School choice is a life preserver, not an anchor
Recently, the Wisconsin Policy Forum released a comprehensive overview of the education landscape in Milwaukee. The report is likely eye-opening for many—and shows just how far behind Milwaukee’s students are in comparison to the rest of the state and the nation. But, much of the media coverage of this report seems to focus on the notion that education reform has failed in the city. For instance, the Journal Sentinel headline calls back to the birth of the private school choice program in Milwaukee thirty years ago as a starting point for this failure. But the reality is far more nuanced, and Milwaukee’s choice and charter schools ought to get credit for doing a better job on average.
One need only dig deeper into the Policy Forum’s report to see evidence of this. The share of students in highly rated schools in the choice program (58.4%) and charter schools (76.1%) is far higher than the share of students in MPS in such schools (20.4%). The same story holds in WILL’s annual Apples to Apples report which aims to put schools on a level playing field by controlling for demographic factors in a statistical model. This report regularly finds a performance advantage for choice and charter schools that is statistically significant.
