More on vouchers for students

This is a pretty comprehensive essay on vouchers as employed in public schools. The whole thing is worth reading, but it depressed me to learn as reported in the following paragraph that we are not seeing the expected improvement in public schools that competition is supposed to provide. Liberals, of course, will take this conclusion and argue that rather than expand vouchers to broaden the positive, we should abandon them, take the money, expand funding for failed programs and teachers, and sink all students equally.

Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee’s public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no “Milwaukee miracle,” no transformation of the public schools, has taken place. One of the Milwaukee voucher program’s founders, African-American educator Howard Fuller, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn’t been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought.” And the lead author of one of the Milwaukee voucher studies, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, told me: “The research on school choice programs clearly shows that low-income students benefit academically. It’s less clear that the presence of choice in a community motivates public schools to improve.”