Taking a long look at Milwaukee

Overall, it’s hard to complain a whole lot about this Christian Science Monitor article on the Milwaukee choice program. A few remarks…

Just because Jack Jennings and the NEA don’t like the present body of research on Milwaukee doesn’t mean it isn’t persuasive.
The article talked about the closing of voucher schools as though it were a bad thing. We are among the first to applaud when a bad voucher school is shut down, because to be quite blunt, if they couldn’t get the job done, they had it coming. Compare that to substandard public schools which, unlike failed voucher schools, manage to stay in business year after year.
Now to the juiciest tidbit of all. Starting next year, long-term data will finally be taken for the purposes of a longitudinal (read: long-term) study of the quality of Milwaukee voucher schools. A variety of people/groups quoted in the article lamented the lack of long-term data available on the program. One organization in particular was the AFT’s Center on Accountability and Privatization ("After this many years there ought to be some hard data, and there’s not"). What wasn’t noted in the article is that voucher advocates have been pushing for this for several years–and that Gov. Doyle vetoed the legislation at the request of the teachers’ union. Now why on earth would the union fear a scientific study of the choice program by a nonpartisan organization? We don’t know. You’ll have to ask them!