Kim Taylor, you can see, is proud of her school’s new classrooms. She shows off the new art room, the spacious classrooms, the brightness, the order, the brainpower.
„I want these kids to have the same kind of education as my kids have,“ she says. They’re getting it. From the project-based lessons to an engaged set of parents – 200 turned out for parents‘ night – to the sheer sense of order, Concordia University School feels like education for the well-off.
About 97% of the students are from poor families.
They attend the school on the northwest side thanks to Milwaukee’s school choice program. Enrollment was at 158 this fall, up from 66 two years ago. Four new students started on the day I visited.
But not only do school vouchers let parents opt for this. They let Taylor, who is a former education professor, her old university and a bunch of concerned laymen come together to offer schooling that cannot be offered in a government-run system.
Ardor for the idea of choice is flagging in some places. Influential writer Sol Stern made a stir last winter by calling vouchers a flop for not having forced Milwaukee Public Schools to improve. Columnist Jonah Goldberg recently wrote that backing choice means Republicans are „simply out of the debate.“ Better, say these maybe-former fans, to simply try improving the old incumbent systems.
Which have proved remarkably resistant to change. Taylor taught in MPS, in one of the good schools, as she puts it. Too many aren’t, she says, because teachers aren’t in control of classrooms. Restore that and „you can do the higher-level thinking.“
How? Taylor has ideas, mainly involving culture and expectations. Often, children come to her school combative and behind grade level. The school quickly changes that. „There’s no fighting here,“ she said.
What there is, is Concordia University Wisconsin, the Lutheran institution in Mequon that’s adding an urban focus to its teacher training. Its art education students now work with the elementary school’s teachers. It’s working on the elementary school’s phy-ed offerings. Taylor aims to be like a good public school at implementing new ideas, she says, while adding an element only a private school can, „the word of God.“
„We consider it a laboratory school,“ said Tim Young Eagle, who heads the group that sponsors the place, but it’s more: It’s a ministry. The group, the Lutheran Urban Mission Initiative, was begun by church laymen who grew up in what are now poor Milwaukee neighborhoods. They were dismayed as church schools closed. When a school on Granville Road shut down, the group scraped together talent and money to reopen it as something better.
The initiative gets no funds from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to do so, nor from the university. It borrowed to finance the expansion that opened this year. That should, reckons Young Eagle, accommodate enough students that the $6,607 in state aid that follows each child can fund it all. He donates his time.
Most of the children belong to some other church, if any, and „we’re not trying to make them Lutheran,“ said Young Eagle. But „we do want them to see Christ in all they do.“
„That’s an essential and important part of what we do.“
Because of the school’s Christian mission, said Taylor, „our staff is cohesive, we can get on to teaching.“
It’s possible to run a good school without religious motivations. People do it all the time. Since Christianity underlay schooling through most of Western civilization, however, one wonders why we think it normal that most schools don’t dare mention God.
Still, faith motivates this particular school. Religion led people to organize it and devote their abilities to it. This could happen only via school choice.
Only when parents, not the government, decide where dollars will go could there be schools with a religious mission. And only by letting parents use the money taxpayers are already putting toward education can anyone afford to serve so many poor children.
For all their good wishes, the Lutheran laymen and Taylor’s staff probably would be stopped by having to raise the $1 million in school aid that vouchers represent. School choice enables their work, it benefits their students and, since those children don’t attend MPS, it saves taxpayers about $6,000 per child.
No, vouchers are not a cure-all. Nothing is. They do, however, permit good work and new ideas to be tried.
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Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. E-mail [email protected]
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