Voucher-Choice works for Walker

The expansion of school voucher-choice programs is an efficient way for Walker to encourage the expansion of voucher-choice programs.

Prior research: Predicting WI's future: GOP's b.s. claim--Vouchers work!
Curt in Cheeseland predicts voucher-choice school scores will go up and public school scores will go down.  He shows how this can be the result of "a natural function of the way Walker has carefully crafted the state's new private school voucher system."

Curt concludes that a program intended to assist low-income students cannot be shown to work by adding middle-income students to the program.

In the data: Milwaukee Public Schools and Milwaukee Parental Choice Schools 2010-11 WSAS Number and Percent Proficient and Advanced (PA) for Students by Race/Ethnicity

Milwaukee Public School students eligible to receive free or reduced lunch (MPS-FRL) are expected to be correlated with low-income students. In 2010-11 school year, MPS-FRL and Milwaukee Parental Choice school students (Choice) were equivalently proficient and advanced (PA) in reading. MPS-FRL had a higher level of PA in math than Choice students.

	% Read PA	% Math PA
MPS-FRL	55.3	43.9
Choice	55.2	34.4

This is an example of the voucher system not working.

In the courts: ACLU: Complaint to DOJ with regards to Milwaukee Parent Choice Program (MPCP)

Messmer has also posted on its website DPI's MPCP brochure, which, with respect to students with disabilities, states:

A Choice [voucher] school may not discriminate against a child with special needs in the admission process or elsewhere. However, as a private school, the Choice school is only required to offer those services to assist students with special needs that it can provide with minor adjustments. Parents should contact Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) for more information on the services provided to children with special needs enrolled in the public schools and the lesser services that MPS provides these children enrolled in private schools. [81]

Needless to say, DOJ should also put a halt to overt discrimination in the voucher program against students with disabilities such as K.S., who neither need nor have they requested any form of accommodation but are barred from admission due to discriminatory notions of what the voucher schools believe these children need.

Hypothesis: Voucher-choice programs can be shown to "work" even when they don't work.

Through discriminatory cherry-picking admissions processes, private schools can trivially improve their test scores at the direct cost of a decrease in public school test scores. Choice test scores can be improved by increasing the income limit of a program intended to assist low-income students.

With this method, it can be shown that economic disadvantage carries itself over into an academic disadvantage. From this result, Walker will conclude voucher-choice "works."

Walker & whatever-remains-of-his-Co. will shout "Voucher-Choice Success!" next Spring to distract us from getting our photo ID's and studying new voter regulations.

Future work: Compare and contrast Soviet Union's Ural-Siberian method for ag reform with United States' right-wing extremist school reform.

Fun with resources:

• Ural-Siberian method
  Excerpt: A distinctive feature of the method was its appearance as the people's initiative.
  
  • In case of vandalism, check for the March 29, 2011 version, the latest version as of this writing. Constructive edits welcome!
  • A traditionally published source: "The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside", Volume one (Annals of Communism Series), 2005,ISBN: 0300106122, section "The Ural-Siberian Method and the Intensification of Repression", [pp. 119-123]
• Senate OK'd budget goes to Walker, Measure includes voucher school changes