No advantage found for voucher school students

Students attending private schools through the Milwaukee voucher program are doing no better academically than students in Milwaukee Public Schools, according to a major new study released in late February.

“After 13 years of research, there’s still not one study that shows that the voucher schools do a better job of educating our income-challenged kids than MPS,” WEAC Vice President Guy Costello told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in reacting to the study.

In the latest report, which represents early results of a five-year study, lead researcher Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas, concluded that students in Milwaukee voucher schools “tend to perform below national averages but at levels roughly comparable to similarly income-disadvantaged students in MPS.”

WEAC research consultant Dr. Russ Allen pointed out that when the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was started 18 years ago, proponents argued that the voucher schools would thrive because they would be unencumbered by unions, bureaucracies, and burdensome state laws and regulations. There has since been no evidence that voucher schools do any better job of educating students than Milwaukee Public Schools.

When University of Wisconsin professor John Witte was commissioned to study the Milwaukee voucher program in 1995, he also found that the overall performance of students in the voucher schools was about the same as students in MPS.

Resource Page on Vouchers

Posted March 5, 2008