A Milwaukee election may test voter view of vouchers

With one term under their belts, these pro-voucher candidates are seeking reelection with fresh assurance from a June 2002 US Supreme Court decision that said public funds may be used at religious schools as long as parents have a range of secular choices as well. This new playing field means the pro-voucher team has become part of the educational establishment in Milwaukee, according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute. It stands to lose more in a one-seat defeat, he says, than it would gain even from a five-seat victory sweep.

"If you're at a country club in a golf competition and you keep beating the same guy, it's hard to say you're on a roll," says Mr. Hess, who wrote "Revolution at the Margins" (Brookings, 2002), a study of the effect of vouchers in Milwaukee; Cleveland; and Edgewood, Texas. "But if the union can knock off several of these folks, and particularly Gardner, they can use this to say, 'Look, Milwaukee knows vouchers better than anybody else, they have more experience with them, and they're having second thoughts.' "

Some Milwaukee schools may also be having second thoughts. Although Wisconsin was the first state to embrace school vouchers, it's been one of the last to permit charter schools. But since a charter-school law was enacted three years ago, six Milwaukee private schools that had been relying heavily on school vouchers have since switched to charter-school status.

Their defection to the newer reform is easy to understand: Charter schools receive $6,900 per student in state funding, while vouchers offer only $5,700 per student.

But as for the election, its outcome in April may not radically alter the direction of Milwaukee public schools. While a different majority would focus on lobbying in the state capitol, Gardner says his team would decentralize the way the city's high schools are administered. Neither side intends to tamper with vouchers per se.

Nevertheless, if the board remains divided, observers say acrimony is sure to persist. And if the majority shifts to the opposite side, Mr. Levin of Teachers College says, vouchers may face a passive resistance and tensions "will get worse."

The board "can make life difficult to the degree that it doesn't cooperate," Levin says, noting its ability to block private schools from using a public school's gymnasium, for instance. "This thing is so ideological.... What you're going to do [if the voucher camp loses one or more seats] is have a board embroiled in conflict."

Key dates for school vouchers:

1955: University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman proposes that all parents be given vouchers to cover the cost of their children's education and then be permitted to use them at the private school of their choice.

1990: Wisconsin passes legislation enabling Milwaukee to become the nation's first school system to use publicly funded vouchers.

1996: Cleveland launches its own state-financed school- voucher program.

1998: The Wisconsin Supreme Court supports the use of vouchers in religious schools.

1999: Pensacola, Fla., initiates its own school-voucher program. But that same year, the Ohio State Supreme Court rules that Cleveland's voucher program violates the separation of church and state.

2000: Voters in Michigan and California soundly defeat state-wide voucher initiatives.

2002: In a 5 to 4 decision, the US Supreme Court rules that publicly funded school vouchers do not violate church-state separation, allowing use of vouchers at a range of religious and secular schools.

2003: The programs in Milwaukee; Cleveland; and Pensacola, Fla., are still the only three state-funded voucher programs in the US. About 11,000 students in Milwaukee, 4,000 in Cleveland, and 50 in Pensacola use vouchers.

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