It was 20 years ago today

The state Supreme Court changed the course of school choice

It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.

No, wait, forget the Beatles' lyrics. Let’s try it this way:

It was 20 years ago today, the state Supreme Court had its say,

Giving public money to religious schools was OK,

This profoundly changed our way. And after all these years,

All the boos and all the cheers, Surging parent power rules the land. There are a lot of anniversaries being marked these days. Noting such milestones is good if it helps provide food for thought on where we are now. I vividly remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy 50 years ago, for example, and think learning about and from each of them is of great value.

So consider June 10, 1998, as an anniversary worth attention. That was the day the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, on a 4 to 2 vote, that it was constitutional for religious schools to receive state money to educate children. It was the first decision in the United States by a court of that level in favor of private school choice.

The legal logic was that it was parents using state-funded vouchers who were determining where children would go to school, not the state directly supporting religious schools. Therefore, it didn’t violate church-state separation.

(Feel free to have your own opinion, but that remains the controlling law in Wisconsin, and, four years later in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision that paralleled the Wisconsin outcome.)

Across Wisconsin, the education landscape is profoundly different because of the 1998 decision.

The private school voucher program goes back to action by then-Gov. Tommy Thompson and the Legislature that allowed a small number of Milwaukee students, starting in 1990, to get public support for attending private schools that were not religious.

In 1995, Thompson and the Legislature approved expanding the program and bringing in religious schools. That was held up until the state Supreme Court ruled.

That court decision threw the voucher door open and was the real start of what I consider the era of vouchers.

The private school option grew quickly. In 1997-'98, 23 schools and 1,500 students in Milwaukee took part. In 1998-'99, within three months of the decision, the number of schools was 83, the number of students 5,740. The total for Milwaukee voucher students has gone up in every year since then.

By last September, it was just under 28,000, attending 126 schools, the very large majority of them religious.

That means that these days, a bit under a quarter of all Milwaukee children getting a publicly funded education are using vouchers.

Another 15,000 kids attend charter schools not under the control of the Milwaukee Public Schools system. Overall, only about 56% of Milwaukee kids are in the conventional MPS system, which shapes the realities of MPS in a big way.

And vouchers have spread statewide. They were offered in Racine starting in 2011. In 2017-'18, nearly 3,000 Racine kids used them to attend 23 private schools.

Expansion of vouchers to the rest of Wisconsin began in 2013. In 2017-'18, there were 154 schools and 4,400 students participating in the statewide program, and those numbers are all but certain to go up in coming years.

A small statewide program of vouchers for students with special education needs was launched in 2015 and, thanks to legislative action last year, it is poised to start growing substantially this fall.

It’s a much different world for pretty much every school and school district in Wisconsin, both public and private. A few aspects of that, in thumbnail form:

Without vouchers, a lot of current private schools would have closed or would never have opened.

Competition for enrollment in Milwaukee and Racine — and increasingly elsewhere — is intense. Kids equal vitality and money for every school. After all these years, too little is known about how and why parents pick schools, but choice is, in general, popular, and just about every school pushes hard to get students in the door.

The rules of the voucher programs have changed a lot over the years. The good news is that there are fewer really terrible private schools than there used to be and more is posted publicly about the private schools’ performance than there used to be. Income caps on participating families have changed so that a much larger number of kids qualify for vouchers.

Choice is almost everywhere. Even within public systems such as MPS, there are a lot of options for schooling. It is a choice world for parents.

The voucher-public divide remains a polarizing, partisan source of division and disunity in education advocacy.

And most important, in my book: Overall academic outcomes in Milwaukee or Racine have not really improved and are deeply concerning. (The statewide picture is less troubling.)

In every stream of schools, there are good schools — and ones where students chronically do poorly. Overall, only about one in five Milwaukee kids rates as proficient or better in reading, and that is true for both MPS and voucher schools. Charter schools are somewhat better.

Parental choice is popular, and it’s here to stay. But if it was supposed to lead to a lot better results for kids, Milwaukee and Racine don’t really show it.

So the 20th-anniversary questions I ask are: Now what?

What’s the path to significant change for the better?

Maybe it’s in everyone dealing with the trauma affecting so many kids’ lives. Better early-childhood programs. More cooperation and commitment to reading education. More emphasis on school quality and adequate resources, regardless of sector.

The rise of vouchers has changed the education landscape greatly. But it hasn’t solved our problems. Parents are

The private school option grew quickly. In 1997-'98, 23 schools and 1,500 students in Milwaukee took part. By last September, it was just under 28,000, attending 126 schools, the very large majority of them religious. That means that these days, a bit under a quarter of all Milwaukee children getting a publicly funded education are using vouchers.

greatly empowered to choose schools. Now where do we find the power to really raise results?

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.