School Vouchers Passing Milwaukee Test

Inside a former plumbing parts warehouse next to the railroad tracks, the dividing line between public and private education becomes hopelessly blurred.

Most of the warehouse is now the 209-student Holy Redeemer Christian Academy. But one room on the second floor is a separate school, serving children who pay their tuition with government vouchers. And come next year, the basement will house a church-operated public charter school, serving college-bound arts students.

Then there’s another former warehouse across the street, where Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ runs a program for troubled adolescents who are behind academically--also using public funds.

Six years after Milwaukee inaugurated the nation’s first program giving low-income families vouchers to pay private school tuition, one might expect public and private schools here to be locked in a bruising competition for students.

But except for some combative rhetoric, they’re not. That’s a fact easily lost in the divisive national debate over school vouchers--waged everywhere from the California statehouse to the presidential campaign--in which each side insists that the pioneering program here proves its point.

First came the dueling professors, from Harvard and the nearby University of Wisconsin, who looked at the same Milwaukee classrooms and test results only to have one portray vouchers as insignificant and the other tout them as the salvation of urban education.

Then, in the first presidential debate, Republican nominee Bob Dole argued for spending $2.5 billion in federal funds to help low-income students in 14 states attend private schools. President Clinton, who opposes subsidizing private schools with public money, countered that Milwaukee’s program had produced “highly ambiguous” results.

Support for Program

Rhetoric aside, here where it counts--in the classrooms where vouchers are a fact of life--there is enthusiastic support for the program giving poor families an alternative to public schools. And it has altered the educational and political landscape.

The vouchers have given a lifesaving infusion of funds to struggling inner-city private schools, some of which were facing imminent bankruptcy. They have prodded the public school system to make its offerings more appealing, such as by creating a new high school for college-bound students, adding kindergartens and issuing report cards on the performance of its campuses. And, as at the former warehouse, they have fostered partnerships between the public and private sectors unequaled elsewhere in the United States.

Significant also is what vouchers have not done. They have not led to the apocalyptic dismantling of public education that critics often foresee.

“The terrible predictions of calamity are rhetorical fictions,” said John Gardner, a member of the Milwaukee board of education.

Still, there is lingering apprehension about the impact of vouchers.

“The fear of the public schools is that it is just like a crack in the dike. . . . They’re afraid the crack will become a flood,” said Polly Williams, a state legislator from Milwaukee who authored the voucher bill.

Elsewhere in the country, voucher supporters tend to be conservative Republicans who see their primary purpose as using market forces to make the public schools improve or--if they don’t--to hasten their demise. The most sustained campaign has come in California, although voters balked at a ballot initiative three years ago that would have given vouchers to all students, rich and poor. Gov. Pete Wilson is expected to push for a more targeted program next year, aimed at students in failing schools, through legislation.

In Milwaukee, in contrast, the impulse for vouchers came from leaders in the African American and Latino communities. They were angry about high dropout rates, low test scores, large classes and a one-way busing program that sought to achieve desegregation by sending most minority students, who make up about 70% of the district’s enrollment, to schools far from their neighborhoods.

Williams, who is African American, said the vouchers were seen as a way to give parents more control over education. “These are the children who were left behind by . . . the middle class who no longer sends its children to the public schools,” she said. “Many of these children were labeled in the public schools as dysfunctional and learning disabled and all of that, and they found that getting into an environment that had high expectations, many of the children improved.”

Skepticism Remains

Now support comes from across the political spectrum, including white liberals such as Gardner--a labor organizer--as well as the business community, and Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson as well as John Norquist, Milwaukee’s popular Democratic mayor.

All insist that their goal is to ensure the existence of strong public schools, along with private alternatives. “The last thing we want to see happen is [to have] the public school system destroyed,” said Tim Sheehy, president of the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce.

Some groups, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Assn., remain skeptical--and opposed to vouchers.

“For us it’s not just about jobs, it’s about keeping the social fabric of a very heterogeneous community woven together, and traditionally, public schools have served that role,” said Sam Carmen, executive director of the teachers union.

Under the Milwaukee plan, low-income students can apply for vouchers worth $4,300 that they can spend anywhere but at religious schools. Although 15,000 such grants are available, only 2,000 students are currently taking advantage of the offer, costing the state about $9 million.

By contrast, 105,000 students remain in the public school system, which has continued to grow. In addition, about 4,500 students eschew the government vouchers for less generous grants from private foundations so they can attend religious private schools, such as Holy Redeemer or the city’s numerous Catholic institutions.

Participation in the voucher program has been limited in part because there are not enough seats available in the private, nonsectarian schools that accept the government subsidies; the city’s toniest prep schools, with tuitions up to $12,000, turn them down. Most observers think it unlikely that Wisconsin courts will lift an injunction barring use of vouchers in religious schools, a practice being allowed for the first time this fall in Cleveland.

That limitation bothers the religious leader who transformed the warehouse into a school complex, Elder Sedgewick Daniels, pastor of Holy Redeemer Church. He says that poor parents are being kept from sending their children to schools that will give them moral and spiritual guidance. “Why do we put on our coins ‘In God We Trust’ and then that same government turns around and says to the churches we don’t trust you with the kids--that’s crazy,” he said.

But the prohibition has not stopped him from creatively establishing the collage of public-private schooling now available in the church-run complex.

The single-room school is called the H.R. Academy. It serves 23 voucher students in fifth through eighth grades who are restricted to that room most of the day. They do not attend the chapel services or Bible study sessions that are mandatory for their Christian academy counterparts in the rest of the building.

But the two groups study Spanish with the same teacher, wear the same white and dark blue uniforms, use the same computers to bolster their reading and math skills and eat lunch together.

“You can’t tell who’s who unless you really know,” said Jerald Fair, the school’s administrator.

Across the street, the church runs one of 16 programs in the city for teenage parents, truants, juvenile delinquents and potential dropouts who are at least two years behind academically. Although most school districts send some students with special needs to private schools, few make such widespread use of such arrangements as Milwaukee.

Controversy Arises

The programs are not without controversy. The public schools have revoked some of their contracts for failing to help the troubled students. And as a concession to the teachers union, the staffs of such schools must include at least one public school teacher.

“This is another issue where these outside [groups] are teaching their children and it doesn’t look good,” said Fair.

Still, voucher advocates are convinced that the mere threat of some students leaving has transformed the attitude of district administrators toward parents and fed a spirit of innovation and cooperation.

In fact, state officials now are proposing that the public schools fill the gaps in private school programs, for instance by inviting students attending private schools to play on public school football teams, or enroll in advanced classes in science or foreign language. “The choice program . . . has been like David nipping at the heels of Goliath,” said Zakia Courtney, a parent who helped organize support for the voucher movement, then started a private school of her own. “But because it’s nipping at the right place, what it has done is cause [the Milwaukee public schools] to make some very significant changes.”

Gardner, the school board member, offers an example.

Before getting elected with the help of the city’s business community, he had tried for more than a decade to get the school district to annex a tiny, Montessori-style school founded by counterculture parents in the 1960s. This fall, the 75-student Highland Community School, in a Victorian mansion once owned by a member of the Schlitz brewing family, became a publicly funded charter school.

The money the school received from vouchers last year made it possible to purchase and demolish an adjacent house in order to expand the school playground. As a charter school, Highland will get even more funds this year, earmarked to buy another house next door. But the parents who run the school say the new status will not change its trademarks, the tiny classes and idiosyncratic curriculum.

District officials bristle at suggestions that it took the threat of vouchers to wake them up. They say the reforms merely continued Milwaukee’s record of innovation, which included the first public Montessori program in the country, schools that immerse students in Spanish, French and German and a nationally recognized “school to work” program, which gets students ready for the job market.

But Marquette University education professor Howard Fuller, a voucher supporter who was Milwaukee’s school superintendent until last year, said he worries that the improvements might disappear unless the voucher program grows beyond its current 2,000 students.

“For those things to go deeper or for there not to be an effort to turn things back . . . you have to have pressure from people on the outside demanding something different from people on the inside,” he said.

Amid all of the talk, the jury is still out on its impact on academic performance. Test results are hard to gauge because many students move back and forth between the program and conventional public schools.

Nevertheless, this past summer, scholars at Harvard University and the University of Houston reached the startling conclusion that the vouchers--most of which are used by African American and Latino students--could cut in half the gap between their performance and that of white students in several years.

“The choice students are more likely to remain in the school from the beginning of the year to the end of the year than are comparable students [in public schools], they are more likely to return the following fall, the parents are much happier and . . . we find that test scores in the third year and after are much higher,” said Paul Peterson, a Harvard professor specializing in education policy.

But University of Wisconsin political scientist John Witte, who has studied the voucher program since the beginning, said Peterson reached his conclusions based on skimpy evidence and flawed methods.

Witte’s own conclusion: The voucher program had almost no impact on recipients’ learning.

Alma Walton, who sends her four children to Urban Day School, one of the largest of the private institutions participating in the voucher program, acknowledged that students there do not get all the amenities of public schools, such as health classes and modern gyms.

“But academics they are getting,” she said. “Because the [private] school is so small, the teachers’ doors are always open and they are willing to work with the parents.”

Urban Day does not have a full set of modern encyclopedias and English teachers cannot hand out sets of novels to an entire class.

But the voucher program “is a good thing and every community ought to have it; it works,” said Lela Chatman, whose daughter attends Urban Day, located in a former inner-city Catholic school.

The involvement of parents--considered key to schools’ success--is required at many of the private schools, setting them apart from the public schools.

At Urban Day, committees of parents make such important decisions as which teachers to hire and can be seen throughout the school all day long.

Compare that to the nearby 31st Street School. Located in an area with the city’s highest murder rate, as well as problems with drugs and prostitution, 31st Street is highly successful by most measures.

But parents are rarely there. “They turn their children over to us and say, ‘Do what you can,’ ” Principal Jim Sonnenberg said.

Although the building is dingy on the outside, the inside of the 101-year-old brick structure is cheery, with wooden floors varnished to a sheen and children’s writings and drawings adorning every hallway.

The highly unified staff includes extra teachers to help those who are behind in reading and math. They have pushed the students to excel academically, with 98% exceeding the Wisconsin standards for reading and two-thirds of the fifth-graders surpassing the state goal in math.

Despite that record, Sonnenberg and his teachers fear that the school would be at a competitive disadvantage if the voucher program were to expand dramatically.

“Schools that could afford to advertise would get the good kids and others would become dumping grounds--that’s segregation,” said fifth-grade teacher James Furniss. “If all were equal, vouchers would work. But all is not equal.”