I'm Matt Rothschild and welcome to another episode of the Wisconsin Forward podcast here
on the Civic Media Network.
In this episode, we're going to be talking about the controversial school voucher program.
Wisconsin was actually the first state in the country to allow school vouchers.
That's the use of public funds to subsidize families who send their kids to private schools.
Governor Tommy Thompson in 1989 and the state legislature brought the vouchers into being.
The program started as a way to give options to a few low income black families in Milwaukee
who wanted to send their kids to private non-religious schools.
State Representative Annette Polly Williams, a black legislator who served in the assembly
for 30 years championed the program initially, but she had to change her heart years later
as the program morphed into something quite different than what she'd envisioned.
The program ballooned going statewide and allowing middle class families to participate
as well as permitting the vouchers to be used for religious private schools.
They've hijacked the program Williams said in her later years.
Here's how it's ballooned.
In 1990-1991, only seven schools participated in the program.
Now there are nearly 400 schools participating mostly religious with about 55,000 pupils
and their families receiving vouchers.
And we, the Wisconsin taxpayers, are footing the bill for them, which comes to more than
500 million bucks a year.
That's money that's being drained from our public schools.
So let's get into it.
First I'm going to bring Earl Ingram in.
He's the host of the Earl Ingram show on Civic Media and he knew Annette Polly Williams
very well and he was there for the inception.
Let me begin by saying the school choice program was not called school choice in the beginning.
It was called vouchers.
There was this wonderful woman, State Representative Annette Polly Williams in her eight Larry Hawwell
who seems like 30 years or so ago now.
It seems like yesterday created a voucher program and it was based on the fact that people
of color struggled sometimes in the Milwaukee public school system.
Annette Polly Williams, who is a State Representative, a beloved State Representative in our community,
came up with this idea.
She was watching many others around us, children who went to parochial schools.
Parents who could afford to send their kids to parochial schools and get quality educations
and she wanted that for her own children, her own grandchildren and that's kind of what
was the impetus of creating vouchers could have never happened if they didn't have the
right governor at the time or Republican governor.
Annette Polly Williams was a Democrat and if you can envision, you see things today with
Democrats and Republicans can't work together.
Annette Polly Williams was able to work along with then governor Tommy Thompson who made
all of that possible.
Do you think Tommy was really interested in the well-being of poor black students in
Milwaukee or was this kind of employee for Tommy, Karen Water for the privatizers or was
he sincere, do you think?
Tommy Thompson was sincere.
I remember Tommy Thompson well.
Tommy Thompson had a great relationship with the black community.
I would venture to say that Tommy Thompson probably had one of the best relationships with
the black community of Milwaukee than Democratic governors and so he was sincere when he decided
to move forward with the then voucher program.
Eventually Polly Williams said this is gone wrong.
The school voucher program is not what I had intended it to be and she kind of recanted
or renounced the program as it developed.
How did that happen?
Well, it was hijacked in railroad by George Bush senior and so they realized that this
was an opportunity for them to show some leadership in education and so they took over what
was the voucher program and named it the school choice program and it became a plank of the
election of then president George Bush the first.
They brought Polly Williams, a state representative and that Polly Williams I never will forget to
Washington DC for photo op and she was basically pushed to the side and they took this program
in, altered it to the degree that it was the whole purpose of what it was created for
was lost.
And then to add insult to injury people who are already paying for their kids to go to
private schools now were able to get dollars from the taxpayers and now instead of supporting
one school district the taxpayers that were now supporting this whole new school district
especially for people who are already sending their kids to private schools so it certainly
changed the whole dynamic of it.
And so the school choice program really became a huge force here in Wisconsin so income levels
were lifted for families that could afford to send their kids to private schools, tax dollars
our own citizen tax dollars were bring siphoned off from the public schools to finance these
private schools and that had what kind of effect on the public schools.
Well, I had a devastating effect so I'm a lifelong resident of the city of Milwaukee.
I graduated high school in 1972.
Milwaukee Public Schools had 120,000 students when I graduated.
Today Milwaukee Public Schools has probably 65,000.
There are 50,000 students in schools other than private public schools in Milwaukee.
It's had a devastating effect on Milwaukee Public Schools.
Not only because they've cut down the amount of students that are in the schools which
affects the amount of money that comes into the schools but what they did more than anything
else was pair off some of the quality students who could possibly help to balance off what
used to be unfortunately many students that are failing in the district.
And I also say that what made this so sinister and so hurtful is that public schools are
mandated by law to educate everybody.
They can't turn anybody away.
These schools have the freedom to say no.
And so even though at the beginning of the school year when those students go over to the
voucher schools they receive the money but then later on they can say well hey Earl's
not going to make it release that student and by law Milwaukee Public Schools has to
take that student back without the funds that they originally received to pay for that
student.
The voucher schools got the resources, got rid of what they considered the headache and
Milwaukee Public Schools gets the student back and by law they have to educate them.
I think if you look at what is transpired now they become for profit schools.
We can't leave that out.
There's a major growth in the city of Milwaukee of these schools but not only that when they
started expanding these vouchers they went to different towns and cities in the state.
And now it's not just in the city of Milwaukee where it began.
It spread all over the state of Wisconsin and many areas, green, bay, south of Milwaukee.
Their experience in the same thing.
They did not want those schools in their areas because they're in direct competition with
public schools and when you destroy public education which has been the bedrock of what
our nation really was and what created it.
I don't think people really realize the major damage has been done and has been done.
Now to discuss how the voucher program has adversely affected our public schools.
Here's Heather Dubois-Bernon, the executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network.
What is the Wisconsin Public Education Network?
We are statewide advocacy coalition that tries to connect everybody who cares about Wisconsin
kids in their public schools to information, action, and each other.
That means students, teachers, parents, community members, administrators, board members, educators,
everybody who has a stake, which is basically everybody.
And it's an incredible grassroots organization you really bring pressure on our elected officials.
Like almost no other group that I know of so congratulations on that.
Thanks for that.
We need more people to join us.
So tell me about the voucher program in Wisconsin.
Give us vouchers 101 here in Wisconsin.
Yeah, school privatization is really confusing here in Wisconsin because there are so many
different types.
Some people might be interested to learn that Wisconsin actually had the first state funded
school voucher program, the one that started in Milwaukee and well the act was in 1989.
It went into being in 1990.
That program was expanded over the next couple of decades.
And then under Governor Walker was expanded state, first and recene in 2011 and then statewide
in 2013.
And now we have a program today that operates all over the state.
And basically what it is is a state funded voucher, a kind of like a coupon that goes
to cover the tuition of a specific student at a specific private school.
So these are private schools, almost all of them are religious schools.
And they operate under a different set of rules than public schools, but now using public
funds.
Now that different set of rules is what?
Well public schools are required to operate under certain rules and obligations that are
set by the state and federal governments and private organizations are exempt from them.
They don't have to, for example, follow laws that public schools have to follow that you
can't discriminate against students, for instance, or that you have to provide special
education services or follow laws like the Americans for Disabilities Act.
Public schools are also required to have democratically elected school boards so that we have a way
of having a voice and an influence in policy measures at the district level.
Public schools participate in the voucher program, don't have to follow those rules.
And so they can just, they can take any kid that they want and they can refuse any kid
that they want.
Well, technically they can't refuse any kid that they want.
But what we do see is that they have the leeway to do what's called counseling out.
That's when a student who has been admitted to the program is rejected and private schools
can reject students once they're admitted for any reason whatsoever.
In fact, they don't have to give a reason.
And some of these private schools, voucher schools, have been kind of fly by night.
That is they'd open in the fall and then they'd close by December or they'd close in January.
Yeah, there are a lot of examples in Wisconsin of students and family who have really been
left in the lurch when their schools shut down either a grade or a whole school or, you
know, and lots of documented incidents of, you know, the sort of fraud that is much more
difficult to pull off in a public system where there's a very intense level of scrutiny
on how public dollars are spent.
And give us some idea of the magnitude of the program now.
How many students are in the private school choice or voucher program compared to how many
are in public education?
Well, we've got about 128,000 students statewide who are in private schools of those about
60% are attend a voucher school.
So there are just under 55,000 students in the voucher program this year attending 383
total schools, which is a huge jump from where we were just four or five years ago.
And part of the reason for that is because in the state statute, the enrollment allotment
increases every single year.
And so it's not that demand is greater.
It's that more students who are already attending private schools now receive a voucher.
In fact, about 80% of the kids who are in that statewide program never attended a public
school at all.
Further, we should expect even bigger increases in those enrollment numbers in the coming
years because statute allows that in the year 2026, the enrollment caps come off that
program altogether, which is ironic because the program was started for poor families in
the Milwaukee area.
Yeah, that's another way that the program has really changed over time.
In the Milwaukee and Racine programs, families can qualify to receive a voucher if they
have incomes at 300% of federal poverty in the statewide program.
It's 220% that means you can make 60 to $80,000 a year and still get qualified for a voucher.
And you said the vast majority of families that are taking advantage of this voucher program,
we're sending their kids prior to that to private schools anyway, so they could afford it
even without the voucher.
Well, we don't know what the story is and those parents maybe they were getting a scholarship
through their church or through through the school, we, I mean, clearly they have qualified
at that level of financial need, but yes, we know that there is no ground swell movement
in Wisconsin of people who are clamoring for more choice options and more voucher schools.
The only people that I see clamoring for this are the paid lobbyists for the private
years who have a very loud and disproportionate voice at the state house and who are putting
tons and tons of money into campaigns that try to create this myth that people are dissatisfied
with their public schools, which we know overall they are not.
Tell me on state funding, how much state funding now goes to these, to these voucher schools?
Well, it was over $500 million this last year and when we factor in the so-called independent
charters, those are charter schools that operate outside of district control and are privately
operated but publicly funded.
The price tag is over $700 million this year alone.
And what's the consequence of that for our public schools?
Well, the pot just keeps getting smaller and smaller and we're seeing that as a percentage
of state GPR, even when we factor in these extra payments, the state is just giving
a smaller and smaller amount to our public schools.
We had a tiny bump this year in the past state budget, giving $325 per student to our
students in public schools, but the voucher increase went up over $3,000.
Students who are getting a voucher to attend at the high school level got a $3,342 increase.
And so there's a real disconnect in the way that the state is choosing to invest in one
sector over the other and that's just increasing the funding gap or across the state, which
is already complicated by a lot of factors related to the way that the way we fund public
schools is already unfair.
And the way we fund public schools in Wisconsin, some of it comes from state government a lot
of it and then there is a freeze on that for a long time, which is why a lot of localities
had to go to referendum to increase the tax base for schools in their district, is that
correct?
In fact, the Evers budget, his first one was kept those caps in place and it was only
the second budget under the Evers administration that we were able to see that tiny increase.
The big irony here as well, that sounds like great news and in one sense it is, districts
are desperate for that additional spending authority.
It doesn't even come close to keeping pace with inflation.
We got $325 per student.
It would have taken $3,380 just to keep pace with inflation for all those years when that
cap was frozen and we didn't see an inflationary increase to state aid.
And that was all the walker years in the first part of Evers.
Yeah, that's just measuring since 2009.
And so that doesn't even take into account what we could call the old broken, which is
how bad things got since those revenue limits were put into place, which was in 1995.
And what's the answer to that?
It's just to lift those revenue limits and not let them come back.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
The answer is to reform our entire school funding system so that it's aligned with student
needs and not property values.
I mean, this idea that the state should dictate how much each child needs in a certain district
without even looking at the needs of those kids without seeing how many kids are in
those language learners, how many kids have disabilities, how many kids need to get
bused in from long distances.
These are all huge factors that contribute to school's costs and the current formula
doesn't accurately or honestly assess for those needs at all.
And tell me about rural schools, a lot of, they're not a lot of voucher schools in a lot
of rural areas and the rural public schools now have been strangled by funding.
So what is the school choice program or the voucher program done to a public education
in rural areas?
Yeah, it's just further widened that gap too.
I mean, over 56% of our districts are rural, but 20% of the kids go to those schools.
Vouchers really have a disproportionate impact on rural schools because the pot is already
shrunk for those districts, especially ones that are already blighted by these low spending
limits that they set in the 1990s.
And so as that gap gets wider and wider and more and more schools statewide are participating
in the program, we see that even in districts where you don't have any voucher schools,
students are really paying the price of the overwhelming expansion of this program
at the expense of students who attend public schools.
And there's nothing in the Wisconsin State Constitution that talks about or there would
allow public funding of private or parochial schools, correct?
On the contrary, what the Constitution says is that public schools are required to provide
as uniform and education as practicable to all kids and no sectarian instructions shall
be allowed therein.
Wow, I would think that would be a prohibition, but it got through once.
It got through once.
So I mean, that matter has already been settled by the court on the argument that the voucher
follows the child and doesn't go to the school, which is also a bit of a shell game because
parents don't get a check and go cash it in or a coupon and go cash it in.
The money does actually go directly from the state to the school, but it passes through
the public school district in a way that kind of confuses the matter.
That's Heather Dubois-Bernon, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network.
To amplify Heather's concerns, let's hear from the hosts of the Busted Pencils podcast
on Civic Media that's Tim Slecker and Johnny Lupinacci.
First, Tim Slecker.
That's a crucial point to point out is for people to realize too that the messaging has
drastically changed about moving kids out of failing schools into better schools, because
the evidence that never happened, every experiment in Milwaukee of looking at kids that were
moved from the public schools into some form of private voucher choice.
The academic achievement never blossomed, it just didn't happen because it wasn't that
teachers in the kids were in failing schools.
They were in a failing system of socioeconomic supports that did not respond to the community
the way that it was needed.
This was never about failing public schools.
The messaging though has shifted and you can see this now where it's a family's choice.
Yeah, and it's just manipulative of the general public because it sounds really great.
So let's provide better educational opportunities for kids.
And across the board, I think by and large people are like, this is great, this is something
we really need.
Schools need them.
Need some help.
We need some improvement.
So this sort of illusion of choice and improvement was just a real big political marketing campaign
to privatize education.
And like private schools have always existed and they'll always exist in a form of where
if you can afford them or they can offer a scholarship, it's a different kind of education
than a public education system.
But this was a blatant sort of marketing tactic and political move to create an economy
in education to really deregulate education at state levels because education is a state
right.
And Wisconsin's more than a canary in the coal mine.
This is like something that started here and people have been working hard to dispel
the myth that this choice is actually improving schools for kids.
It's not, it's just improving economic opportunity for big companies that want their hands in
the pot of public education money.
And so it's robbed children, it's robbed families, it's bad advertising because it's not
been delivered on.
But it's made a lot of high power people money.
I mean, it was definitely a money grab.
Yeah.
But it's also an ideological grab.
It's part of this theme to say to the people of Wisconsin, the people of this country,
that anything private is good, anything public is bad.
That's right.
And the private sector can do it better in the public sector and the whole notion that
there is a public or that there is a community or that we have shared interests as fellow
citizens in a democracy goes the wayside when they push this ideology down our throats.
And you know, the result of that is, you know, you get rid of public parks.
You don't like public.
You don't want a public park.
You don't want to.
And you blame the public sector for the public parks being gone.
Yeah.
And the idea that you just get rid of everything public is just kind of insane.
And it's insane at the education level.
But it is run and pushed this ideology by some super rich people, billionaire, Betsy
DeVos.
You know, Trump's secretary of education, her group, American Federation for Children,
has spent $9 million on electing Republicans in Wisconsin since 2010, who will keep opening
the spigot of money now.
And how much money is the school choice program, God, and for that money, billions, billions
and billions of dollars.
You also then made the point here of going, why is this happening because it isn't attack
on democracy.
Right.
It's an attack on democracy.
When you attack public, you're attacking democracy because those are those spaces that
are preserved and waiting for us to allow us to come together and occupy to practice democracy.
If we limit those spaces, we're limiting democracy.
Yeah.
And I think you hit the nail on the head with it also being an ideological thing because
it's, you know, stepping back, it really is about saying, should there even be industry
in education?
Is the public sector capable or should it, in a democracy, should we have that?
And I think a lot of us have said, absolutely, like to make this an industry should almost
be an oxymoron, right?
We shouldn't have like a, you know, a corporate model of education.
But that's that big ideological view that's been pushed and it goes back decades and decades.
And it's no accident that's an attack on schools because public schools are where we learn
the importance of democracy is where we realize that even with industry out there, there are
some really important things that are part of the common good that are the fabric of a healthy
strong democracy.
And so, I mean, sadly for schools, they've been the target and that that has been sort
of the sad state of the war on public education all across this country.
And it gets to the curriculum battles too because I mean, you know, you go in some private
parochial schools, they'll be, they're funded with Wisconsin taxpayer public dollars.
They're teaching, you know, creationism or things that are just so anti-science that it's
kind of mind-boggling.
This has been such a hard nut to crack for people because the cell job was so great when
Wisconsin starting with an African American civil rights activist assembly person, Polly
Williams.
But they don't listen to what Polly said at the end when she totally renounced the contamination
of the so-called choice program when she saw that it was just a tool and she was just
being used as a tool for decades on this thing.
And Heather, you mentioned earlier that there's confusion on, you know, are we spending record
historic amounts or are we spending, are we underfunding?
So do you want to clear that up?
We are currently spending more than half a billion dollars a year on vouchers alone that
does not include the other forms of privatization that we are funding with public tax dollars
in the state that is schools that are publicly funded but privately operated like the so-called
independent charter schools.
This fall, kids will be entering the 16th year in a row that the state did not provide
a public school funding budget that kept pace with inflation from the previous year.
That's 16 years of cuts.
It's time to say is enough is enough.
We're not here over saying, you know, what are you fighting for?
Add a quit aid.
What are you funding for?
Just doing what we've been doing.
No.
We want to set a higher bar.
We want to restore the joy gap for every kid so that all of our kids, all of our educators
feel like they are welcome in a thriving, joyful, vibrant public school.
It's, you know, it's not enough to say we just have to give them exactly enough or exactly
as much as they're used to or exactly what they'll take.
We need to set a higher bar for our kids and people who are ready to do that need to get
off the sidelines.
Support these referendums.
In every day, ambassador for your kids in your schools, let your neighbors know what
you love about them.
Join us at Wisconsin Public Education Network.
Come to our summer summit July 30 and 31 in Madison and learn more about how you can
be part of this growing movement and do your part in standing up for local kids and setting
that higher bar that they deserve because it's on us.
No one else is going to do this work for us.
In investment and strong public education is an investment in your state's economy.
It's an investment, a high yield, sort of like safe investment on, on better local economics
and, you know, lower crime and all the things that we want in our states, better health
care.
It all starts with the strong public education system.
So it's just also a wise investment, best bank for the book, investing in your public
schools.
Yeah, it's an investment in the economy, it's an investment in community, it's an investment
in democracy, it's an investment in joy.
Yeah, I love it.
I love it.
There's a line about joy, fill that joy gap, fund our public schools.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Wisconsin Forward podcast.
I'm your host, Matt Rothschild, and I'll be back with another episode soon on the upcoming
Crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court Race.
So please watch for that one.
