From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Up From Mediocrity
Vouchers in Milwaukee: The Polly Williams story.
(Editor's note: This editorial first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1990.)
Polly Williams represents an inner-city Milwaukee district in the Wisconsin Legislature. For years, her constituents have begged her to find a way to let their children go some place other than the local public schools they consider beyond reform. This month, Mrs. Williams persuaded her fellow legislators to pass the nation's first experiment in school vouchers for low-income children. Her efforts may kick-start a new wave of education reform that adds parental choice and competition to the recent flood of tax dollars that have been poured into education.
Polls show a solid majority of Americans favor allowing parents a choice of where to send their children to school. But support varies greatly among income groups. Educational choice has only tepid support among upper-income voters: Their local schools still more or less work. Choice is most popular among minority and lower-income parents, whose children suffer the most from failing public schools.
Under the Williams proposal, which Republican Governor Tommy Thompson will soon sign into law, some 1,000 low-income Milwaukee students will be allowed to attend private nonsectarian schools next year (to qualify a family of four can earn no more than $12,000 a year). The state will pay up to $2,500 in tuition for each student, and subtract the money from the public-school system's budget. Mrs. Williams says parents and their children will finally have the leverage of competition to force change in the ossified Milwaukee public schools. "They waste $5,000 a year per student, and all they do is treat low-income people like pawns in some game," she told us. "Parents deserve a better choice on where they can spend their tax money."
She points to Urban Day, a private school in her district, as an example of why local parents want choice. Urban Day successfully prepares students for college or vocational school and, at about $3,000 a year, at much less cost per pupil then the public schools. Donations allow tuition to be set at $650 a year, and parents also agree to perform 20 hours of volunteer work or pay an extra $300 a year. Active parental commitment to a school is now widely recognized as a significant reason for the success of a school--public or private.
Mrs. Williams says her support for school vouchers stems from her own experience. A former welfare recipient who raised four children on her own, she went back to college and was elected to the state Assembly in 1980. A lifelong Democrat and state chair of Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 campaigns, she says many of her fellow liberals put the interests of the education lobby above the welfare of inner-city children. Her first attempt to pass an educational-choice bill failed 54 to 44 last year when white, liberal Democrats refused to join black Democrats and Republicans in support of her bill. "They say they're liberal, but whenever it comes to empowering black people, they stab us in the back," she says. "We want self-determination, not handouts and dependency." She came back to win this year after 200 black parents filled a legislative hearing in Milwaukee to clamor for a voucher plan.
While Mrs. Williams says that competition between public and private schools is an essential element of educational choice, she also supports a program pioneered in Minnesota in 1987 that allows parents to send their high-schoolers to schools in other districts and earn credits in college or vocational programs. Teachers were initially suspicious of the idea, but now 61% of them favor the concept. Elements of the program have been adopted in Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Nebraska and Ohio. Choice proposals are now being debated in 20 states.
The response of the entrenched education lobby to this groundswell of support for choice is illuminating. Far from questioning the public-school monopoly, school boards, administrators and teacher unions are digging in for trench warfare to protect their rice bowls. The Wisconsin ACLU is already making threatening noises. Michael Brennan of the Wisconsin Education Association Council says advocates of choice want to "shove kids out of the system and hope the problem goes away."
The Educrats also have their own answer to the collapse of public education in the inner cities. They propose that courts mandate that wealthy school districts ship truckloads of money to poorer districts under the guise of "social justice." But at this juncture, one might ask who today are the real forces of reaction?
Parents in Mrs. Williams's district aren't buying any of this. They have painfully learned that more money spent on a failed system does not necessarily produce a better education. They want nothing less than a chance to make their own decisions about the future of their children.
