PDK International | Phi Delta Kappan: Molnar V78 N3 pp240-243 Novmber 1996

Find more Kappan articles in the
searchable PDK Publications Archive

Research, Politics, and the School Choice Agenda

By Alex Molnar, Walter C. Farrell, Jr., James H. Johnson, Jr., and Marty Sapp

The strategy of neoconservative advocates of private and religious school choice appears to be to exploit the dissatisfaction of poor, predominantly minority parents in order to achieve the goal of creating a publicly funded private school system free of public control and oversight. If achieved, the authors argue, this alternative system will inevitably reproduce and legally sanction the doctrine of "separate but equal" on a grand scale.

IN 1990 Wisconsin became the first state in the nation to adopt a public-ly funded voucher program for private schools, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Since then, Milwaukee has become a mecca of sorts for a disparate collection of neoconservative education reformers, journalists, authors, and politicians who hope to interpret the larger significance of the Milwaukee experiment for the rest of the world.

Supporters of the Milwaukee program have argued since its inception that it is a model urban education reform that will improve the academic performance of poor, mostly minority students by empowering their parents to choose their schools. To proponents, the high levels of parental satisfaction with and involvement in the schools they have chosen - reported in the five official annual evaluations conducted between 1991 and 1995 by University of Wisconsin political science professor John Witte - are proof that the program should be expanded and adopted as a national model. Skeptics, however, in addition to raising policy-related and constitutional objections, have pointed out that the Witte evaluations have failed to find higher academic performance among choice students than among similar students attending Milwaukee's public schools.1

That is, no evidence of higher achievement among program participants had turned up until this past summer. On August 12 researchers from the University of Houston and Harvard University captured national media attention and electrified education policy makers with the release of their study, "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation."2 The authors - Jay Greene, Paul Peterson, and Jiangtao Du - claimed that, in reading and math, children who remained in the MPCP for three or more years "substantially" outperformed a group of students who had applied for but were not admitted to the program.

The results were released just as the national Republican convention was getting under way in San Diego and on the eve of a widely anticipated August 15 court hearing in Madison, Wisconsin, that was intended to determine whether or not an injunction blocking the expansion of the Milwaukee choice program would be lifted.

Two of the authors of the report, Jay Greene and Paul Peterson, immediately took to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal with an August 14 article titled "School Choice Data Rescued from Bad Science."3 They argued that the official annual evaluations that had found no evidence of an achievement advantage for choice students were so "methodologically flawed as to be meaningless." They went on to say that, if the sort of academic success that they were reporting were to be repeated nationwide for all minority students, it "could close the gap between white and minority test scores by at least a third, possibly by more than half."

The political value of the new study quickly became apparent. During an August 22 appearance on "Newshour with Jim Lehrer,"4 Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee and secretary of education in the Bush Administration, repeatedly referred to the "Harvard study" as proof of the wisdom of Bob Dole's campaign pledge to provide low- and middle-income parents with "opportunity scholarships" that they could use to send their children to private or religious schools.

Supporters of private school choice had long chafed at Witte's failure to find any achievement advantage for participants in the MPCP. In the preface to a November 1992 report written by George Mitchell for the neoconservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, James Miller, the president of the institute, hinted that Witte was suspect as an evaluator of the choice program because his "published views include criticism both of educational choice and research supporting choice."5

In a 1995 critique of Witte's MPCP evaluations that was distributed to every member of the Wisconsin legislature by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce as part of its lobbying effort on behalf of an expansion of the choice program, Peterson devoted several pages to a highly personal attack on Witte. He wrote, among other things, that Witte's fourth evaluation had been "skillfully prepared to supply ammunition for critics of school choice while at the same time maintaining a façade of objectivity, neutrality, and detachment."6

These are surprising words to find in the text of an academic publication. They are especially surprising coming from the same Paul Peterson who had, in a 1990 essay titled "Monopoly and Competition in American Education," approvingly likened choice supporters to "a small band of Jedi attackers" who used their intellectual powers to "fight the unified might of Death Star forces led by Darth Vader, whose intellectual capacity has been corrupted by the urge for complete hegemony."7 These are hardly the words of objectivity, neutrality, or detachment.

Nevertheless, Peterson and his colleagues seemed to have provided their "Jedi warriors" with the ammunition needed to win the school reform battle. Unfortunately, this dramatic scenario is quickly dispelled by reading the new study.

For starters, there are serious questions about the study's methodology. For example, over the time period studied, the choice-group and nonchoice-group students included in the analysis appear to have become less and less representative of choice applicants overall. In addition, the number of cases analyzed is small - sometimes tiny. And finally, the description of how the authors derived the results they report is at times so incomplete as to be virtually incomprehensible.8

Even if we overlook these issues, however, and accept the results at face value, one fact still stands out: the data reported by the authors do not show a cumulative academic benefit in favor of choice students who have spent three or more years in the program.

There is a clear mismatch between what is stated in the body of the report, the public claims made by Greene and Peterson, and the data displayed in the tables appended to the study. Three tables (Tables 4, 5, and 6) contain the information Greene and Peterson use to support their position.

These tables show a number of things. First, when only the gender of the students in the two groups is controlled for, no statistically significant difference at the conventional level (.05) in the reading performance of choice and nonchoice groups is reported after one, two, three, or four years in the program. Second, when the authors attempt to make the choice and nonchoice groups in their study more comparable by controlling for the students' gender, family income, and mothers' education, they report no statistically significant differences at the conventional level in the performance of the two groups in reading or math for any year studied. And third, when gender and prior test results are controlled for, statistically significant differences at conventional levels in the reading and math scores of the two groups are reported, with the choice group performing better in the third year. However, in the fourth year there is once again no statistically significant difference in the performance of the two groups reported.

Thus the data reported in the study's own tables do not support the authors' claims about the impact of the choice program on academic achievement, notwithstanding their speculations about potential reductions in the achievement gap separating white and minority students. It is clear, however, that the report has energized choice supporters.9

THE political purposes served by the Greene, Peterson, and Du study are more profound than simply lending credence to Bob Dole's promise to provide "opportunity scholarships." The publicity and political posturing surrounding the new choice report reveal the extent to which the claim to serve the interests of low-income and minority students - especially African Americans - has been harnessed by neoconservatives to advance their own agenda. The goal of the neoconservative power brokers who are bankrolling the push for school choice in Milwaukee and across the country is to create a private school system that is publicly funded, that operates according to the rules of the private market, and that will break the government "monopoly" on the provision of education.10

Michael Joyce, president and chief executive officer of Milwaukee's neoconservative Bradley Foundation and a major funder of school choice proponents in Milwaukee and around the country, occasionally reveals his real agenda. In a March 1995 story in the Toledo Blade, which described him as the "kingpin" behind the Milwaukee choice program, Joyce commented, "I expect that what would happen should this [expanded MPCP] legislation go forward is that you would have . . . pressure not from the most desolate poor but from the next level." He went on to say that if school choice is "good public policy for the poor, why isn't it good public policy for middle - or higher - income wage earners? It's good public policy for all wage earners."11 Joyce's position is consistent with that of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative D.C.-based think tank that has aggressively promoted publicly funded private and religious school choice policies since the late 1970s.

As conditions in America's inner cities continued to deteriorate throughout the 1980s, some African American community activists, such as Milwaukee's Annette (Polly) Williams (principal architect of Wisconsin's 1990 choice legislation), concluded that underfunded, problem-ridden urban school systems had become a barrier to their children's upward social and occupational mobility.12 By the mid-1980s, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and other cities with large low-income minority populations offered the opportunity to build cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-ideological alliances backed by neoconservative money. It was in this context that conservatives began to promote privately funded voucher plans in order to build support for publicly funded vouchers.13

By initially focusing on voucher programs that serve only low-income, mostly minority children, neoconservatives have very effectively blunted charges from liberals, moderates, and even more traditional conservatives that their real purpose is to construct a market-based system that will inevitably harm poor families the most. They have also had considerable success in painting teacher union opposition to their agenda as just the self-interested posturing of defenders of the status quo. And neoconservative ideologues have learned to trot poor African American and Latino parents before the cameras to make the case for vouchers.

Three books published this year by conservatives describe and reflect this strategy. In Private Vouchers, Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, explains how so-called private voucher plans, such as the PAVE (Partners Advancing Values in Education) Program in Milwaukee, the Golden Rule Program in Indianapolis, and the CEO Program in San Antonio are being used to build political support for publicly funded programs that include private and religious schools. Moe argues that, "in the new politics of education, the conservatives have become the progressives, pushing for major change, promoting the causes of the disadvantaged, and allying themselves with the poor."14

Break These Chains, by former Bush Administration speech writer Dan McGroarty, who is now a Bradley Foundation-funded fellow at the Institute for Contemporary Studies, purports to tell the story of how Milwaukee's voucher program turned children's lives around.15 And in Active Faith, Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, takes great pains to argue that conservatives must be on the side of social justice.16

All this talk of social justice and concern for the poor might be more credible if so much of it were not financed by the same money that paid for The Bell Curve and The End of Racism,17 books that disparage the intellectual ability of minorities and the cultural capital of the minority community.

As sociologist/theologian C. Eric Lincoln observed, "The lines of division have been laid between the few and the many [in the minority community], and the challenge to the few is to prove themselves worthy to be a people apart from their roots."18 In short, there are signs that the majority community is prepared to offer access and opportunities to a few minority students and their families if they are willing to separate themselves from the rapidly growing masses of their increasingly economically distressed counterparts, who now populate public schools in our urban centers.

The strategy of neoconservative advocates of private and religious school choice appears to be to exploit the dissatisfaction of poor, predominantly minority parents who have been left behind by our economy in order to achieve the goal of creating a publicly funded private school system free of public control and oversight. If achieved, this alternative system will inevitably reproduce and legally sanction the doctrine of "separate but equal" on a grand scale, with the primary beneficiaries being middle- and upper-middle-class families. In other words, the politics of private school choice now resembles a high-stakes version of the old "bait and switch" scam.

The outcome of the coming showdown over publicly funded private and religious school choice is far from certain. But for the African American community it is,

to borrow a phrase from C. Eric Lincoln, "bringing with it some very strange fruit so delightfully different and yet so hauntingly familiar."19

1. Since 1991 there have been five annual evaluations of the MPCP. John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin has been the lead evaluator for all five, which are published by the Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

2. Jay P. Greene, Paul E. Peterson, and Jiangtao Du, "The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation," paper prepared for presentation before the Panel on the Political Analysis of Urban School Systems at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August/

September 1996.

3. Jay P. Greene and Paul E. Peterson, "School Choice Data Rescued from Bad Science," Wall Street Journal, 14 August 1996, p. A-14.

4. "Newshour with Jim Lehrer," WMVS-TV, Channel 10, Milwaukee, 22 August 1996.

5. "The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program," Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Report, November 1992.

6. Paul E. Peterson, "A Critique of the Witte Evaluation of Milwaukee's School Choice Program," Center for American Political Studies, Occasional Paper 95-2, Harvard University, February 1995, p. 2.

7. Paul E. Peterson, "Monopoly and Competition in American Education," in William H. Clune and John F. Witte, eds., Choice and Control in American Education, vol. 1 (New York: Falmer Press, 1990), p. 73.

8. See, for example, John F. Witte, "Reply to Greene, Peterson, and Du: 'The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation,'" paper distributed by the Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 23 August 1996; and Walter C. Farrell, Jr., James H. Johnson, Jr., Marty Sapp, and Alex Molnar, "The CPP/Harvard School Choice Study: An Assessment," Milwaukee Courier, 24 August 1996, p. 4.

9. Curtis Lawrence, "Choice Pupils Do Better, Report Says," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 August 1996, pp. 1, 12; and Richard P. Jones and Daniel Bice, "Choice Injunction Partly Lifted," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 August 1996, pp. 1, 9.

10. See Ann Fisher, "Milwaukee May Offer a Lesson on How Ohio Vouchers Would Work," Toledo Blade, 6 March 1995, pp. 1, 6-7; Brent Schundler, "The Simple Logic of School Choice," New York Times, 28 October 1993, p. A-19; Don Wycliff, "Market System Urged as Way to Loosen Grip of School Bureaucracy, New York Times, 6 June 1990, p. B-8; Douglas Bartley, "Monopoly on Education Lets Bad Schools Continue to Exist," Milwaukee Journal, 3 October 1988, p. A-13; and Michael Joyce, "Low-Income Parents Have a Choice," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 19 September 1995, p. A-9.

11. Fisher, p. 6.

12. Annette (Polly) Williams et al., "Manifesto for New Directions in the Education of Black Children in the City of Milwaukee," paper distributed by the office of State Representative Annette (Polly) Williams, October 1987; Derrick Bell, "The Case for a Separate Black School System," Urban League Review, vol. 11, Nos. 1 and 2, 1987-88, pp. 136-45; and A. Polly Williams, "Education Is Not Just for the Privileged Few," Education Week, 7 February 1996, pp. 41-42.

13. Michael Walsh, "Hundreds Turn Backs on Public Schools as Privately Funded Vouchers Take Hold," Education Week, 16 September 1993, pp. 1, 18; and Barbara Miner, "Conservatives Push Privately Funded Vouchers," in Robert Lowe and Barbara Miner, eds., False Choices, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 1993), pp. 33-35.

14. Terry Moe, "Private Vouchers," in idem, ed., Private Vouchers (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1996), p. 35.

15. Daniel McGroarty, Break These Chains (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1996).

16. Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1996).

17. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995).

18. C. Eric Lincoln, "The New Black Estate: The Coming of Age of Black America," in Michael V. Namorato, ed., Have We Overcome? Race Relations Since Brown (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1979), p. 29.

19. Ibid., p. 30.

ALEX MOLNAR, Walter C. Farrell, Jr., and Marty Sapp are professors of education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. JAMES H. JOHNSON, JR., is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of Business, Geography, and Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Molnar is the author of Giving Kids the Business (Westview/HarperCollins, 1996), which analyzes the politics behind market-based school reforms such as education vouchers. (c)1996, Alex Molnar and Walter C. Farrell, Jr.