Joseph Lawler and Philip Klein of the American Spectator have some helpful comments on my earlier post about the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of a recent report on Milwaukee’s voucher program. I had stated that the city’s public schools cost taxpayers about 50% more than the voucher program, and Lawler and Klein note that it’s really more like 100%. They’re right. The approved FY2010 budget is $1.073 billion and enrollment is 82,444 — for a per pupil figure of just over $13,000/pupil. The voucher is worth only $6,607.

My mistake was to rely on my recollection of the MPS spending figure used in a 2009 fiscal impact analysis of the voucher program, which turns out not to have included all the district’s revenue sources.  

But while I’m following up on this, I’d like to re-emphasize the final point of my earlier post, to which the Spectator writers did not draw particular attention: the Milwaukee voucher program is not a test of free market education. As I noted earlier, its total enrollment is legislatively limited to about 20,000 students, and in the past that limit was much lower. Additionally, there is a rigid price control on voucher schools — the voucher must be accepted as full payment, even though it is worth only half as much as public schools spend per pupil.

Think carefully about this. What entrepreneur would enter an industry whose total customer base is confined to a few thousand families in a single U.S. city and which has a rigid price control set at half the spending level of a government protected monopoly operating in that same city?

That is not test of market forces.

More on Milwaukee Vouchers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

To the extent education policy commentary actually affects policy, it has the potential to do great good or great harm. Several recent commentaries in this field fall into the latter camp, and it’s important to understand why — so that we can avoid similar mistakes in future.

The one I’ll discuss here is this blog post by Matthew Yglesias, in which he draws broad conclusions about the functioning of education markets from a recent study of a tiny school choice program in Milwaukee as well as from some older unspecified research [for the latter, Yglesias linked here, but the body of that page doesn't discuss school choice]. The Milwaukee study is part of a vast literature. Over the past quarter century at least sixty-five studies have compared outcomes in public and private schools around the world, reporting 156 separate statistical findings.

The evidence of this literature is starkly one-sided. The vast preponderance of findings show private schools outperforming public schools after all the normal controls. What’s more, when we focus on the research comparing truly market-like systems to state-run school monopolies, the market advantage is found to be even more dramatic (see Figure 2 in the paper linked above). To draw policy opinions from a small, selective handful of those studies while ignoring the rest is policy malpractice, and it is dangerous to children.

Even the recent Milwaukee result described by Yglesias as a failure shows voucher students in private schools performing as well as public school students who receive roughly 50% more government funding. How is a program that produces similar academic results to the status quo at a much lower cost to taxpayers a failure? And what of the research suggesting that students in the Milwaukee voucher program graduate at higher rates than those in public schools?

More importantly from a long term policy perspective, how is a program limited to 20,000 or so children in a single city, being served almost entirely by non-profit entities, a test of market education? Would Apple have spent hundreds of millions developing the iPhone or the iPad if its market were limited to the same customer base? Of course not. The dynamism, diversity and innovation we have come to expect from competitive markets in other fields relies on the prospect of ultimately scaling up to serve mass audiences. Without the prospect of a large-scale return on investment, there is no incentive to invest in the first place.

Failures in Ed. Policy Analysis—Misunderstanding Milwaukee is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The D.C. school voucher program has received a lot of attention in recent months since Congress and President Obama issued its death warrant. Obama has put funding for the children currently in the program in his proposed budget, but this has no force of law and the program as it stands will still end after this year.

Despite a general trend toward increasing bipartisanship on the issue, killing school choice remains a top priority for the powerful and largely Democratic teachers unions, and therefore many in the ranks of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

Now the Milwaukee voucher program, the intensely studied and successful private school choice program that crystallized the national school choice movement nearly two decades ago, is in mortal danger.

The new Democratic majority in Wisconsin has set about reducing the amount of the voucher, adding onerous regulations to participating school, and now is looking to directly reduce the number of children allowed a choice in education.

From the AP:

[Assembly] Democrats voted Thursday night in a closed door meeting to lower the cap on the program from 22,500 to 19,500 over the next two years. The current lid was agreed to in 2006 by Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican lawmakers…

The enrollment change was added to the state budget that will be debated by the Assembly on Friday. It must also pass the Senate and be signed by Doyle to become law.

NEA and Compliant Dems Rolling Back Voucher Programs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog