Educational Issues Series School 'Choice'

About the Author:

Alex Molnar is Professor of Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He is also associated with the Urban Research Center at UW-Milwaukee. Molnar is a prolific author and has served as a consultant to Educational Leadership for contemporary issues. His new book, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercializion of America's Schools, was published by Westview/Harpercollins.

Background

In the early 1870's, demoralized by their crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the social turmoil that followed, many French citizens angrily attacked the public school system as the source of their woes and embraced the simplistic political declaration that it was "the Prussian teacher [who] has won the war."1

To improve the schools, and presumably France's prospects in the next war, in 1872 a French parliamentary commission recommended a religious school voucher plan remarkably similar to the ones currently being championed in the United States.

However, in 19th century France hostility to the idea of providing public money to support church schools was so widespread that the plan was never taken up by the French Assembly.

Just over 100 years later, the authors of A Nation at Risk declared that America was headed for a disastrous defeat in a global economic war.2 And, as in nineteenth-century France, the public schools were blamed. A Nation at Risk made the belief that the U.S. system of public education was a catastrophic failure an article of faith in the nation's school reform debate. In so doing it helped set the stage for attempts to enact school voucher plans in the late 1980's and 1990's.

Until the 1980's, when they were revived by a resurgent conservative movement, the constitutional prohibition against church-state entanglements, public opposition to the use of tax funds for religious schools, and a lack of other alternatives to public schools kept voucher schemes on the fringes of American school reform.

Educational vouchers were first proposed in the United States by economist Milton Friedman.3 Friedman argued that providing parents with vouchers and allowing them to choose any school public or private for their child to attend was a way of getting the government out of public education. In his view, an educational market would be much more efficient at allocating educational resources than a system of government run schools. Friedman's idea initially drew scant attention and little serious support.

When private school choice plans were proposed in the U.S. in the late 1950's and early 1960's it was not the alleged virtues of an educational market that motivated their sponsors. The first efforts to create private school choice in America were part of an openly racist response to court-ordered desegregation.

In 1956, the Virginia legislature passed a "tuition-grant" program and in 1960 a "scholarship" plan which provided students with tax dollars they could use to pay the tuition at any qualified non-sectarian school in their district. The express purpose of the Virginia laws and other "freedom of choice" plans like them passed by southern legislatures was to help maintain segregated school systems in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.4

Over the next 40 years private school choice moved from the darkest edge of racial politics into the mainstream school reform debate. This transformation was possible in part because through the years vouchers have consistently found support among Catholics eager to use tax dollars to save their schools, free-market advocates, and people of all political persuasions who, for various reasons, were dissatisfied with the shortcomings of what David Tyack, a historian of public education, has labeled "the one best system."5

From Racist Reality to "Empowerment" Rhetoric

In the late 1960's, the idea of educational vouchers caught on with the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson. At that time, they had a vocal constituency not just from the right wing groups or segments of the business community, but also among "de-schoolers" influenced by the writing of Ivan Illich,6 progressive and black nationalist "free schoolers,"7 social critics of the public education bureaucracy such as Paul Goodman8 and liberal academics like Christopher Jencks.9 The chance to craft so-called "regulated" voucher plans - insuring that the poorest recipients got the largest vouchers - appealed to many on the left.

President Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) developed a voucher proposal subsequently embraced by President Richard Nixon's administration. There was so little grass-roots enthusiasm for the idea, however, that Minneapolis, Rochester, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Gary, and Seattle all rejected the opportunity to participate in an experimental program. The only community that agreed to try the OEO plan was Alum Rock, California, where it was implemented within the public school system with disappointing results and subsequently abandoned.10

In 1971, the Panel on Non-Public Education of the Nixon administration's Presidential Commission on School Finance openly expressed a desire to publicly fund religious schools. However, "Parochiaid" (as the idea was termed) and any other plan to send public money to religious schools not only faced widespread public opposition, it risked being ruled unconstitutional. The Supreme Court erected a difficult hurdle for advocates of tax dollars going to religious schools. In its 8-0 ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman in 1971 the Supreme Court held that to be constitutional the plan had to meet three standards: its purpose is not secular; its main effect is to neither advance nor inhibit religion; and it does not excessively entangle the state with religion.11 12

Although "Parochiaid" died for lack of sufficient political support and the very real threat that it would be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the idea of spending tax dollars to pay for education at church affiliated private schools remained alive. Indeed the "Parochiaid" debate rehearsed many of the current arguments over private school vouchers and their use to pay tuition at sectarian schools.13

In 1983, 1985, and 1986, the Reagan administration tried unsuccessfully to move some form of voucher legislation through Congress. The 1985 effort is worth noting because it sought to re-establish the link between vouchers and "empowering" the poor that had attracted progressives in the 1960's and 1970's by turning the federal government's Chapter 1 program (which provides increased resources to school districts serving large numbers of poor children) into an individual voucher program.14

The Emergence of Public School Choice

According to Henig, with his free-market arguments for vouchers meeting with no success, Reagan tacked into the political wind and began to talk about public school choice. This tactical shift immediately raised the visibility of and support for school "choice." Suddenly "choice" was transformed into a strategy to reform rather than dismantle the public school system. Furthermore, it was associated with educational excellence and, perhaps more importantly given its history, racial equity through its link to the popular magnet school concept. Magnet schools were used by many school districts (including Milwaukee) to promote school integration by offering a diverse array of innovative curriculum options to attract voluntary transfers to integrated schools. By shifting the discussion from vouchers to public school choice, Reagan seemed to separate the idea from its racist and religious roots.15

Over the next eight years, beginning with Minnesota in 1988, public school choice laws (also called open enrollment) were enacted in fourteen states.16 These laws allowed students to choose to attend any public school in the state that had room for them.

After his election in 1988, George Bush stayed close to the Reagan position for the first two years of his presidency. However, by the end of 1990 his policy was clearly shifting away from using choice to reform public schools toward using private school vouchers to abandon them.

Between 1990 and 1992, President Bush sent Vice President Dan Quayle to Oregon to speak on behalf of a voucher ballot initiative there; he expressed strong (and well-publicized) support for Wisconsin's 1989 private school voucher law; he included "parental choice" in his 1991 "America 2000" reform initiative; and in 1992 announced he was sending a voucher plan he dubbed a "G.I. Bill for Children" to Congress as part of his budget.17

During the second half of his term, Bush and his Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, missed few opportunities to argue that vouchers would empower parents and unleash the market to reform what they said was a failed school system. Perhaps to shore up his support among the right wing of the Republican Party, George Bush returned the voucher idea to its roots in free market ideology and attempts to provide state support for private and religious schools. It was left to Bush's Democratic challenger Bill Clinton to take over the Reagan administration's "public school choice" position during the 1992 presidential campaign.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, supporters of private school voucher plans made an important rhetorical breakthrough by effectively blurring the distinction between public school choice and private school voucher plans in the public debate. Voucher advocates also no longer saddled their plans with controversial labels like "parochiaid."

Proponents of private school vouchers such as Wisconsin Assembly member Annette "Polly" Williams downplayed or ignored the conservative economic rationale for vouchers and instead described their proposals as a way of empowering poor families and helping impoverished children get a decent education. Vouchers, it was now argued, were not intended to dismantle but to improve the public education system by forcing it to compete in an educational marketplace in which parents directly held the power of the purse.

To side-step constitutional obstacles to funneling public funds to private schools, the provision of taxpayer dollars was characterized as a payment to poor parents who could in turn "choose" the private school their child would attend.

The Milwaukee Voucher Experiment

In 1989 the Wisconsin legislature passed the country's first true educational voucher plan - the "Milwaukee Parental Choice Program." The Wisconsin law applied only to children attending the Milwaukee Public Schools and originally set a ceiling of about 1,000 low-income students (up to a maximum of 1 percent of the children attending the Milwaukee Public Schools) who could attend - at state expense - private, non-sectarian schools within the city that were willing to participate in the program. Each child attending a private school in the program would be supported by a voucher worth approximately $2,500.

To protect the private school status of participating schools, the Wisconsin law did not require that they meet the same educational standards that the Milwaukee public schools had to meet. It did not require that the teachers at the choice schools be certified. It did not require that the curriculum of the schools be reviewed, or accredited by any outside agency.

Choice schools had to meet only one of four educational requirements:

1. At least 70 percent of the pupils in the program had to advance one grade level each year;
2. the average attendance rate had to be at least 90 percent;
3. at least 80 percent had to demonstrate significant academic progress, or
4. at least 70 percent of their families had to meet parent involvement criteria established by the private school.

Choice schools did not have to accept children with exceptional educational needs nor did they have to meet the financial disclosure or other record-keeping requirements placed on the public schools.

The Wisconsin legislature created Milwaukee's choice program as a five-year experiment and provided for yearly comparisons of the academic achievement of students attending choice schools with the achievement of comparable students attending the Milwaukee public schools. Governor Thompson vetoed the five-year time limit on the program but left the requirement of annual program evaluations intact.

Although the Wisconsin law's constitutionality was immediately challenged, it was upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1992 on the grounds that the law was narrowly drawn to affect a small number of children living in poverty and did not include religious schools.18

By 1995 there had been four yearly evaluations of the Milwaukee voucher experiment, conducted in accordance with the terms of the law by University of Wisconsin political science professor John Witte. Witte was unable to find statistically significant differences in the achievement of students attending choice schools and the achievement of a comparable group of students attending the Milwaukee Public Schools. He did, however, find a high degree of parental satisfaction with the choice schools. He also found that more students left the choice schools each year than changed schools in the comparable group of public school students.19

Witte's research was attacked in a 1995 study by Harvard professor Paul Peterson.20 Peterson argued, among other things, that Witte's methods were flawed and had, therefore, produced findings that understated the positive academic impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

Peterson's study was sent to every member of the Wisconsin legislature on January 28, 1995, on the eve of debate on the governor's 1996-97 budget (which included a Milwaukee voucher program expanded to include religious schools) by Timothy Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. Sheehy began his cover letter to legislators: "School choice programs are working in Milwaukee and should be expanded. Milwaukee employers have made it their number one legislative priority."

The political ground for Peterson's report had been prepared by a series of reports issued by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI). The Milwaukee-based think tank - heavily funded by Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation - released three pro-voucher reports between 1989 and 1993 22 in an effort to build support for expanding Wisconsin's voucher program.

The same month Peterson's study was released, the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, the research arm of the legislature, released its own report on the Milwaukee program. It contended that no conclusion could be drawn about the academic performance of children attending private school under the voucher program and a comparable group of students attending the Milwaukee Public Schools.23

Witte responded to Peterson's criticisms in his own letter to the legislature24. Nevertheless, the Peterson and Legislative Audit Bureau reports raised enough doubt about the results reported by Witte to enable both advocates and opponents to claim the data supported their position during the legislative debate.

Instead of attempting to strengthen and improve the evaluation requirements for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in order to clarify what effect, if any, the program was having on student achievement, voucher supporters succeeded in killing the annual program evaluations entirely. As revised in 1995, Wisconsin's choice law replaced annual evaluations with the requirement that the Legislative Audit Bureau provide an evaluation of the program after five years in the year 2000.

When the Legislative Audit Bureau issues its report, it is not likely to provide evidence strong enough to settle the debate over the impact of Milwaukee's choice experiment on student achievement because no requirement that schools participating in the program provide the data necessary for a rigorous evaluation was written into the revised legislation.

The Murky Empirical Situation

In the absence of clear evidence showing a positive effect on student achievement as a result of participation in a voucher program, the debate in Wisconsin and elsewhere continues to be driven much more by competing social and political philosophies than research data. Cookson25 calls the battle over school choice a struggle over the "soul" of American public education, and Henig26 sees in the struggle a conflict over the type of society Americans want to call into being.

Afer a review of the research on school choice in three countries (the U.S., Great Britain, and New Zealand) Whitty finds little evidence to support the contention that the creation of educational markets will increase student achievement. However, he does think the evidence available suggests that educational markets are likely to make existing inequalities in the provision of education worse.27- a conclusion supported by Carnoy's analysis of the effects of school privatization in Chile and other counties.28

In 1992 the Carnegie Foundation released its study, School Choice.29 Carnegie researchers visited choice programs around the country, surveyed more than 1,000 parents, and reviewed other studies of school choice. Except for Milwaukee's one-of-a-kind private school choice program, all of the programs in the Carnegie study were public school choice programs. The Carnegie report concluded that to the extent choice programs benefitted children at all it was the children of better-educated parents, that the choice programs require additional money to operate, that choice programs have the potential to widen the gap between rich and poor school districts, and that school choice does not necessarily improve student achievement. Bruce Fuller, in a 1995 review of data on selected choice programs around the country, drew conclusions similar to those contained in the Carnegie report.30

The most important work purporting to show the value of instituting a system based on school vouchers is Politics, Markets and America's Schools31 published in 1990 by the Brookings Institution. In this book John Chubb and Terry Moe argue that public education can not be systematically reformed within its current political and bureaucratic governance structure. They claim that the failure to improve school performance, despite a series of reforms instituted after the publication of A Nation at Risk, demonstrates the need to fundamentally restructure the system by creating an educational market that will increase achievement levels by making schools compete for students.

In their 1995 book, The Case Against School Choice,32 Kevin J. Smith and Kenneth J. Meier methodically analyze the theoretical claims made, the methodology used, and the conclusions drawn by Chubb and Moe in Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. In addition they review data about the performance of choice programs in other countries. Smith and Meier conclude that the available empirical evidence does not support Chubb and Moe's case for vouchers.

Evaluations of Milwaukee's privately funded "voucher" program (Partners Advancing Values in Education or PAVE) have for the most part shied away from assessing student achievement gains, preferring to focus on other issues such as parental satisfaction and parental involvement in school activities.33 Of the three evaluations of the PAVE program conducted by Family Service America since 1993 only one (in 1994) made a serious effort to determine the program's effect on student achievement. The 1994 evaluation suggested that students who had attended private schools for their entire school career achieved at higher levels than students who had transferred into a private school participating in the PAVE program from a public school. Further, the evaluation suggested that the longer transfer students stayed in participating private schools the greater their achievement. However, since the data gathered depended entirely on the voluntary cooperation of parents, the findings are suspect and it is reasonable to say that no conclusion can be meaningfully drawn from the evaluation's results.

Advocates of private school vouchers sometimes point to the reputed better performance and lower cost of Catholic schools as both a justification for supporting private schools with tax dollars and for including religious schools in the program.

The performance of Milwaukee's Catholic schools roughly follows the national pattern - although it is hard to draw reliable conclusions because private schools, religious or otherwise, do not have to reveal their test results or other performance data. In 1991, when the Catholic archdiocese did release the test scores of children in its schools the results showed that when the performance of children from similar social and economic backgrounds were compared, the Catholic schools in the Milwaukee archdiocese did no better and perhaps a bit worse than the Milwaukee Public Schools.34

The picture looks the same when the issue is cost. In 1994, when the archdiocese began closing its central-city elementary schools, the Catholic school system had a deficit of $100,000, largely because of a per-pupil cost of approximately $4,000 at the four schools. By comparison, in the 1992-93 school year, when excluding centrally budgeted items such as fringe benefits and transportation, each elementary school in Milwaukee received, on average, approximately $2,958. Even including the centrally budgeted items, the public schools only spent approximately $4,645 per student.35 36 For that price, the Milwaukee public schools took all students who showed up at their door - and also provided a much more complete educational program than the Catholic schools.37

An Unpopular Reform

Private school voucher proposals are often characterized by their supporters as an enormously popular grass-roots reform pushed by parents trying to seize the power now jealously guarded by self-serving bureaucrats and patronizing liberal elites. In fact, private school vouchers have been quite unpopular with the voting public. Since 1978, four states have held referendums on voucher plans: Michigan in 1978, Oregon in 1990, Colorado in 1992, and California in 1993.38 In each case, the vouchers went down to defeat by at least a 2-to-1 margin.

Attempts to put a "regulated" voucher plan in place via a ballot initiative were rejected in California in 1980 and 1982. 39 In 1993, after 70 percent of California voters rejected yet another voucher initiative,40 backers vowed they would be back in 1996. Yet by 1995, support for the idea was still so thin among Californians that voucher supporters decided to shelve the idea until at least 1997.41

Even a popular governor like Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey found in 1995 that support for her proposed voucher plan for Jersey City was so weak that she withdrew the measure.42 Governor Whitman then handed the hot potato to a commission whose report was not due until sometime in 1996.43

The nationally famous Wisconsin parental choice legislation was never put to the voters in a referendum. In fact, it never had to face an up-or-down vote in the full legislature. When the bill was originally adopted in 1990 and again when it was expanded to include religious schools in 1994, the measure was part of an omnibus budget bill - a procedural maneuver that effectively shielded the legislation from what in all likelihood would have been certain defeat.

While opinion surveys indicate that the public likes the idea of "choice" in the abstract, it appears that most people do not like the implications of voucher programs once they are spelled out in concrete terms. This may explain why a good deal of energy among groups supporting private school vouchers is devoted to figuring out how to "sell" the idea to a skeptical public.

Focus groups conducted in Cleveland and Chicago by Public Opinion Strategies of Alexandria, Virginia, for one such group, The American Alliance for Better Schools, produced a litany of concerns about voucher programs:

• "Participants were reluctant to support any proposal which could potentially hurt public schools."
• "Parents feared chaos in schools, and questioned how such a program would be funded and administered."
• "Although empowerment of parents could be an effective tool to strike at education bureaucrats, participants [in the focus group] were able to cite instances where empowerment resulted in racial favoritism, or unfair practices - two themes participants were very sensitive to."
• "Although competition language is a popular notion among some, ... parents were inclined to see risk, often believing students - especially those who are younger or disadvantaged - as worthy of protection and a more 'nourishing' environment."44

Faced with these attitudes about damaging public schools, it is not surprising that private school voucher plans are now often described by proponents as an attempt to strengthen public education.

Clouded Future

Regardless of the lack of enthusiasm among the general public, there is no doubt the voucher pot is boiling on the political front burner. In 1993, Puerto Rico adopted voucher legislation that provided a voucher worth $1,500 for parents earning less than $18,000 a year to send their children to any private school in Puerto Rico that would accept him or her - including religious schools.45 The private school portion of the law was struck down by the Puerto Rico Supreme Court in November 1994, leaving Puerto Rico with a public school choice program.46

In addition to Wisconsin, voucher legislation was introduced in California, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, and Pennsylvania in 1995.47 Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson promised to introduce voucher legislation in 1996.48 However, his efforts were stymied by legislative opposition. Constitutional amendments have been proposed in Michigan and Missouri to permit the creation of private school voucher plans.49

Despite all of the legislative activity, by the end of 1995 only Wisconsin and Ohio had enacted voucher laws. Ohio's law, intended to go into effect in the autumn of 1996, created a pilot program modeled after Wisconsin's voucher legislation called the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program. It provides vouchers that eligible low-income parents in Cleveland can use to send their children to private (including religious) schools. The constitutionality of the law was challenged by the Ohio Federation of Teachers and others in a January 1996 suit filed in Franklin County Court.50

In Wisconsin, since the 1995 expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program included religious schools, the constitutionality of the new law was immediately challenged in a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 14 parents and clergy. The ACLU argues on the traditional grounds that had always proved fatal in the past to plans to spread about public funds to religious institutions - that it would breach the constitutional wall separating church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and issued an injunction preventing the law from taking effect during the 1995-1996 school year. On March 29, 1996, the supreme court sent the case back to circuit court for trial, leaving the effort to include religious schools in the Wisconsin program in legal limbo.

A thorough examination of market-based school reforms such as vouchers, charter schools, and for-profit schools can be found in Alex Molnar's Book, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America's Schools (Westview/Harpercollins, 1996).

Endnotes

1 W. Van Vliet and J. A. Smyth, "A Nineteenth-Century French Proposal to Use School Vouchers," Comparative Education Review 26, no. 1 (February 1982): 95-103.

2 National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperatives for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1983).

3 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

4 Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 104.

5 David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).

6 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

7 Allen Graubard, Free the Children: Radical Reform and the Free School Movement (New York: Pantheon, 1972). See also the letter from Herb Kohl to Mario Fantini printed in the appendix to, Mario D. Fantini, Free Schools of Choice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

8 Paul Goodman, The New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Random House Books, 1970).

9 Education Vouchers: A Report on Financing Elementary Education by Grants to Parents (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for the Study of Public Policy, 1970), as cited in Richard F. Elmore, Choice in Public Education (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1986), p. 9.

10 Amy Stuart Wells, Time to Choose: America at the Crossroads of School Choice Policy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 152.

11 Amy Stuart Wells, Time to Choose: America at the Crossroads of School Choice Policy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 174.

12 Charles J. Russo and Michael P. Orsi, "The Supreme Court and the Breachable Wall," Momentum, September 1992, pp. 42 - 45.

13 Thomas W. Lyons, "Parochiaid? Yes!" Educational Leadership, November 1971, pp. 102-104, and Glenn L. Archer, "Parochiaid? No!" Educational Leadership, November 1971, pp. 105-107. See also, Grace Graham, "Can the Public School Survive Another Ten Years?" Educational Leadership, May 1970, pp. 800-803.

14 "Justice and Excellence: The Case for Choice in Chapter 1," U.S. Department of Education, November 15, 1985, as cited in Richard F. Elmore, Choice in Public Education (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1986).

15 Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 4.

16 Education Commission of the States, "Legislative Activities Involving Open Enrollment (Choice)," Clearinghouse Notes, December 1994.

17 Education Commission of the States, "Legislative Activities Involving Open Enrollment (Choice)," Clearinghouse Notes, December 1994, p. 91.

18 166 Wis. 2d, 501, 480 N.W. 2d, 460 (1992)

19 John F. Witte, First-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, Wis.: The Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1991).

John F. Witte, Andrea B. Bailey, and Christopher A. Thorn, Second-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, Wis.: The Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992).

John F. Witte, Andrea B. Bailey, and Christopher A. Thorn,Third-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, Wis.: The Robert La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993).

John F. Witte, et al., Fourth-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, Wis.: The Robert La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994).

20 Paul E. Peterson, A Critique of the Witte Evaluation of Milwaukee's School Choice Program Occasional Paper 95-2 (Harvard, Mass.: Harvard University Center for American Political Studies, 1995).

21 Timothy Sheehy, to all members of the Wisconsin legislature, January 28, 1995.

22 John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Educational Choice: Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Mediocrity in American Education And What Can Be Done About It (Milwaukee: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Report, March 1989).

George A. Mitchell, The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Milwaukee: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Report, November 1992).

Susan Mitchell, Educational Choice in Wisconsin: Public Funds for Private Schools Early Childhood through Post Secondary (Milwaukee: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Report, May 1993).

23 Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau Audit Summary Report 95-3 (Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Legislative ASudit Bureau, 1995).

24 John Witte, to members of the Wisconsin legislature, February 13, 1995.

25 P.W. Cookson, School Choice: The Struggle for the Soul of American Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

26 Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994).

27 Geoff Whitty, "Creating Quasi-Markets in Education: A Review of Recent Research on Parental Choice and School Autonomy in Three Countries," in Michael W. Apple, ed., Review of Research in Education, 22 (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, [in press] 1997).

28 Martin Carnoy, "Is School Privatization the Answer? Data from the Experience of Other Countries Suggest Not." Education Week, July 12, 1995.

29 School Choice, (Princeton: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1992).

30 Bruce Fuller, Who Gains, Who Loses from School Choice: A Research Summary , policy brief (Denver: National Conference of State Legislatures, 1995).

31 John E. Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990).

32 Kevin B. Smith and Kenneth J. Meier, The Case Against School Choice: Politics, Markets, and Fools (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharp, 1995).

33 Maureen Wahl, First-year Report of the Partners Advancing Values in Education Scholarship Program (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1993).

Maureen Wahl, Second-year Report of the Partners Advancing Values in Education Scholarship Program (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1994)

Maureen Wahl, Third-year Report of the Partners Advancing Values in Education Scholarship Program (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1995)

34 Marie Rohde, "Minority Test Scores at Catholic Schools Mirror Lag in City," Milwaukee Journal, August 1, 1991.

35 Ernst-Ulrich Franzen, "Archdiocese Abolishes School System," Milwaukee Sentinel, January 27, 1994.

36 Milwaukee Public Schools Governmental Relations Office, to the author, December 1 and 6, 1995.

37 Emily Koczela, Timothy J. McElhatton, and Jean B. Tyler, Public and Private School Costs: A Local Analysis (Milwaukee: Public Policy Forum, 1994).

38 The California Voucher _Parental Choice in Education" Constitutional Amendment Initiated by Petition (Denver: Education Commission of the States, 1993).

39 Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 67.

40 Kenneth Jost, "Private Management of Public Schools," The CQ Researcher 4, no. 12 (March 25, 1994): 277.

41 Drew Lindsay, "With Voters Lukewarm, Calif. Group Shelves Voucher Initiative until 1998 Election, Education Week, September 6, 1995, p. 17.

42 Mark Walsh, "N.J. Governor Agrees to Delay School Voucher Legislation," Education Week, January 18, 1995, p. 11.

43 Drew Lindsay, "PepsiCo Backs Off Voucher Plan in Jersey City," Education Week, November 15, 1995, p. 3.

44 A Summary of Focus Group Findings in Chicago and Cleveland, on behalf of Alliance for Better Schools (Fairfax, Va.: Public Opinion Strategies, 1993).

45 Larry Rohter, "Puerto Rico Takes Lead with School Vouchers, and Feels the Arrows," The New York Times, October 27, 1993.

46 Mark Walsh, "Court Strikes Down Puerto Rico's Private-School Voucher Program," Education Week, December 14, 1994, p. 17.

47 1994-95 State Issues Report (Denver: Education Commission of the States, 1995), pp. 65-68.

48 Joanna Richardson, "Minn. Governor Unveils Private School Voucher Plan," Education Week, November 29, 1995, p. 13.

49 1994-95 State Issues Report (Denver: Education Commission of the States, 1995), p. 66.

50 Memo from John Goff, Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction to BEST Board of Directors, October 30, 1995.

Bert Holt, Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, reading from an official memo from the Ohio Department of Education's legal representation, January 29, 1996.

Posted November 27, 1996