Changing City Puts School Choice in New Light
By Patrick McIlheran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Last Update: January 4, 2006
If it's January, it must be time to squabble about school choice.
Deja gloom seems a certainty: Gov. Jim Doyle will offer the Legislature his plan to allow more poor Milwaukee parents to take their state aid to private schools. In exchange, he'll want more aid for government-run schools, a trade-off he outlined in November and similar to what he wanted last winter.
Republicans will react as they said they would, noting the governor's asking for too much money for public school programs tangential to the issue, as they said last winter.
But the world hasn't stood still.
Rep. Jason Fields, a Democrat from Milwaukee's north side who supports choice, doesn't sound optimistic. The same bargain is on the table as last year, and if no one was budging then, Fields isn't expecting much this time.
School choice's expansion is locked in Democrat-vs.-Republican mode, while Fields argues it shouldn't be. While the idea of letting parents, not bureaucrats, control their children's education appeals to small-government Republicans, choice's empowerment of poor families should appeal to Democrats' preference for the underdog, he says.
It hasn't gone so, however, and unless something's worked out, school choice will take a gut-kick from the Department of Public Instruction's rationing plan, which drenches in doubt all the plans poor parents are making for their kids next year. This is deplored widely, just as it was last year.
But this isn't last year.
Milwaukee finished 2004 with 88 murders. In the year just ended, killers took 122 lives. Out-of-control young people tried killing another, smashing the head of a man who complained about getting ripped off in a drug deal.
While the horror of the mob beating on N. 36th St. may be attenuated as we learn that Samuel McClain wasn't an innocent passer-by, most people can distinguish between the wrongness of buying crack and the greater wrong of his beating. And the December attack stands not alone but as the latest in a string of youth mobs in central city Milwaukee, every one of which has been followed by people asking what society can do.
Fields, in whose district the man was beaten, makes the link.
Violence will decline when children are raised better, he says. No provocation, much less any material deprivation, can justify murderous behavior, and no government program can make parents instill sound moral reasoning.
But what government can do, he says, is expand opportunities, most classically by education. The Milwaukee Public Schools are trying but are frequently unsuccessful. Of the children who enter its ninth grade, fewer than half make it to 12th grade. The district is trying to change, but a city that makes it onto national TV because of a mob beating needs anyone with bright ideas. And it would be particularly perverse to see those bright ideas, or the willingness of parents to take charge of children's lives, stymied because of some separate argument about other programs the governor is demanding.
"I would rather see a child in school, any school . . . than to hear news about them beating people up," says Fields. It is possible that more lawmakers than last year have gained a similar sense of urgency.
Something else has changed in Milwaukee over the past year, though much less noticeably. Thousands more poor children were educated at private schools their parents chose - some well, some poorly, but one 2004 study showed their graduation rate was double that of MPS.
This steady accumulation of successfully educated Milwaukeeans, and the rising number of Milwaukee parents who used school choice to take charge of their children's lives, is changing the city. With every passing year, school choice is less an abstraction and more an acceptable, workable fact that the governor rejects at his peril.
As Fields puts it, if the problem is children simply not getting any education at all - the state says three of four MPS high schoolers is a chronic truant - then the state has no business putting a 14,500-student limit on parental engagement. It's a parent's job, not the state's, to choose an education, he says, "and we should support that choice."