A major, nonpartisan review of Milwaukee schools over the past three decades produced a dismal result: No improvement.
Backed by millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, voucher advocates promised that competition would produce gains for all sectors. It didn’t.
Milwaukee has a significant number of charter schools and voucher schools. About 55% of all students are enrolled in traditional public schools. The public schools enroll a disproportionate share of students with disabilities.
Rory Linnane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
Three decades since their beginnings in Milwaukee, publicly funded private school programs and independently run charter schools now enroll over 40% of the city’s students.
Reflecting on the city’s shifting education landscape, a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum examines enrollment, financing and academic outcomes for Milwaukee schools in every sector, including traditional public schools, private schools and charter schools…
‘Transformed system has not transformed outcomes for children,’ researchers say
Milwaukee in the ’90s was “widely seen as the epicenter of ‘education reform’ in the country,” the forum noted, as state lawmakers opened the door for private operators to start their own schools. Proponents argued that the free-market competition would push all city schools to improve.
In 1990, state lawmakers created the country’s first “voucher” program in Milwaukee, providing public funding for students to attend private schools. Soon after, Minnesota lawmakers were the first to write legislation for charter schools, allowing teacher-led nonprofits to operate schools. Wisconsin was one of the first states to follow in 1993, but without the requirement that teachers lead them.
Thirty years later, the forum noted there is “little evidence … that the average Milwaukee child receives a higher quality education today.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Wisconsin Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation & The Bradley Impact Fund. Separately doled out six & seven-figure checks to groups including Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. And other DJT-friendly bastions including Heritage Foundation and Michael Flynn’s America’s Future.” They are MAGA MEGA Funders of 2024/2025 GOPee.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/trump-rightwing-groups-funds
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Publicly funded private school programs quack like publicly funded test and scold programs, only not as loud. The greatest waster of minds and resources remains in the hands of the test givers. If “Practice made Perfect”, sooner or later, “They” would know what they were doing. Why do you think it’s called a “Practice”?
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This post shows that more choice is not necessarily better choice. More choice creates a less efficient, more dispersed education model, but not necessarily better, especially when it is the schools that do the choosing. With multiple choices available, the public schools tend to become the schools of last resort. They tend to serve the neediest, most vulnerable and expensive students including special education and ELLs in schools with fewer resources. This is not a model that results in success. While the article did not show any statistics on race or the socioeconomics of students in each choice group, it would have been useful to understand how all this so-called choice impacts different types of students. More competition never improves public schools when the model also includes reducing public school funding.
As pubic school teachers have been saying for twenty or more years, the problem is not the teachers or the schools, it’s the poverty. How about some tax credits for disadvantaged children or paying parents a living wage to address this issue?
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then again, that was never the purpose …
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Jon Awbrey: My thoughts, exactly. It depends on what you mean by “gains.” If the “purpose” is to help children get a good education, not so much.
But if “gains” means to slowly strangle public education to death, I’d say, with all the gusto of Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady,” “they’ve done it.” CBK
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Systems don’t move results. People, mainly teachers, do. The proof? Well resourced schools perform much better than under privileged schools because the students tend to come from stable homes and high quality teachers are drawn to those institutions. Therefore, if we honestly look at the past 30 years it is clear that data, particularly in reading and math, has shown little or no movement based on one size fits all models or privatization schemes. In fact, prior to Covid reading and math scores continued to decline nominally. What our education establishment has refused to employ in regard to improved student achievement is an investment in teachers and resources that would attract the best and brightest to the profession. It’s actually amazing that we have the caliber teaching force that we have under the governing practice that treats teaching as mission work. It’s laughable that those who have promoted these failed schemes continue to refer to data when it clearly shows their proposals have failed.
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Charter schools produced no gains for kids, but I wish someone would do a study on all the unprincipled adults who “gained” a very generous income from charter schools – an income that was well beyond what teachers and administrators receive in public schools.
My guess is the number of charter operators and administrators who “gained” very generous compensation that was far beyond what public school teachers and administrators received would be quite high. And I suspect the compensation of the highest level folks at the billionaire-supported charter cheerleading institutions and businesses was also quite high. Many unethical adults’ bank accounts made very nice “gains” from 3 decades of charters and vouchers, which is why so many of them deliberately looked the other way and professed to see no evil whenever a charter boasted of miraculous results that could only be achieved by doing great harm to the children whose existence affected the bank accounts of those who gained so much from charters and vouchers.
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