The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.
Recently, the Wisconsin Policy Forum released a comprehensive overview of the education landscape in Milwaukee. The report is likely eye-opening for many—and shows just how far behind Milwaukee’s students are in comparison to the rest of the state and the nation. But, much of the media coverage of this report seems to focus on the notion that education reform has failed in the city. For instance, the Journal Sentinel headline calls back to the birth of the private school choice program in Milwaukee thirty years ago as a starting point for this failure. But the reality is far more nuanced, and Milwaukee’s choice and charter schools ought to get credit for doing a better job on average.
One need only dig deeper into the Policy Forum’s report to see evidence of this. The share of students in highly rated schools in the choice program (58.4%) and charter schools (76.1%) is far higher than the share of students in MPS in such schools (20.4%). The same story holds in WILL’s annual Apples to Apples report which aims to put schools on a level playing field by controlling for demographic factors in a statistical model. This report regularly finds a performance advantage for choice and charter schools that is statistically significant.
Far more comprehensive research has regularly found that school choice does serve as an incentive for public school improvement. A 2024 comprehensive overview of the existing peer-reviewed research from EdChoice found 29 studies that examined the effect of school choice on public school students. 26 of those studies found some positive effect, 1 found no effect, and just 2 found a negative effect. Based on the evidence, one might expect public school performance in Milwaukee to be even worse were the choice and charter programs not to exist.
All of this is not to dismiss the need for continued improvement across all sectors in Milwaukee. A reading proficiency rate of approximately 16.5% in the choice sector is not something anyone should be writing home about. But it is meant to caution against the knee-jerk reaction that additional regulation is needed of the city’s educational options.
Not every student enters school or learns at the same pace. Respected scholarship shows many students enter the Milwaukee choice program behind their MPS peers. DPI data documents that those students are experiencing noticeable growth. There now is a growing gap, with choice students outperforming MPS students.
We cannot say the free market has failed in Milwaukee education because the free market has still not even been fully tried. There are still many barriers to families that want to exercise school choice in Milwaukee. Some of these impediments are well known—families must prove they have income below 300% of the federal poverty limit and prove their residency in the district. But some of these other regulations fly under the radar.
For instance, DPI has exerted authority in the past—later judged to be invalid based on a WILL lawsuit—to require additional verification documents from parents and denied applications for things like common abbreviations of addresses or hyphenated last names. Beyond the interference of DPI, parents face informational barriers in learning about the existence of educational alternatives. We routinely hear stories from school administrators about parents who are unaware that the private school choice program exists, or that schools are not allowed to charge tuition on top of the voucher amount outside of high school.
A true marketplace only exists if it is as easy for me to shop at a nearby Pick-n-Save as it is to shop at an Aldi of similar distance. But our current system requires a would-be shopper to drive around 10 miles of roadblocks to reach the Aldi. Rather than more regulation, policymakers should look at ways to free up the education sector even more—both in Milwaukee and the state as a whole.
Will Flanders is the Research Director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Nic Kelly is the President of School Choice Wisconsin.
