The Journal's series on school choice

I was out of town when the Journal Sentinel published its massive series on school choice and am just now getting around to reading it. So far it strikes me as an excellent job of getting past the cant and presenting a picture of school choice that better reflects reality, both what works and what does not.

It was depressing, therefore, to read the letters in Sunday's paper. Most of them could have been written without ever reading the articles.

One in particular I found especially depressing--that from the local director of the ACLU. Particularly with the blindness of the current Washington administration towards the need for civil liberties and due process, there is a growing need for a credible ACLU. By getting involved in controversies so far from its core mission, the ACLU squanders its credibility and makes itself easy to ignore.

Mayor Barrett's Education Plan

This morning's Journal Sentinel reports that Mayor Tom Barrett issue a plan that included four elements:

1. Restoring two-thirds state funding of education.
2. Increasing the cap on enrollment in the choice (voucher) program by 6,000 over four years.
3. Counting choice students as part of MPS in calculating state aid.
4. Having some accountability measures of choice schools. The article mentions either accreditation or testing.

From the account in the paper, this plan strikes me as very good. All four elements are desirable in themselves. If putting them together makes the plan more politically viable, so much the better.

The Wisconsin state aid formula depends on the ratio of the total property value divided by the number of students. The lower this ratio the more a district must struggle to support its schools, justifying a higher percentage of state aid. By excluding choice students, present law makes Milwaukee richer than it is, unfairly penalizing Milwaukee taxpayers (the same effect could be achieved by neglecting to count fifteen thousand MPS students). The last time a proposal to change this formula was made, it died for lack of Democratic support. With Barrett's support, it may be harder for Democrats to vote against the interest of Milwaukee property tax payers.

I particularly like the idea of including choice students in the testing program. The argument that including such requirements would create constitutional problems strikes me as both dubious and hypocritical. Choice is constitutional precisely because its purpose is to educate children, not to aid religion. Testing that helps determine whether the education is effective fits this purpose. If government did not care whether the education was effective, one might conclude that aiding religion was the purpose of the legislation.