School Voucher Program Teaches Hard Lessons

One lesson is clear from this city’s decade-old experiment with school vouchers: A lot of people didn’t know as much about schools as they thought they did.

Barbara Lee, a Catholic school principal, didn’t know that two-thirds of her teaching staff would quit the first year her school accepted voucher students.

Edward Mc Milin, a public school bureaucrat, didn’t know that, given choices, many parents would care more about day care than test scores. And Taki S. Raton, a private school principal, didn’t know when he opened his academy that his first concern would be controlling gang fights, not teaching his cherished Afrocentric values.

All know better now. But what no one seems to know, in public or private schools, is a simple recipe for educating concentrated populations of poor children.

“We keep looking for a magic way to do this,” said Lonnie J. Anderson, a public school principal. “There isn’t one.”

As Californians consider a November ballot initiative that would grant every child in the state a $4,000 voucher for private school, Milwaukee, home to the nation’s largest publicly funded voucher program, offers this lesson: Urban education remains a tough job, even when schools compete.

In contrast to the California proposal, the Milwaukee program grants vouchers only to low-income parents. But it is one of the few examples nationwide of how publicly funded vouchers play out in reality.

Nationwide, the debate over school vouchers is steeped in ideology and passionately fought. Advocates tout the virtues of the free market and competition; opponents fear public school resources will be sapped and oppose mingling religious education and public money.

But in Milwaukee’s classrooms--both public and private--ideology is drowned out every day by the realities of educating children who have fallen far behind, children without stable homes, children exposed to violent street culture, children who don’t speak English, children with a parent in jail.

Some Parents Prefer Busing

Even public schools, far more familiar with this environment than the private ones, had some things to learn.

An example involves busing. Seventy percent of Milwaukee public school children ride a bus. Busing has long provided ammunition for voucher advocates, who argue that it shows that a district is poorly run.

But school officials have discovered that substantial numbers of parents actually prefer that their children be bused. When asked about busing, some parents admitted to using the long rides as a form of free day care. Long bus rides ensure that children are being supervised during the early morning and afternoon hours while parents work, they said.

In all the years busing has been an issue, “we had never delved into the reasons before,” said Mc Milin, the Milwaukee school district’s facilities planner.

Vouchers have made it possible for a share of Milwaukee’s children to attend private schools their parents could not otherwise afford. But they have not succeeded in sprinkling poor students evenly among their wealthier private school peers, so voucher students tend to be concentrated. Half attend just one-fifth of participating private schools, according to the Public Policy Forum, a Milwaukee research group. In at least 20 private schools, 90% or more of students receive vouchers.

The result is that some private and public school educators in Milwaukee’s urban core have begun to sound awfully similar.

Private school principals here fret about discipline problems and teacher shortages. Public school principals refer to parents as “customers” and talk about consumer surveys. Both voice frustration at their schools’ being constantly compared to suburban schools. Both say urban schools are too often judged by people who have never been in them.

Milwaukee is a city with a small-town feel despite its 600,000 residents. It is a city of smokestacks and steeples--a two-area-code, lakeside town of 19th century homes, tree-lined streets and majestic stone buildings. It’s also a city of overgrown weeds, vacant lots and shuttered brick factories.

Blacks comprise about 40% of the population. The school system, though, is 62% black, and 83% minority--due partly to white flight, partly to the relative youth of the minority population.

Wisconsin’s Parental Choice program was launched on an experimental basis in 1990 and later expanded to include religious schools. Though a state law, it affects only Milwaukee.

Today, about 11,000 low-income Milwaukee youngsters receive $5,326 from the state to attend private schools. The number enrolled has increased sharply since access to religious schools was granted three years ago. Students in the Parental Choice program still represent only about a tenth of the number of Milwaukee children attending public schools.

Several thousand vouchers go unused. Whether that is due to lack of space in private schools, eligibility problems or preference for public schools isn’t clear. Surprisingly, overall private school enrollment in Milwaukee has declined slightly in the 10 years since the voucher program began.

The effects of vouchers on Milwaukee public schools are hotly debated. Achievement gains are difficult to gauge because the private schools are not required to test students. (California’s voucher initiative, Proposition 38, would require private schools to administer the Stanford 9 test to voucher students.)

Although it’s impossible to know how much vouchers have had to do with it, it’s clear that Milwaukee’s public school system is changing, attacking some of its problems and replicating its successes.

Auer Avenue Elementary School is one of the latter: a nearly all-black, all-poor school where 90% of students are at average or better reading levels. Principal George Kazel’s formula uses experienced, generalist teachers and a schedule that allows kids to be pulled aside in smaller groups.

Many Auer teachers seem to be in the career mid-range. One such teacher, Renee Allen, kicked off an English lesson by writing a mock essay on the overhead projector, pretending not to notice it was full of mistakes. Her students were captivated, bouncing off their chairs in their eagerness to correct her.

At Malcolm X Academy, a black, mostly poor, public middle school, Principal Lonnie Anderson is at the cutting edge of the school district’s new efforts to improve itself.

Malcolm X has such a troubled reputation that many families in its service area have their children bused elsewhere.

To turn Malcolm X around, Anderson was allowed to handpick his staff this year and ignore seniority rules that traditionally determine teacher assignments.

Anderson has an array of strategies for addressing the concerns that district surveys show parents have about inner-city middle schools: Malcolm X has uniforms, an emphasis on manners and a policy of keeping grade levels separate, even at lunch.

Misbehaving students are sent to a temporary homeroom, combining military-style discipline with social studies lessons about race- and youth-oriented topics. Anderson has set up a choral program and talks about starting a boarding school.

But Anderson doesn’t claim that any of these ideas offer cures to the ills of urban education. What works varies by school, and by student, he said. For that reason, Anderson doesn’t believe vouchers will provide a cure either.

He displays a lively competitive spirit. Poor students can achieve just like middle-class students, he said. “It just takes some different things.”

Private Campuses Face New Needs

Perhaps the most dramatic changes have taken place within private schools, particularly those with large numbers of voucher students.

Some report being forced to hire more administrators, social workers and special education teachers and to raise salaries. Private school educators talk of days filled with a new array of small tasks: tracking down parents whose phones are disconnected, filling out more child abuse reports, tutoring children who are behind.

At the private, Afrocentric Blyden Delany Academy, the challenges of urban education are keenly felt.

The drab former church building with a peaked roof is more than a century old. A basement cafeteria is windowless and spare. But the walls are lined with bright posters on African history.

The students, kindergarten through eighth grade, nearly all receive vouchers. They are supposed to wear uniforms of yellow shirts, but so many have failed to do so of late that Raton, the principal, has cracked down. The result has been high rates of absenteeism as students without uniforms have stayed home, he said.

It’s the sort of problem Raton didn’t anticipate when he opened the school three years ago. Sitting in his office, surrounded by African masks, Raton recalled: “I had this ideal: an African American school . . . perfect nice little children happy to be in school that was all black with teachers who love them and high expectations . . . “ He gave a short laugh. “Please.”

The first year, there was a lot of “gangster stuff,” he said. There were fights, kids who had to be restrained or who were openly defiant.

“It threw me for a loop,” Raton said. He hadn’t planned on using suspensions or expulsions to discipline students, but he has come to see that it’s necessary. Asked if he had ever used corporal punishment, Raton answered: “Not under the letter of the law.”

Today, he says, things are going much more smoothly. On a recent rainy fall day, Blyden Delany’s classrooms appeared much like classes anywhere. Raton says the emphasis is on character, not academics. But here, as elsewhere, teachers stand in front of rows of students and teach grammar and multiplication.

Across town, St. Anthony’s, a 130-year-old Catholic school, is adjusting to vouchers.

Enrollment here has increased to 400 students from 275 since the school began participating in the Parental Choice program. There are classes in trailers and a storage room. Most students use vouchers and are from immigrant Latino families on the city’s south side. Teachers report more students who are behind, more who don’t speak English well.

Principal Richard Mason has had to hire a full-time administrator and resource teachers to pull students aside in small groups to help those who are behind. A psychologist visits every two weeks.

Before vouchers, the nuns and Catholic lay workers who taught here earned up to $22,000 a year. Now, with the new money available, teachers at St. Anthony’s earn up to $30,000. The raise was needed to attract teachers, Mason said. He still worries because his teachers are generally either young and inexperienced lay people or nuns and lay workers at retirement age. Seasoned mid-career professionals--the sort found at Auer--can’t afford to work at St. Anthony’s, Mason said.

Before vouchers, Milwaukee’s Catholic schools had taken poor students on scholarship. Even so, “We really served the big middle. We had pretty high-performing kids,” said Donna Schmidt, principal of Prince of Peace School, another Catholic school.

Now, “because of new dynamics in the classroom, teachers won’t do this for $13,000,” she added. “There is a call to ministry, but there is also a call to wellness to yourself.”

At St. Rose Urban Academy, eight of 12 teachers quit after Barbara Lee’s first year in charge. Even Lee thought of quitting. Now, she says, she sees it as a mission.

Her colleagues in suburban private schools don’t really understand what it’s like, she said.

“I go to the [Catholic school] principals’ meetings and I can’t relate to them,” she said. “They are talking about what the pastoral team is fighting over, and what technology they are getting.” Worst of all is, “when they talk about their high test scores,” she added. “I want to get under the table.”