Milwaukee’s Idolatrous Voucher Bill

The Milwaukee Voucher Program was a failure, as every voucher program has been:

From http://keystoneresearch.org/sites/pennbpc.org/files/No-Accountability-EITC.pdfp.
p. 15-16:

“• As noted in KRC’s 1998 report, the first “five legislatively mandated evaluations of the
Milwaukee program found no achievement gains for voucher students.
• As noted in KRC’s 1999 report, 1995 legislation terminated the official evaluation of the Milwaukee
voucher program. The program now enrolls 20,000 students and cost $130 million in
2009.2
• As noted in KRC’s 1998 report p. 15-21, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson, a voucher
advocate, and his team re-analyzed the state’s Milwaukee voucher evaluation and found
that by the third and fourth year of attending a private school, voucher users outperformed
the public school control group in reading and math. The researchers’ own tables showed a
statistically significant result only in math and only in the fourth year. Moreover, their data
showed that voucher students were a more advantaged group than the comparison students
in public schools.3
• A second re-analysis of the state’s Milwaukee voucher evaluation by Princeton University’s
Cecilia Rouse found no effect from vouchers in reading and a small effect in math for voucher
students who had remained in the program over the four-year period.4
• A follow-up study by Rouse found that low-income students attending Milwaukee public
schools served by a state class-size reduction and enrichment program significantly
outperformed voucher students in reading and scored as well in math.5
• In 2007, a fresh evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program began. The evaluation team
includes: Patrick Wolf, Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas; Jay
Greene, a former co-author of voucher advocate Paul Peterson’s; and John Witte, the head of
the earlier evaluation of the Milwaukee voucher program. After four years, the new Milwaukee
evaluation program has found no achievement advantage for voucher students.
15
• The summary of the new Milwaukee evaluation team’s fourth year reports concludes (p.
8): “…to this point we have observed no significant effects of the MPCP on the rates of
student gains in reading and math achievement.”6″