CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – My oldest daughter went to college in Milwaukee, and continues to live there. She says Milwaukee is an underrated city.
Perhaps. She knows Milwaukee better than I do.
But if you’re a young professional, Milwaukee isn’t do-able once you have kids. The school system is notoriously bad. Incompetently bad. It’s the school district that has the largest number of administrators in the state, but still lost out on state and federal aid for not getting its paperwork in on-time.
For many Milwaukee families of modest means, the state’s voucher program is the means of escape for their children. 60,000 families are in the state’s voucher program, where the state gives them small grants to send their kids to private schools. Per-student state aid also follows wherever the child is enrolled.
Getting rid of the voucher program is a cause celeb for liberals. A democrat running for office cannot win the powerful teachers union endorsement unless they are opposed to vouchers.
Francesca Hong and Mandela Barnes, the two most likely democrat nominees for governor, both campaign to abolish school vouchers. A case pending before the state supreme court would rule that vouchers illegally take public resources away from public schools.
The voucher program survived a court challenge in 2020, so long as the state provided sufficient resources to public schools. Since then, per-student aid in the Milwaukee School District has climbed about $25,000. At that level, MPS could hire personal tutors for each student. Yet the money evaporates into administrative costs. There is no school district that has more staff that isn’t involved in student instruction than Milwaukee.
School vouchers should be the issue of the campaign for governor. One side, Republicans, gives inner city students a pathway to success. Voucher students are far more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college, and earn degrees. The other side, democrats, want to yank funding away from voucher-school kids and send them back to failure factories.
Vote accordingly.
Chris Conley
Comments