brown from taking a paddle to her son’s behind.

“He said that maybe if we niggas would beat our kids in the first place, he wouldn’t have to,” the mother wrote of Brown. “He then proceeded to tell me that he is not governed by Florida school laws.”

He wasn’t far off. The DOE couldn’t remove South Florida Prep from the McKay program, says agency spokesperson Deborah Higgins, “based on the school’s disciplinary policies and procedures.”

It’s like a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don’t regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going.

For optimal results, do this in Florida, America’s fraud capital.

Now watch all the different ways the flimflam men scramble for the cash.

Once a niche scholarship fund, the McKay program has boomed exponentially in the 12 years since it was introduced under Gov. Jeb Bush, with $148.6 million handed out in the past 12 months, a 38 percent increase from just more than five years ago.

There are 1,013 schools — 65 percent of them religious — collecting McKay vouchers from 22,198 children at an average of $7,144 per year.

The lion’s share of that pot ends up in South Florida. Miami-Dade received $31.8 million, more than any other county in the state, and Broward was second with $18.3 million. Palm Beach ranked fifth, with its schools collecting $6.9 million.

But there’s virtually no oversight. According to one former DOE investigator, who claimed his office was stymied by trickle-down gubernatorial politics, the agency failed to uncover “even a significant fraction” of the McKay crime that was occurring.

Administrators who have received funding include criminals convicted of cocaine dealing, kidnapping, witness tampering, and burglary.

Even in investigations where fraud, including forgery and stealing student information to bolster enrollment, is proven, arrests are rare. The thieves are usually allowed to simply repay the stolen loot in installments — or at least promise to — and continue to accept McKay payments.

There is no accreditation requirement for McKay schools. And without curriculum regulations, the DOE can’t yank back its money if students are discovered to be spending their days filling out workbooks, watching B-movies, or frolicking in the park. In one “business management” class, students shook cans for coins on street corners.

And public schools now apparently help with the recruiting. Failing kids, who would sabotage all-important standardized testing scores, are herded en masse to dubious McKay schools.

To read the full story go to:

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2011-06-23/news/mckay-scholarship-program-sparks-a-cottage-industry-of-fraud-and-chaos/

Republican Party, Hispanics for School Choice and Scott Jensen

Scott Jensen and Hispanics for School Choice-Both are part of an interlocking network of pro-voucher organizations aligned with the Republican Party.

By Barbara Miner, Feb. 18, 2012

News reports this week exposed the close working — and legally questionable — relationship between Republican legislators, lobbyist Scott Jensen and the pro-voucher group Hispanics for School Choice.

Those involved in the controversy have a long-standing working relationship that is part of a strategic alliance between right-wing billionaires; school vouchers supporters, and Republican Party operatives.

Consider this announcement on the website of “The Hispanic Conservative” more than a year ago, on Jan. 14, 2011:

Last week, Executive Board members of Hispanics for School Choice created somewhat of a buzz as they descended upon the State Capitol to circulate their legislative agenda.  Associates from the American Federation of Children and School Choice Wisconsin accompanied HFSC in separate meetings with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, Education Committee Chair Steve Kestell, and Secretary of the Department of Administration Mike Huebsch to discuss a timetable of moving the School Choice program forward.

HFSC Board Members were also given exclusive entry to a closed caucus in the Grand Army of the Republic Hearing Room before Assembly Republicans  – an access rarely granted to non-profit organizations of any sort for any reason.  Before the 60-member caucus, Board Members of HFSC were introduced communicating the idea that HFSC aimed to be more of a resource to legislators than a needy lobbyist.[i]

Pro-voucher groups are some of the strongest and best-funded lobbyists in the Wisconsin legislature, and have played an increasingly central role in promoting Gov. Walker’s overall agenda. As state Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) noted last year, “The new 800-pound gorilla— actually it’s more of a 1,200-pound gorilla —is the tax-funded-voucher groups. They’ve become the most powerful lobbying entity in the state.”[ii]

Who is Hispanics for School Choice?  What are its connections to Scott Jensen? What is the involvement of the American Federation for Children, a well-known conservative powerhouse headed by a former chair of the Republican Party in Michigan?

Walker’s Attack on Our Children’s Education Widens

Gov. Walker privileges private voucher schools and once again breaks the public trust

February 12, 2012 By Bob Peterson

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker continues to promote the privatization of public education while refusing to hold voucher and semi-private charter schools accountable.

On Feb. 9, Gov. Walker released a new “Education Reform” bill (Senate Bill 461) that reneged on previous promises to include all schools receiving public dollars in a statewide accountability system.

Most observers had expected the law to include a common report card for public schools, private voucher schools and charter schools. That accountability provision was pulled at the last minute, apparently under pressure from voucher and charter school lobbyists.

Tony Evers, State Superintendent of the DPI, criticized Walker’s backtracking. “This missed opportunity is more than a step backward,” he said.

Last July, Walker co-authored an opinion with Evers in which he said  “that every school enrolling publicly funded students – traditional public schools, charter schools or private schools in choice programs – should be part of this new accountability system.”

Walker repeated that pledge last month in his Jan. 25 State of the State speech when he said,  “Every school that receives public funds – be it a traditional public school, a charter school or a choice school – will be rated by a fair, objective and transparent system.”

A few days after Walker released his truncated legislation, the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum issued a research brief detailing the private voucher schools’ expansion, thanks to Walker’s initiatives last spring. (Walker lifted the cap on voucher enrollment, allowed families earning up to 300% of the poverty level to receive vouchers, expanded vouchers beyond Milwaukee to include the city of Racine, and permitted high schools to charge additional tuition to higher-income families. See Barbara Miner’s, “Take a Stand Against Vouchers.”)

The forum’s brief, “Significant Growth in School Choice,” noted that Wisconsin taxpayers are spending an additional $14.2 million this year on the expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program. This contrasts sharply to the cut of approximately $84 million of state aid to the Milwaukee Public Schools for the same school year. (Overall, Walker cut $840 million statewide in funding to public schools last year, while significantly expanding the private voucher school program.)

The brief also reported that most of the new students enrolling in voucher schools were already enrolled in  private schools, underscoring that the voucher program is not about increasing options but funneling public dollars into private institutions.

The Public Policy Forum based its data on surveys of voucher schools (five schools refused to return any information) and from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Among its findings:

• 2,200 additional students entered the Milwaukee voucher program this year and “most of the new voucher users appear to have already been enrolled in a private school.” This brings the total of Milwaukee students receiving public tax dollars to attend private schools to 23,198.

• The additional cost this year to tax payers for the expansion of Milwaukee program was $14.2 million. The new private voucher program in Racine cost over $330,000 and is expected to expand significantly when enrollment caps are eliminated in the next two years. The total cost of the two programs will be $150.9 million.

• Religious schools enroll 85% of all voucher students, at a total cost to the public of $128.3 million.

• “At no grade level did voucher students, on the whole, out-perform MPS students in either reading or math.” The brief described a “wide variance in performance” among the voucher schools “with a handful comparing favorably to MPS and many more having proficiency rates far lower.”

Unfortunately, the Public Policy report does not mention special education, long recognized as an essential issue in safeguarding the rights of all students. Approximately 1.6% of the private voucher school students are classified as special needs students, compared to more than 19% of MPS students.  It’s a glaring, and disturbing omission, akin to researchers in the 1960s neglecting to mention racial disparities.

Throughout our nation’s history public schools have been the corner stone of our political democracy. The stronger, the more inclusive, and the more democratic public schools are, the stronger our democracy. Walker’s privileging of private schools over public and democratically controlled schools is one more reason we need to recall him.

Washington D.C. Schools: Why School Choice Fails

By NATALIE HOPKINSON  Published: December 4, 2011 NYTime Op-Ed

IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.

Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.

My neighborhood’s last free-standing middle school was closed in 2008, part of a round of closures by then Mayor Adrian Fenty and his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The pride and gusto with which they dismantled those institutions was shameful, but I don’t blame them. The closures were the inevitable outcome of policies hatched years before.

In 1995 the Republican-led Congress, ignoring the objections of local leadership, put in motion one of the country’s strongest reform policies for Washington: if a school was deemed failing, students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school or receive a voucher to attend a private school.

The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.

Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power.

Competition produces winners and losers; I get that. Indeed, the rhetoric of school choice can be seductive to angst-filled middle-class parents like myself. We crunch the data and believe that, with enough elbow grease, we can make the system work for us. Naturally, I’ve only considered high-performing schools for my children, some of them public, some charter, some parochial, all outside our neighborhood.

But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.

For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.

In the meantime, the neighborhood schools are dying. After Ms. Rhee closed our first neighborhood school, the students were assigned to an elementary school connected to a homeless shelter. Then that closed, and I watched the children get shuffled again.

Earlier this year, when we were searching for a middle school for my son — 11 is a vulnerable age for anyone — our public options were even grimmer. I could have sent him to one of the newly consolidated kindergarten-to-eighth-grade campuses in my neighborhood, with low test scores and no algebra or foreign languages. We could enter a lottery for a spot in another charter or out-of-boundary middle school, competing against families all over the city.

The system recently floated a plan for yet another round of closings, with a proposal for new magnet middle school programs in my neighborhood, none of which would open in time for my son. These proposals, like much of reform in Washington, are aimed at some speculative future demographic, while doing nothing for the children already here. In the meantime, enrollment, and the best teachers, continue to go to the whitest, wealthiest communities.

The situation for Washington’s working- and middle-class families may be bleak, but we are hardly alone. Despite the lack of proof that school-choice policies work, they are gaining popularity in communities nationwide. Like us, those places will face a stark decision: Do they want equitable investment in community education, or do they want to hand it over to private schools and charters? Let’s stop pretending we can fairly do both. As long as we do, some will keep winning, but many of us will lose.

Natalie Hopkinson is the author of the forthcoming book “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.”

Growing Resentment Toward Vouchers by State School Board Members

Legislators Challenged on Vouchers Wisconsin School Board Members Dislike Private School Choice by: Terrence Falk | Monday 11/7/2011

When the chairs of the Wisconsin senate and assembly education committees spoke before a state school board conference, they knew they were going to get tough questions.Senator Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) and Representative Steve Kestell (R-Elkhart Lake) limited their remarks to the impact of the new state budget. They told members of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) that cuts were necessary because previous state budgets were balanced through onetime monies, raids on other funds, and accounting tricks. There were no magic tricks left.  Both recognized the “tools” given to school boards didn’t solve all the school boards’ financial problems. The cuts to schools were real, acknowledged the legislators. Then they waited for the questions. I doubt they got what they were expecting. The questions quickly turned to school vouchers, and the questions weren’t just from Green Bay, Racine, or Milwaukee. No, the voucher questions came from rural, suburban and small town board members. The legislators assured the school board members that vouchers would not be expanded to districts like Green Bay in the near future. But the voucher questions just kept coming. Kestell told the school board members that the voucher program in Milwaukee saved state money that benefited school districts around Wisconsin. When I stated that the voucher program actually costs the taxpayers of Milwaukee more money because we get no state aid for the voucher children, Kestell responded that most school districts would love to get the kind of money Milwaukee gets in state aid. But the audience was not buying, and they may have been insulted by Kestell’s attempt to appeal to the self interest at the expense of Milwaukee. So why did school board members from around the state react so negatively to the school voucher program? Smaller Wisconsin communities are beginning to look a lot more like Milwaukee with increased minority student populations. The poverty rate has risen dramatically across this state. Schools are beginning to face levels of homelessness, mobility, unemployment, and families in crisis never seen before. The problems cannot be ignored. So the attacks on Milwaukee are becoming attacks on all of them as well. They have seen vouchers go to Racine. They know there are conservative legislators that want to expand vouchers statewide. The proposal to create a state board to authorize charters for any school district with more than 2000 students is simply an expansion of the voucher program by another name. I didn’t know how strongly my fellow school board members felt. Their interest went beyond their own individual districts and embraced every child in every community. I’m only sorry I didn’t print up a sign for the meeting which simply said- “We are Milwaukee” I know a lot of Wisconsin school boards members would have held those signs high. (For more blogs by MPS School Board Director Terry Falk go to: http://www.insidemilwaukee.com/Author/Terrence_Falk)