Skip to content
Big choice news out of Arizona this week. The state legislature has passed and Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to sign a bill that will allow all the state’s students to take education funding to a school of their families’ choice. The bill will give all K-12 students in the state access to tax-funded ESAs—Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Parents can use the accounts for tuition and other educational costs. Read more here. Congratulations to the more than 1.1 million students in Arizona and their families who can now take advantage of school choice. Educational Freedom Your Child, Your Choice — School…
Read MoreRecently we ran into a headline that piqued our interest here at School Choice Wisconsin: The four high schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District, the second-biggest district in the state, have enacted a concept called bridge week. Students who’ve earned Cs or higher were not required to come to school on June 7 or 8 as the schools planned to focus on kids who’ve logged Ds and Fs on those days, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. The kids with higher grades were not to be marked absent. Final exams, which would have been an end-of-year focus, were scrapped more…
Read MoreSchool Choice Wisconsin set out to see what some of our choice schools did last year and will do going forward to combat the disruptions and learning loss that followed the pandemic lockdowns. See what we found. Recent headlines, such as this story in The New York Times and this piece in The Atlantic, cite a pandemic-related learning loss that is more serious than many had realized. The loss was worse for schools that stayed closed longer in response to the pandemic, according to a study from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy. “Remote learning was a failure,” wrote The New…
Read MoreTuesday’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Carson v. Makin case, a big win for school choice, may have implications for religious choice schools here in Wisconsin. In its ruling, the court struck down a law in the state of Maine that excluded schools providing religious instruction from a voucher program that allowed parents in areas with no public school to send their kids to private schools. “Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the court’s opinion on the case. He was joined by…
Read MoreToday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to allow parents in Maine to use state funds to pay tuition for religious schools. This is an important case for the choice movement and a big win. The case was titled Carson v. Makin, No. 20-1088. See this story from The New York Times.
Read MoreSome very nice news surrounding a choice school in Milwaukee this week. St. Augustine Preparatory Academy, a Milwaukee Parental Choice Program school, broke ground this week on a grade school facility on Milwaukee’s south side. The $49 million building will have room for 900 K4 to 5th grade students. The K4–12 school, expected to be completed in 2023, will be the biggest single-campus school in Milwaukee and will have space to serve 2,400 students, according to a press release, BizTimes reported. One of the most interesting facts to emerge: Since the school opened, crime in the area has fallen by…
Read MoreBy School Choice Wisconsin Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public school peers, says a new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL). Proficiency rates in private choice schools were 4.6% higher in English/language arts and 4.5% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee, says the Apples to Apples report from WILL. The report draws on data from the state Department of Public Instruction’s WISEdash system for the 2020–21 school year. Among the report’s other findings: Forward Exam participation was higher in Milwaukee choice and…
Read MoreIt’s heartening to see movements for school choice gathering steam around the U.S., following the lead of School Choice Wisconsin’s founders, who spearheaded the drive toward parental empowerment. If you cruise around Google News or other news aggregators, you’ll see how broad the interest in school choice is across the country. Here are a few links of interest. Brandon Jennings attempting to launch Milwaukee voucher school School choice in America Elected officials can’t ignore reality on school choice The growing enthusiasm for school choice reflects the views found in a recent survey School Choice Wisconsin commissioned. In the survey, conducted…
Read MoreMarch 30, 2022 By George Mitchell While Superintendent of Public Instruction, Gov. Tony Evers wrote to legislators a decade ago that expanding the Wisconsin Parental Choice program was “morally wrong.” Evers said he reached that conclusion because the program “has not improved overall student achievement.” Fast forward to the present. Under criteria applied by none other than Evers’ education agency, private choice schools in the state’s largest choice program — Milwaukee — score higher on the DPI Report Card than do public schools. DPI data show that by other measures — such as the college-readiness ACT test — students in the state’s…
Read MoreThis year in Wisconsin, 49,000 students are enrolled in private schools through the Milwaukee, Racine, or Statewide Parental Choice Program. These are students in hard-working lower-income families who have been given a voucher to attend the school of their choice. The program is a blessing to families who could not otherwise afford the education that best meets their child’s needs. The only way parents can apply for the Parental Choice Program is through the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s Online Application System (OAS) during the enrollment period for their program. OAS is also the only place where schools can…
Read More