In my household, the passing of July marks the start of the end of summer. August just seems to fly by, packed full of soccer practice and swimming. More important, I'm reminded of what would have been Milton Friedman's 97th birthday.

Dr. Friedman was the greatest economist of our time, an unrelenting defender of personal freedom and the father of the school choice movement. We have a special connection with Dr. Friedman because Milwaukee is, for the moment, home to the nation's oldest and largest school choice program. Recent developments in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), however, would have troubled Dr. Friedman.  

If you followed the saga of what we now call the 2009-2011 state budget, you know that School Choice was one of the most widely debated and contentious issues. Members of the same political party had heated disagreements behind closed doors about the future of the program. Veiled threats were made to vote against the budget unless certain amendments were adopted. Additional restrictions were added to placate special interest groups. In the end, the effort spent by our politicians cooking up more and more bureaucratic regulations for the Choice Schools dwarfed that of any other single subject in the state.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of Dr. Friedman's vision for education.  Dr. Friedman believed that all schools need the maximum amount of freedom possible to produce progress. I guess, given the amount of time spent smothering this program, the Choice Schools are in desperate need of immediate repair.  A closer look at the education system as a whole in Milwaukee paints a much different picture. 

Milwaukee Public Schools, or MPS, is the state's largest school district, serving approximately 87,000 students a year at over 200 schools. MPS has a yearly budget of $1.2 billion dollars which equates to nearly $13,800 of spending per child. The School Choice program serves over 19,000 students a year at roughly 120 different private institutions. The yearly cost of the Choice Program is approximately $129 million dollars and the maximum parent reimbursement for each child was recently cut to $6,442.

While MPS has made some modest academic improvement recently, it is struggling. In the fall of 2008, Gov. Jim Doyle, Mayor Tom Barrett and several local foundations commissioned McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, to undertake an independent evaluation of MPS. McKinsey & Company published their report, "Toward a Stronger Milwaukee Public Schools," this past April.

The McKinsey team found that MPS has "seen limited improvement" in a few areas.  Since 2004, the percentage of 8th graders reaching the proficient level on the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE) in science rose from 29 to 40 percent. In math, it went from 29 to 38 percent. Finally, McKinsey found that the graduation rate has increased two points to 69 percent over the same time period.
In general, however, the McKinsey report offers a terrifying look at MPS. "With the primary exception of increased proficiency in 8th grade math and science, student performance has not improved and, in many cases, has worsened over the past five years."

MPS fourth-grade reading and math scores have dropped since 2004. ACT scores have dropped from 18.1 to 17.5 over the same time period. The achievement gap between MPS 10th graders and the rest of the state in reading and math has widened, not narrowed, in the last four years.

The situation is so grave that Gov. Doyle and Mayor Barrett commented in their letter accompanying the release of the report that "while we recognize the successes, the unfortunate reality is that academic outcomes throughout MPS remain unacceptably low" and that "more than 70 percent of MPS 10th graders are not proficient in mathematics, and more than 60 percent are not proficient in reading."

To make matters worse, MPS as a whole has also been recently designated for a fifth year in a row as a District Identified for Improvement (DIFI) under the Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.  MPS is now almost out of time. According to then-Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster, there is only one further sanction level left within NCLB and MPS is facing the possibility of losing millions of dollars in federal aid if adequate yearly progress is not achieved next year.

Individual schools within MPS have also been designated as Schools Identified for Improvement (SIFI). Fifty-one individual schools recently found themselves on the SIFI list. These schools serve over 28,000 students.

Now, contrast the struggles of MPS with those of the Choice Schools. During the 2008-2009 school year, nine private schools were sanctioned by DPI. These schools served almost 1,300 students. Four of the schools were terminated from the program and closed.  The other five schools are currently making their way through an administrative law proceeding to determine their future in the program.

What does the academic research show us about the Choice Schools? The national team of researchers at the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) are in the middle of a five-year longitudinal study of the Choice Program which will produce a total of 36 reports. In March, the second round of reports was released. The SCDP found that Choice students scored somewhere in the 33rd and 41st percentile on standardized tests in the 4th, 8th and 10th grade compared to the average student in the United States. This finding shows us that there is certainly room for improvement.

The evaluation also found that the group of Choice students who took the WKCE scored lower than similar students at MPS in the fourth grade but somewhat higher than similar students at MPS in the eighth grade. And Choice students in general "are performing at lower proficiency rates than income-disadvantaged MPS students in fourth grade but at higher proficiency rates than such students in two of the three subjects in eighth grade."  There are still three more years of studies and results to be produced, but the academic gains of the Choice kids are trending the right direction ... up.

These immediate concerns, however, need to be put in perspective. Twenty-eight thousand MPS students attend 51 "challenged" public schools while the entire Choice Program serves 19,000 students. That means approximately 33 percent of the students in MPS attend a school in need of improvement while less than 10 percent of private students in the Choice Program attend a questionable school.

We would like to ask our esteemed elected officials, why the rush to strangle the Choice Schools with new regulations? Why was there no sense of urgency to "fix" MPS during the budget process like there was with the Choice Schools? Could it be that the legislators are worried more about politics and elections than the children of Milwaukee?

The point here is not to pummel MPS.  The point is to prod parents and the rest of the state to expect more. Wisconsin needs Milwaukee and the schools that educate the children of Milwaukee to succeed. In order to compete globally, Wisconsin needs a highly educated and skilled workforce.

Our education system must be competitive with others across the globe, not just those in our small corner of the world. We cannot begin to achieve that goal if we do not produce as many high school graduates as possible, especially in the City of Milwaukee.

As Emily Anne House of the Friedman Foundation pointed out in her report published for The MacIver Institute back in April, the toll of the high dropout rate here in Wisconsin is almost $500 million a year in higher costs and lower revenues. 

Here is an idea. Let's return to the original vision of Dr. Friedman. We should not care if a high-quality school is public, private, charter or virtual. Instead, we should focus on implementing a true system of free choice for every child that, according to Dr. Friedman, would produce "competition and innovation, changing the character of education." Let's focus our efforts long-term on preparing our children to compete globally, not just the easy fix to get us past the next election.

Let's put the interests of the children and their parents first. 


Brett Healy is president of The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a free-market think tank located in Wisconsin.  For more information, visit http://maciverinstitute.com.