How can we convert choice skeptics to parent advocates?
Welcome to Quinton’s K-12 Corner, a series discussing the biggest education issues in a simple way. Wisconsin’s children deserve the best schools in America. This series provides solutions to the major problems facing parents, taxpayers, superintendents, and new state leadership. If you have suggestions, comments, or questions, email QK@ReformingGovernment.org.
Where We Are
Anything can be taken away from you. That is the lesson in Ohio, where a left-leaning appeals court struck down the long-lasting voucher program there. Ohio’s right-leaning Supreme Court as well as national precedent will reverse the lower court’s decision, but the signal is clear: flip the high court, end school choice.
Wisconsin faces similarly perilous stakes. Politicians seek a scapegoat for shuttered schools, so they blame choice: churchgoers, school startups, and families escaping disarray. Public charter schools receive the same disdain; Milwaukee and Wauwatosa self-sabotaged, chasing some of their highest-performing schools out of their districts.
However, the numbers do not back the critics. Take the current school year. While voucher users grew this year, total private enrollment did not. Among schools taking vouchers, total enrollment rose only ~750 this year, almost entirely due to a few new schools beginning. That is 0.08% of all of Wisconsin’s students. The birth dearth is shrinking district schools, not school choice.
But facts repel demagogues like baths repel fleas, so let us assume they never clean up their acts. How can we ensure parents continue to have access to the schools they feel best fit their children?
Where We Could Go
Wisconsin choice schools should take it upon themselves to broaden their reach, strengthen their ties, and mend irritants in state law.
First, expand school choice to new areas. More parents will have a direct stake in choice, and more children will become their best selves. 4,000 students in Dane County attend private schools that do not accept vouchers, and another 4,000 do in Waukesha County. Imagine if they joined the tens of thousands in defense of school choice! Large schools in Hudson, Janesville, Baraboo, Antigo, and Superior not participating could join, bolster their work, add more families, and share the transformative results with neighbors and leaders. Rural towns could cultivate creative, small alternatives for students who need a little something different from school. And Wisconsin is way behind on charter schools, with far too few outside the southeast. The broader the coalition, the brighter the future.
Second, choice schools statewide must create allies the way Milwaukee’s do. This year, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson attended the opening of 2 new Catholic school buildings, adding, “I’ve got a responsibility to make sure that every single young person, regardless of what school type their family chooses, gets the education that they need to find success.” Would your mayor say that? If not, it may be because your choice schools do not invite your mayor to spaghetti supper, march in your city’s parade, team up with local businesses, tour classrooms with city and state legislators, or collaborate with your school district to ensure more people move to and stay in your hometown. The time of timidly tending to one’s business is over. Political and population threats will control choice’s future unless choice schools reach out.
Third, fix common-sense problems affecting school choice that make nobody happy. Specifically, decouple choice funding from district funding. Right now, choice schools receive funding from the state, but it indirectly affects your property taxes in almost every city for no good reason. (Again, Wisconsin’s school funding system makes no sense.) Decoupling would not give choice schools any more funding yet would lower property taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars. Pro-, anti-, and what the heck are you talking about constituencies all win with decoupling.
