School reformers agree that one essential step to improving education is giving consumers—parents and students—access to better information when choosing a school. To help accomplish this, The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty released its second annual Apples to Apples report Tuesday which compares Forward Exam and ACT test scores of Wisconsin schools across sectors. New this year, is that each school in the state received a ranking which levels the playing field by accounting for the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of students in the school.
Many of the findings that came from the report are similar to what we concluded last year: When appropriate controls are included, schools in the Milwaukee parental choice program, along with charter schools, outperform traditional public schools.
But one interesting new finding was that charter and choice schools are displaying what is called a barbell phenomenon in academic performance: While many choice and charter schools appear at the top of our school performance rankings, many also appear near the bottom.
Some may say that the solution to this problem is additional regulations on the state’s choice programs to prevent these relatively poor academic schools from continuing to enroll students. It should be said that there are other factors beyond academics that people may use to choose a school, such as safety or the teaching of religious values. Rather than precluding parents from making these choices, however, we think the solution is to expand the schools with the highest rankings.
There is demand for good schools across all sectors. Three successful voucher schools, St. Marcus Lutheran, Mount Lebanon and Nativity Jesuit all have waiting lists. St. Marcus’s list is 250 kids long. The children who are waiting to enroll are currently attending other schools, but want access to the high-quality education available at these schools.
The questions is, how do we help these schools expand? There are two key factors: Make sure that parents are well informed about the available schools, and create parity of funding for choice and charter schools.
Learning about schools can be difficult, especially for low-income parents who work long hours. If a parent has a school just around the corner, they may be more likely to pick that school if they are not aware of other options. With greater awareness, they might pick another school.
Therefore there need to be reductions to the cost of learning about schools. Making test data readily accessible online, or perhaps mandating an affirmative decision to choose a particular school would be steps in the right direction.
Finally, if choice and charter schools were to receive equal funding to that of public schools, it would aid in their expansion. For example, in 2016, Milwaukee Public Schools spent $10,439 per student. This is on average $3,000 more per student than private voucher schools where the maximum state voucher for 2017-18, per student, is $7,530 for K-8 and $8,176 for grades 9-12.
The same story holds for many voucher and ESA programs throughout the country, where funding is often two thirds of public school funding, at best. If the funding was allocated evenly across school sectors, better schools would have more money to expand.
Wisconsin was home to the country’s first school voucher program back in 1990, and the results here suggest that choice and charter schools are continuing to improve academic outcomes for students. But the persistence of the barbell phenomenon suggests that more room still exists for improvement. By making these changes, the Milwaukee school choice system could succeed academically and regain its cutting edge.
Will Flanders is research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Cori Petersen is a research associate at WILL.
