School Choice in Milwaukee

Abstract

For decades educational reformers have identified school choice programs as a strategy for restructuring public school systems.Practically every state has considered or adopted a school assignment program that qualifies as a "choice" initiative, one in which students crd parents have some choice in school selection. Increasingly, school districts are contemplating plans that include a choice of private, as welt as pubtic, schoots. One of the most far-reaching of these schoot choice ptans is the Milwaukee (Wisconsiri) Parentat Choice Program, which, as tegistated, allows parents to use vouchers to enrott their children in both sectarian and nonsectarian schoots in the community. This paper explores the evolution of school choice in Milwaukee and examines the extent to which school choice is representative of other privatization efforts currently under way in the United States.

Determinants of Organizational Failure in the Milwaukee School Voucher Program

“…However, over two‐thirds of these start‐up schools would go on to fail. Percy and Maier (), in an early study of the Milwaukee voucher program, warned of the potential negative consequences of school failures resulting from Milwaukee's voucher policy. In this article, we build on Percy and Maier () by examining the lifecycle of schools in Milwaukee's longstanding voucher program, with the goal of explaining the factors that put voucher schools specifically, and public entrepreneurial public polices in general, at greater failure risk.…”

The Politics of School Choice Research: Fact, Fiction, and Statistics

“…For example, both Peterson and Noyes (1997) and Witte (1996a) agree that the MPCP program has revitalized one of the private schools participating in the program, Bruce Guadalupe, which has had a positive impact on the surrounding community. Percy and Maier (1996) also note that in 1995, after the Wisconsin legislature expanded MPCP to include larger numbers of students and religious schools, the MPS board announced plans to revamp its school selection procedures to allow parents greater choice in selecting the schools their children will attend (p. 659). Likewise, in Cleveland, two private schools, the Hope schools, were formed in response to the voucher program, which may be seen as a positive outcome of the program to the extent that they offer parents increased educational options for their children.…”

Nailing Shut the Policy Window: The Policy Evolution of America’s First Urban School Voucher Program

“…Under Kingdon's framework, a set of circumstances and actors coalesce to turn a public policy idea into a reality. It was the opening of a policy window in Milwaukee that enabled the creation of the first urban private school voucher program in the United States (Percy & Maier, 1996). However, the circumstances that made a free-market based voucher policy a viable approach to solving Milwaukee's educational challenges, as will be demonstrated in this article, now cease to exist despite the ongoing struggles of Milwaukee's education system.…”

“…Throughout the MPCP's history, the political debate over the MPCP was driven partly by fiscal issues unrelated to the academic effects of the voucher program (Costrell, 2011). The prominent role of cost savings in the policy debate suggests that Percy and Maier's (1996) argument that vouchers are a form of privatization less premised on public cost savings, did not play out in reality. As more evidence surfaces that the aggregate academic effects of the MPCP are modest at best, pro-voucher arguments 89 increasingly focus on the increased efficiency of the MPCP, (i.e., the same outcomes for a lower cost) (Carlson, Cowen, & Fleming, 2013;Cowen et al, 2013).…”