Dear Editor:
Joel McNally combines comical reasoning with outright lies to argue in his Saturday column that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program explains "why education for black children in Wisconsin is worse than education for blacks elsewhere."
McNally advances the long-refuted canard that schools in the choice program "deny choice to students who have special educational needs or behavioral problems." The truth is that while many schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools screen students on such criteria, state law specifically prohibits screening of students in Milwaukee's choice program.
Having falsely argued that special-needs students are denied access to the MPCP, McNally then claims that when "parents use vouchers to try to send those children to private schools, after their children have been counted for purposes of state aid, voucher schools send those kids packing back to public schools." As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported after investigating this charge, "There is one problem with the claim: No facts back it up."
McNally then asserts "there is no real evidence that even the black children who are deemed acceptable to private and religious schools do any better once they get into those schools." In truth, a Brookings Institution report says the "most rigorous" studies of school choice programs show that they benefit African-American students. Further, we know that the graduation rate in Milwaukee is much higher for students in the MPCP than for MPS students.
Next, according to McNally, the choice program "only (gives) choice to students who are highly motivated or who have highly motivated parents."
Naturally, McNally offers no substantiation. University of Wisconsin Professor John Witte, the original state evaluator of the MPCP, found no evidence to support McNally's charge. Witte said earlier this year: "Everyone agrees there wasn't really cream skimming."
In a 2005 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series on the MPCP, the reporters concluded: "There is no evidence that voucher schools have 'creamed' the best students from Milwaukee Public Schools, an early concern expressed by some critics."
Howard Fuller, director, Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University, Milwaukee
The above letter to the editor was published in the October 11, 2007 Capital Times.