With a new school year starting and a new state budget in place, administrators, teachers and parents are all looking to provide the best education possible with the funding available. But one area where opinions tend to differ surrounds how much of those financial resources, if any, should be divided between public schools and voucher school options.
State Rep. Chris Taylor, D-Madison, recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post titled "Back to ALEC, Back to (Private) School." In it, Taylor argues that while the American Legislative Exchange Council — a conservative, pro-industry nonprofit — produces model legislation on a wide variety of issues, what she terms the privatization of public education appears to be one of their top priorities.
"ALEC is basically a dating service between big corporations, right-wing think tanks and state legislators," Taylor told WPR Monday.
Taylor said that the voucher program in Wisconsin, which gives students public dollars to attend private schools, is a direct product of ALEC, and that it has not improved the education that is provided in the state.
"(Vouchers) have not improved the performance of low-income children in Milwaukee. They have not improved graduation rates. This program has been a complete failure," she said.
Previously, said Taylor, vouchers were promoted as a way for low-income students to have access to a higher-quality education in better-functioning schools. But she said that ALEC is now targeting middle-income families as well, and as a result, caps on vouchers in Wisconsin have been lifted and other limits have been loosened to allow more children to access vouchers.
But for state Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt, a Fond du La Republican who chairs the Assembly's Education Committee, Taylor’s assessment of ALEC’s influence is off base. Thiesfeldt said that the school choice program in Wisconsin did not come from ALEC, but instead was a Wisconsin innovation that he described as "a pioneer nationwide."
In fact, Thiesfeldt said, the idea of school vouchers as they've been implemented in Wisconsin comes originally from the economist Milton Friedman, who was espousing these views as early as the mid-1950s.
Thiesfeldt said that the goal of vouchers is to make private education, which is often superior to the local public equivalent, available and accessible to many more students.
"Why would we want to deny a student the ability to go to a school that works best for them?" Thiesfeldt asked.
In response to Taylor's assertion that the voucher program in Milwaukee has not been successful, Thiesfeldt said that the 27,000 students taking advantage of the program would simply not stay if it was not working for them.
"If a program is not successful, it may happen slowly, but slowly it’s going to just kind of go away. There will be fewer and fewer people involved. We have the exact opposite going on in Milwaukee, and I assume the statewide program will have similar results," Thiesfeldt said.
