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After Milwaukee: the most heralded experiment in education markets has not lived up to expectations. Frederick M. Hess explores what it will take to fulfill the promise of school choice.

Article Excerpt
Nearly two decades have passed since the enactment of the landmark Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by the Wisconsin legislature. The program and its many supporters had hoped this experiment in school choice would lead the way in transforming American schools. But it is by now clear that aggressive reforms to bring market principles to American education have failed to live up to their billing. It is time to find out two things: What happened? And what comes next?

Milwaukee's voucher program initially allowed a few hundred students to attend local private schools with public scholarships. When it was launched, advocates voiced expansive claims on behalf of "choice." In 1990, scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe argued in their seminal volume Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, "Without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.... It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways."

The record of markets in advancing prosperity, opportunity, and innovation is compelling. It seemed almost axiomatic that market reforms would deliver similar results in schooling, spurring the emergence of good schools and pushing traditional districts to improve.

Yet things have not worked out as intended. Chester Finn Jr., chair of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education and a champion of choice-based reform since the 1980s, has voiced "growing sympathy" with choice skeptics and warned against "too much trust in market forces."

Even staunch proponents of school choice are conceding disappointment. Earlier this year, Weekly Standard contributor Daniel Casse reported, "The two most recent studies show that, since the implementation of the voucher program, reading scores across all Milwaukee schools are falling." Howard Fuller, patron saint of the voucher program, has wryly acknowledged, "I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought." Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, one-time choice enthusiast and author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice, brought the concerns to a boiling point earlier this year when he declared, "Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district [there is] ... no 'Milwaukee miracle,' no transformation of the public schools has taken place."

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Today, the Milwaukee voucher program enrolls nearly 20,000 students in more than 100 schools, yet this growing marketplace has yielded little innovation or excellence. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently described 10 percent of voucher schools as having "alarming deficiencies." These include Alex's Academics of Excellence, which was launched by a convicted rapist, and the Mandella School of Science and Math, whose director over-reported its voucher enrollment and used the funds to purchase two Mercedes. Veteran Journal Sentinel writer Alan Borsukhas opined, "[Milwaukee Parental Choice Program] has preserved the status quo in terms of schooling options in the city more than it has offered a range of new, innovative, or distinctive schools."

Wisconsin headline writers have had a field day, with Milwaukee Magazine...

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