A study being released today suggests that school choice isn't a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools.

But more surprising than the conclusion is the organization issuing the study: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation's premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.

"The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find," George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper's first sentence.

"We had expected to find a wellspring of hope that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools would be the key ingredient in improving student performance," Lightbourn wrote. But "there are realistic limits on the degree to which parental involvement can drive market-based reform in Milwaukee."

Even some of the most ardent supporters of school choice in Milwaukee have seen that the purest version of the idea - in which there is little government oversight of schools, and parental decisions in a free market dictate which schools thrive - does not square with the reality of what happened in Milwaukee when something close to such a system existed.

That reality can be summed up in two phrases: "bad schools" and "little change."

Bad schools: A Journal Sentinel investigative report in 2005 of the then-115 schools in the voucher program found that about 10% showed startling signs of weak operations. In short, many parents were choosing bad schools and sticking with them. Escalated government oversight of schools' business practices and a new requirement that all voucher schools be accredited by an outside organization have played roles in putting most of those schools out of business.

Little change: Milwaukee has been a national laboratory for school reform such as the voucher program, yet there is little evidence that it has yielded substantially improved academic results - at least so far. Test scores in MPS, especially for 10th-graders, have been generally flat for years. The record of the voucher schools is unclear, though results from a major study of the program are supposed to begin coming soon.

Howard Fuller, the most prominent supporter of voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee, has changed his position toward agreeing that government oversight of voucher schools is needed. In a recent interview for a workshop of the national Education Writers Association, Fuller said empowering parents to make good choices, improving student performance and creating good schools were proving to be much harder achievements than many once thought.

Asked whether the voucher program was leading to improvements in the achievement of MPS students, as was once expected, Fuller said: "I'm one of those people who believes that we may have oversold that point. . . . I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS that we would have thought."

Fuller said he remains a strong supporter of school choice, but he now has a more realistic understanding of what it can accomplish. Lightbourn also said he and the institute remain committed to school choice as a principle, but other reforms clearly are needed to drive major improvement in the success of Milwaukee students.
Methodology of the study

The new report focuses on parental choice within MPS, including parents who select schools within MPS or who use the state's open enrollment law to send their children to public schools in the suburbs. It does not discuss parents who select private schools in the publicly funded voucher program or charter schools that are not affiliated with MPS.

The report did not analyze actual data from MPS or interviews or surveys with MPS parents. Instead, it used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Education analyzing decision-making by parents from different social and economic groups when it comes to school selection for their children and how they are involved in their children's schools. The report applies that data to MPS parents, assuming the same percentages of parents use the same methods of choosing.

The overall conclusion: Only 10% of MPS parents make school choices by a process that involves considering at least two schools and that brings academic performance data from a school into the choice.

"Given this number, it seems unlikely that MPS schools are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace," wrote the report's author, researcher David Dodenhoff.

Dodenhoff also concluded that parental involvement in MPS schools is low - he estimated that 34% of MPS parents could be considered "highly involved" in their children's schools. And he said his conclusions were probably on the high side because people tend to give the "right" answers when asked questions such as whether they are involved parents, even when the answers are untrue.

In an interview, Dodenhoff, who has written other reports for the institute, said that while it would be better to base conclusions on data directly about Milwaukee parents, coming up with numbers by applying national data locally was a defensible approach. He said his results squared with what people involved in Milwaukee schools told him were their best estimates of parental involvement.

In the conclusion of his report, Dodenhoff wrote: "Relying on public school choice and parental involvement to reclaim MPS may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district's schools. . . . The question is whether the district, its schools and its supporters in Madison are prepared to embrace reforms more radical than public school choice and parental involvement."

He did not specify what those reforms might be.
Options within MPS

Parents have numerous school choices within MPS. Each winter, the district offers a "three-choice" registration period to parents whose children will attend a new school the following fall. The process allows parents to pick first, second and third preferences for schools, and a large majority of people get the first choice.

The range of choices has been reduced somewhat in recent years, largely with a goal of holding down busing costs, but it has been difficult for MPS to persuade people to enroll in neighborhood schools, despite a neighborhood school initiative launched in 2000.

Nonetheless, whether parents use the choices to pick schools that are academically the best ones for their children is unknown.

MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos responded to the report in a statement, saying: "We believe that there are many reasons why parents choose a school. When we review parental choice in our district, we see that parents pass up high-quality schools in their neighborhoods for schools with lower academic performance outside their neighborhoods. When that happens, we wonder why those parents choose a school. Parents do make informed choices, but those choices have more to do with talking with their relatives and neighbors than with looking at data on academic performance."

Lightbourn said the conclusions of the report probably were relevant to how parents make choices for private schools in the voucher program, though Dodenhoff was reluctant to say how applicable the conclusions were to voucher parents.

Lightbourn said, "We should continue to encourage parental involvement in choosing for their children and for (parents) to be actively involved in choosing based on academic criteria."

But he added, "If they're not picking on academic criteria, the impact of choice will be minimized."

About 87,000 students are attending more than 200 schools in MPS this year, at an average cost of more than $11,000 per student. Voucher program figures have not been released yet but are expected to show that about 18,000 students are attending more than 120 private schools in the city, with the state generally providing the schools about $6,500 for each student.