Three times a week, the young students struggling the most with reading at each of Milwaukee College Prep’s four campuses go to a dedicated classroom, don their headphones, and log into a virtual tutoring session.

For the next 30 minutes, each student gets one-on-one attention from a certified teacher who might ask them about their dog or their baby sister before diving into the lesson.

Virtual tutoring — in this case through a provider called OpenLiteracy — is the only way Milwaukee College Prep could provide so much tutoring for so many children and from such experienced educators, said Erica Badger, director of curriculum and instruction for the 2,000-student charter network.

“We have a hundred kids on at once,” she said. “Being able to have that many adults come into the school building? I can’t even imagine.”

For these reasons and others, virtual tutoring has remained part of the toolbox of American schools long after students returned to in-person classes. It costs less than in-person tutoring, scheduling is more flexible, and providers aren’t limited to hiring in the surrounding community.

But it doesn’t always work smoothly.

Two studies from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator released Wednesday used natural language processing technologies to review transcripts from tens of thousands of hours of virtual tutoring sessions. Their goal: to better understand exactly what happens between tutors and students in these sessions.

as revealed through tutor comments, such as “You can’t see me? I’m not sure why you can’t see me” or “Sorry. Did you say something? It was hard to hear.”

Researchers found that 19% of available time was lost to disruptions, whether from technological issues, distracted students, or background noise. Time lost to disruptions was even greater when tutors were working with more than one student, especially if one of the students entered the session late.

The with students in one-on-one sessions and in sessions with two students.

Students were randomly assigned to either an individual tutor or to work with the tutor and another student. Tutors spent more time talking overall when they were working with two students, but only about 21% of tutor speech was individualized content instruction, compared with 65% one-on-one sessions. The tutors in the one-on-one sessions also used more phrases associated with motivation and relationship-building.

Both studies involved young students working on early literacy skills.

High-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, emerged as one of the most high-profile and effective interventions to address pandemic-related learning loss. .

The new studies shed light on why virtual tutoring in particular has a mixed track record, according to studies. They also suggest ways schools and tutoring providers can make these sessions more effective. That’s especially important now that federal pandemic relief has expired, and schools have less money to spend.

“There are specific features that effective tutoring programs tend to have, but what is actually driving effectiveness is kind of a black box,” said Carly Robinson, a co-author on both papers and director of research at Stanford’s SCALE Initiative, which runs the National Student Support Accelerator.

The emergence of virtual tutoring provides new opportunities to provide answers, because new technology allows audio and video from these sessions to be analyzed at scale, Robinson said. Previous research using similar techniques found, for example, that tutors tend to , unless that student was a girl paired with a higher-performing boy. In those cases, the boy still got more attention.

Robinson said the research findings shouldn’t deter schools from using virtual tutoring or even from using small group sessions. That 81% of tutoring time was productive even when working with very young children is a “positive finding,” Robinson said.

Students experienced more disruptions when they worked in the corner of a classroom than in dedicated tutoring spaces. Small schools experienced more disruptions than large schools did as they added tutoring sessions. And the youngest children, kindergartners, experienced significantly more disruptions than second graders.

Researchers suggest that schools find a quiet dedicated space for children to work if possible; have an adult on hand to handle tech issues; and be realistic about each school’s capacity to host a lot of video calls at once.

The study on one-to-one versus two-to-one tutoring suggests that tutors may need different techniques, including strategies from in-person small group instruction, to ensure both students get the most possible from each session.

OnYourMark Education, the tutoring provider that was involved in that study, has already overhauled its 2:1 tutoring, CEO and founder Mindy Sjoblom said. Some of these changes were subtle, just as having tutors ask a question and then call on a child, so that both students have to pay attention to the question and think about the answer.

The study took place in OnYourMark’s second year of operation. Now in its fourth year, OnYourMark still offers one-to-one tutoring in , but when districts are paying out of pocket, they’re mostly opting for two-to-one sessions, she said. The company has lost some clients who decided they could no longer afford tutoring.

OnYourMark is piloting a program that has students work independently on an adaptive tech platform three days a week and meet with a tutor twice a week. If it’s successful, it would cost about 60% as much as two-to-one tutoring.

“If schools can’t afford to implement it, we’re spinning our wheels,” Sjoblom said.

Thinking beyond a tutoring ‘gold standard’

A lot of research on tutoring points to a “gold standard,” said Liz Cohen, vice president of policy at 50CAN, an advocacy group, and the author of “The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.” But schools might also be interested in what a silver standard or a bronze standard looks like.

The two new studies help identify trade-offs in a granular way that can shape training and program design, she said.

“It’s really important research because a big part of making tutoring more effective is figuring out how to scale it and make it more affordable,” she said. “That means figuring out how to make the most out of the tutor’s time.”

But Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said perfecting tutoring programs won’t have much impact if schools don’t also pay attention to their core instruction.

“What does it mean to do high-impact tutoring in a school system where the classroom instruction has not been optimized?” she said. “This is a huge liability. We optimize too much on these design-based studies without thinking about the system as a whole.”

Milwaukee College Prep originally targeted a small group of fourth graders for extra reading help, but Badger said the network school realized that was too late and not enough. A donor approached the school about wanting to fund something that would really move the needle on student outcomes. A gift of $500,000 a year over three years allows the network to provide one-on-one tutoring for 30 minutes a day, three times a week to 200 first and second grade students.

Sarah Scott Frank, CEO of OpenLiteracy, the tutoring provider at Milwaukee College Prep, said she believes strongly in one-to-one tutoring. When students don’t work at the same pace, it can be “crushing” for the slower student, Frank said.

“One kid would be zooming along, and the kids are very perceptive, and they see that, and they think ‘see, I can’t do that,’ and it reinforces that negative identity,” she said.

One-to-one tutoring costs more up front, she said. But she believes it’s more cost effective because it works.

The charter network already had a classroom aide providing small-group instruction in addition to the lead teacher in every classroom. The charter network has also upgraded its literacy curriculum to add more phonics. Tutors and classroom teachers use the same curriculum and can share data easily.

Teachers practice the transition to the tutoring room and do trial runs with the platform so that students can log in smoothly two minutes before the session is supposed to start. An adult is on hand to troubleshoot tech problems. Attendance is measured in minutes.

“It’s not a quiet environment,” Badger acknowledges. “But it’s this hum and excitement of learning.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Gov. Tony Evers took the next step in starting additional audits of Milwaukee Public Schools on Monday, opening a request for services to conduct an independent operational audit of the district and starting a waiver to expedite the process of hiring an auditor to conduct an independent instructional audit.

The requests come as the state’s largest school district continues to deal with the fallout of being several months late in submitting required financial documents to DPI. Last week, the district and to work towards submitting the overdue financial documents and to address the factors that contributed to the delay.

Evers said last week that he would move forward with his plans to conduct operational and instructional audits in addition to the ongoing financial audit. He said in a statement on Monday that it’s “exceedingly important” that the audits are started “quickly to fully identify the extent of the problems in order to work toward having future conversations about solutions.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Evers also said it’s “critical” that Milwaukee Public Schools cooperates with the state Department of Public instruction during the financial audit in progress.

“I look forward to these audits getting underway so we can support kids, families, and educators in MPS, as well as the greater community,” Evers said in a statement.

According to the operational audit request, the audit would need to include a review of compliance and reporting functions, financial management and controls, an analysis of the district’s human resources processes and the identification of areas to improve effectiveness and efficiency of the district’s central office.

The Evers administration will take responses to the operational audit request through June 24.

The instructional audit would need to provide the state government, MPS and the public with analysis, guidance and recommendations on several issues including supporting positive learning environments for students; supporting educators, staff, and administrators and implementing curriculum and instruction best practices.

Milwaukee Board President Marva Herndon said in a statement that the board is appreciative of the Evers’ support.

“We, too, are committed to identifying root causes of district challenges so they can be addressed moving forward,” Herndon said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

When Annette “Polly” Williams died in 2014, she had spent 30 years as a Wisconsin state representative —Ìęthe woman in the Wisconsin Legislature. But it was her efforts in the late ’80s and early ’90s to create the nation’s longest-running private school voucher program that marked her career. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or MPCP, offered parents with limited means public funds to send their child to a nonsectarian private school.

Williams and her staff drafted legislation leading to MPCP. And she brought together an unlikely bipartisan coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans, as well as a grassroots coalition of parents and community leaders to get the bill passed. Tommy Thompson, the Republican governor at the time, had tried for a few years unsuccessfully to move similar school choice legislation. But it wasn’t until Williams, a Democrat, black activist and community organizer, took the helm that it succeeded.

For her efforts and influence, Williams the “.” At her funeral, however, those closest to Williams were careful to qualify that legacy. “I was a Polly Williams choice person,” said a longtime colleague and friend. “She had a permanent interest in helping black people, and helping poor black children.”

Although many proponents celebrated the controversial parental choice program because of its historic introduction of competition into the public education space, this was not Williams’s ambition. To suggest that free-market theorist and economist Milton Friedman was her muse would cause her to balk. In fact, she admonished me for even using the v-word.

“Don’t call it a voucher plan,” she told me in 2012 during one of many interviews. “That’s not what I call it. It’s parental choice. My focus is always empowering the parents.”

Williams’s specific ambition was to empower low-income and working-class black families in Milwaukee to have more control over a variety of aspects of their lives, one of the most influential being education. MPCP was just one of many efforts she championed in this cause. In her 10 years in the state Assembly leading up to MPCP being enacted in 1990, she worked to give the black community more control over Milwaukee Public Schools in hopes of reversing its long record of underserving black kids.

She pushed for more black teachers and black paraprofessionals, believing that black educators would have a greater impact on black students. (A theory that now supports.) She introduced legislation to redraw school board election district lines to increase black representation and give Hispanic voters a chance to elect a board member.

She also fought to keep the city’s court-ordered school desegregation plan from overburdening black families and decimating majority-black schools. Key tenets of the plan included closing inner-city schools, converting neighborhood schools into magnet schools and busing students to achieve a racial balance. In each instance, black families were disproportionately impacted. Williams joined other community activists, including Howard Fuller, who would later become the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and subsequently an influential parental choice advocate, to mitigate that impact.

She supported Fuller’s bid to keep North Division High School (Fuller’s and Williams’s alma mater) from becoming a specialty school and displacing hundreds of black students. She introduced legislation to create a separate, majority-black school district, one where black educators and community leaders would have the resources and control to provide and decide what was best for black students and where more black students would be able to stay in neighborhood schools.

Ending forced busing, however, was the issue on which she was, perhaps, most consistent and persistent. In 1987, she introduced an amendment requiring parents and guardians to give written permission before their child could be bused to another school. Two years later, addressing her colleagues on the Assembly floor in 1989, she called on them to end “intra-district transfers” in particular. At the time, she said, of the 33,000 Milwaukee students who were being bused inside the city, 20,000 were black students being bused from one black school to another.

“They are not being bused for desegregation purposes. They are not being bused for specialty schools. They are just being bused for the sake of being bused,” she said. “Assume your responsibilities as state legislators who are responsible for the education of all children in the State of Wisconsin and take his burden off the backs of black students.” (*Transcript published in The Milwaukee Courier, July 1989.)

A mother on a mission

The busing issue is what initially drew Williams to grassroots activism. In the 1970s, she joined Blacks for Two-Way Integration, a group of mostly parents calling for black and white families to equally shoulder the burden of integrating schools. The group was organized by Larry Harwell, a known community organizer who would later serve as Williams’s chief aide and thought partner for much of her efforts to give the black community more control.

The group’s motto was “two-way or no way.” They were angry that their children had to wake up early and endure long bus rides, while white students remained in their neighborhood schools. Black parents were also frustrated because they couldn’t be as engaged as they wanted to be, finding it difficult to make it across town for parent-teacher meetings and to intervene on their child’s behalf when they needed to.

Initially, Williams said, “I was one of those parents who bought into integrating. 
 The perception was wherever white kids are, white parents are going to make sure their kids got the best.” So, she fought to get her oldest daughter’s assignment switched from a majority-black high school to a more integrated one. Officials originally denied the request, claiming that the school’s racial quota had already been met. But Williams persisted. Her oldest daughter remembers her mother telling school administrators that she would “go to school at Riverside or not at all.” And when officials warned Williams that truancy would land her in jail, she gave them her address, telling them where to find her. Her daughter also remembers her mother going up to the school and having meeting after meeting after meeting. “They got sick of Ma,” she said. “She bullied her way through.”

All four of Williams’s children would go to Riverside. But Williams marks that initial rejection as a turning point for her. For one, it made it clear to her that the city’s desegregation efforts were more about racial quotas than making sure black children in the city had access to a quality education. “Our children were being taken out of our community to integrate another community under the guise that it was a better education for them,” said Williams. “We didn’t see that it was necessary that black students’ education had to be tied to integration with white kids.”

To accept the premise that black kids had to go to school with white kids to get a good education meant that all-black educational settings were inherently inferior. This was far from what Williams, Harwell, Fuller and other community activists she worked closely with believed. Before she pushed to get her kids into Riverside, she sent them all to Urban Day, an independent majority-black community school serving grades K-8. Williams said she read in the paper about Urban Day, a former Catholic school that was reopening as a private school and where low-income families could pay on a sliding scale. To offset tuition, Williams did administrative work — typing, answering phones, etc. Williams would maintain close ties with the school, even after her kids graduated, serving on its advisory board. Later, Urban Day would be one of the first schools to participate in the Milwaukee voucher program.

The Riverside rejection also showed Williams firsthand how it felt, as a parent, to know what was best for your child’s education and not be able to access it because of something outside of your control — setting the stage for the historic parental choice legislation to follow. Looking back at that experience, she said, “I would imagine that had something to do with my fight to have a quality education no matter where the child lived. That a parent ought to be able to get the best, whatever they decide for their children, whatever it is, whether it is all-white, predominantly black, Hispanic 
 good quality education ought to be there.”

The people’s politician

Williams got her political inklings from her cousin Monroe Swan, who in 1972 became Wisconsin’s first black state senator. She worked on his campaign and then a few others. And in 1976, at 39 years old, she ran for state representative against a Democratic incumbent who also was black. Recalling her initial campaign, she said: “Black folks saw me as a problem. ‘You’re running against this black man. You’re trying to put him out of work.’” But Williams said he was not a “good representative.” So, even though she helped get him elected in 1972, she “decided to take him on.” She was unsuccessful in 1976 and again in 1978. But in 1980, on the charm try, she won.

When Williams showed up in Madison at the State Capitol, she had only one loyalty — to the people who elected her. She didn’t get support or money from the Democratic Party, since she was trying to unseat an incumbent. The money she raised came from family and friends, she said. “As a politician, either you have money or people 
 I had people,” she said. Each time she ran and persisted, she made a name for herself, earning the respect of the community. “I was able to turn them around and see me as a viable person who could do a better job,” she said.

From the beginning, Williams showcased her independence in the Legislature. “I came there with an agenda that I got from the community. Not the agenda of the State Capitol, where the leadership dictated what you are going to do and what you are going to vote for.” She remembered, in her freshman year, refusing to follow party lines and vote against the Republican governor’s budget. The budget had money to support community-based organizations in her district, so she gave her first of many impassioned speeches on the floor on behalf of what was best for her constituents. She was so emotional, she said, she had to leave the room crying. But when she returned, she learned that her pleas had worked and she had just secured $3 million for her district, she said.

Williams recounted other instances when she “fought her party” and “refused to toe the line,” from policies regarding HMOs to serving as minister of education for Milwaukee alderman and former Black Panther party member Michael McGee’s . “I was a shock to them,” she said of her legislative colleagues. “I was a single [divorced] mom, African-American and poor. I needed the job. I made more money than I had ever made in my life. Prior to coming to the Legislature, my income was $8,000 a year with five of us. And when I went into the Legislature, my income jumped to $19,000. I had never seen that much money in my life.”

But there were consequences to her independence. The Democratic Party, she said, funded candidates to run against her in her first and second terms in hopes of ousting her. She credits her strong base in the community for keeping her in office. “If they didn’t put you in, they can’t take you out,” she said. So, almost 10 years into her 30-year tenure, when the opportunity came up to work with another Republican governor to push parental school choice, a controversial issue that would further distance her from her Democratic peers but would benefit her constituents, she didn’t think of her party, but of her people.

Open invitation to the White House

In his memoir Power to the People, former Wisconsin governor Tommy G. Thompson writes that the idea for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program originated during a meeting in his office at which Williams and Fuller were in attendance. Fuller, in his memoir, No Struggle No Progress, maintains that the idea emerged out of talks in the black community after the bid to create an all-black school district failed. And editor of the Milwaukee Community Journal, Mikel Holt, in a comprehensive firsthand account, Not Yet “Free At Last,” names an origin long before —Ìęas part of local black activists’ efforts in the 1970s to gain control over their educational destiny.

While there is discrepancy in the idea’s origin, there is no disagreement about Williams’s role in bringing it to life. Fuller, for example, writes that she deserves the “lion’s share of credit” for getting the bill through the Legislature and recently expressed that he’s “extremely disappointed that Polly doesn’t get the credit she deserves for so much of what’s happening today.”

Thompson corroborates a familiar story of Williams bringing busloads of parents, students and community activists to pack the Assembly gallery — a palpable presence for lawmakers as they voted on those same students’ educational fate. Holt gives great detail about Williams’s role in influencing her colleagues, as well as “sounding the trumpet” and “rallying the troops” among parents and community leaders. In all, she built strong public support among black parents, private school and community leaders and local black press. Together they organized a massive grassroots campaign (word of mouth, phone trees and flyers) to influence lawmakers.

And yet, when Fuller asked the audience this past July at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ annual conference in Las Vegas — a group that arguably owes its start to the Milwaukee parental choice program — if anyone had heard of Williams 
 few signaled yes. Williams’s story from being MPCP’s lead architect and proponent to near obscurity among today’s parental choice advocates is a complicated one, and one that has yet to be told — at least from her perspective.

In the years immediately following the program’s start, she traveled around the country and overseas as the voice of choice. “I spoke at the most prestigious places,” she said. Harvard, Stanford and the Brookings Institution are some examples. At Stanford, she said, she was on campus speaking the same weekend as Mikhail Gorbachev. “I was the Friday night banquet speaker, and he was the Saturday afternoon speaker.”

She was especially popular with conservative audiences and Republican lawmakers, who had been trying unsuccessfully to legislate private school choice for years. Ronald Reagan tried several times to introduce educational vouchers during his presidency. And George H.W. Bush continued the push early in his term. During the first Bush presidency, Williams said, she had an “open door policy” at the White House since she was invited so much. “I didn’t have to go in the way through all the security. The guy just told me to come to the back gate and they would just open it and let me in.” President Bush called her a “courageous hero” during a Rose Garden ceremony. And Newt Gingrich, she said, who was House minority whip at the time, told a room full of journalists from major outlets that they should all go out and write stories about her.

Many accused Williams of being naive and letting conservatives use her. But she said she was well aware of what she brought to their cause. “An elected official, an African American, a former welfare recipient, who was articulate, who could speak — they never thought they would get that. So I helped legitimize them.” She said she also knew that her conservative allies, mostly white and wealthy, had a long-range plan to create programs to benefit the rich: universal vouchers with no income limits. In the meantime, they needed low-income families like those she represented to open the door. So, just as she had, in her first term in office, taken advantage of a shared interest with those she generally disagreed with to benefit her community, she did the same.

But by the mid-1990s, that shared interest was not enough for Williams to set aside her core belief in black empowerment and community control. As the program expanded, the school choice coalition grew to include philanthropic foundations, religious groups and the business community. They helped bolster the program by funding organizing efforts and the many legal battles the program faced. But they were not typically controlled or led by African Americans. Thus, as they stepped up their efforts, Williams sensed she was no longer in control, and by extension she believed neither were the low-income and working-class black parents she had helped to organize.

“We just wanted the resources to allow [black parents] to be in control. I just didn’t see that,” she said. “Everywhere I went it was always white people. People whose background and their history was not serving or helping low-income families.”

Williams disagreed with the coalition on other matters. When the Legislature passed an amendment to make religious schools eligible, it increased the number of choice schools from 12 to 100 and students from 800 to almost 3,000 in a matter of months. (It also set in motion a constitutional battle that would hamstring the program for many years.) At the same time, by the mid-1990s, reports of choice schools closing due to cash flow problems, parents complaining of poor conditions and mistreatment, and other issues illuminated flaws in the program’s structure and the lack of regulation (not unlike the concerns put forth by many of today’s critics of similar programs).

Theoretically, the school closings could be considered signs of success, i.e., market forces at work. But Williams, who spent her days fielding complaints from choice parents in her district desperately scrambling to find new options when their voucher school closed mid-semester, couldn’t dismiss it as an ideological issue. “I’m not going to be an ostrich with my head in the sand pretending we don’t have a problem,” Williams told a local reporter.

Instead, she introduced amendments to limit religious school participation, strengthen oversight and make the choice schools more accountable. She also moved to limit the seats allowed for religious schools, so the existing pioneering choice schools — the few independent community schools like Urban Day — would not lose their opportunity to expand and be replicated. It was not unlike when she tried to limit forced busing the decade before. In theory, integrated classrooms promised to lead to a better education for black kids. But in the present, black families were being treated unfairly. In either case, she focused on fixing the problem at hand. Nonetheless, calling for more government-imposed rules to regulate a market-based approach (and trying to slow religious school expansion) further put her at odds with her allies. As Williams began to speak publicly about her frustrations, she solidified her split from the Milwaukee coalition, ultimately distancing herself from a national school choice movement that she helped to spark.

Other community leaders, such as Fuller, stepped in to represent the interests of poor black families in the national school choice movement. In MPCP’s early years when Fuller was superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, he was restricted from advocating for the program. But once he resigned, he resumed his early activism, fighting to ensure that low-income and working-class families had access to quality education. More recently, however, Fuller has shared some of Williams’s frustrations. He includes details of his own split with longtime Milwaukee choice coalition members in his memoir. He also writes about the battle to keep Republican lawmakers from ending MPCP’s income caps altogether, meaning anyone would be eligible, including wealthy families who already have the resources to choose a better education — a fear Williams expressed early on.

Zakiya Courtney, a local community activist and Urban Day parent, would too emerge as an important leader in Milwaukee and in the national movement. She said that a lot of what Williams predicted came true, especially regarding the fate of the black independent community schools like Urban Day that pioneered the program. MPCP’s expansion to include Catholic and Lutheran schools left little room for them, she said. Today, both Urban Day and Harambee Community School, which shared a similar history and track record of successfully educating black children, are closed.

A Polly Williams choice person

Soon after her confirmation, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos evoked Williams’s legacy in a major on the Trump administration’s plans to expand school choice and then in testimony on Capitol Hill. Most recently, she referenced Williams during her in September. DeVos, in an appeal to bipartisanship, championed Williams as “a Democrat city councilwoman [sic] 
 [who] bucked the system on behalf of the kids she loved.”

DeVos was (mostly) right about Williams’s early role in the parental school choice movement. But she left out the second half of the story, when, after hard-won experience, Williams also bucked her allies, many of them with privileged backgrounds like DeVos’s. Williams was not alive to hear DeVos’s reference or to witness the recent federal push to expand school choice initiatives. But a close look at her more than three decades of public service and advocacy for low-income and working-class families offers insight into how she might have reacted as well as into exactly what her longtime colleague and friend meant when she said at Williams’s funeral that she was a “Polly Williams choice person.”

It’s highly likely, for instance, that Williams would have been upset with reports of students taking hour-long bus to voucher schools, politicians from tax-credit vouchers and policies that subsidize private education for the wealthy. She would have rejected programs with no to serve kids with special needs and programs having no problem turning away students with disciplinary problems and been disappointed by the showing little gains for low-income students and students of color.

But she would have celebrated the stories of black and brown students succeeding in various educational settings. And she would have been pleased to — public, private or charter — where both black students and black teachers say they feel welcomed, supported, motivated and culturally affirmed. And there’s no question she would have answered in the affirmative if she were asked the question today’s advocates are pondering: if “School Choice Is the Black Choice.”

Perhaps, most certain, she would have never questioned the role of low-income and working-class families in making decisions about their children’s education. That’s a premise she maintained. “When they ask me, knowing what I know now, would I still do it? I say yes. Even though I may not agree with a parent’s decision, they still have the right to make it,” she said.

Robin V. Harris is a former New America Fellow, working on a documentary project and book about the life of her cousin Polly Williams. Quotes from Williams and her family are all from personal interviews conducted in 2012-2014, unless otherwise noted.

Walter Lanier stood before a packed room at the Milwaukee County Zoo in May and repeated his mantra: “We have to be organized.

The room was filled with Black leaders — mostly men — from government, nonprofits and academic institutions. The leaders knew all too well that, year after year, studies have ranked the Milwaukee metropolitan area the worst place to live if you’re Black.

Those studies have cited Wisconsin’s dramatic , deep racial disparities in income and educational achievement and a legacy of redlining that made Milwaukee one of the nation’s most segregated major cities.

But Lanier, a pastor and community leader who also has , announced plans to change the narrative by changing the reality — particularly for Black men.

Since 2022, Lanier has served as president and CEO of the African American Leadership Alliance Milwaukee. The nonprofit aims to make Milwaukee a top city for Black residents by 2025 and serves as the backbone for its latest push to narrow wide achievement gaps for Black men and boys.

Doing so, Lanier told the gathering, would require all-hands-on-deck cooperation among nonprofits, civic groups and government.

“All over the city and all over the county, we have all types of stuff going on,” Lanier said. “We haven’t been as organized and connected as we need to be.”

It’s hardly Milwaukee’s first effort to boost the achievement of Black boys and men.

Responding to a nationwide challenge by then-President Barack Obama, city leaders launched an initiative to “address the multitude of challenges” that disadvantage Black men and boys in Milwaukee. That initiative sparked the creation of a Black Male Achievement Advisory Council to set a policy agenda, provide a funding apparatus and coordinate groups striving toward similar goals.

But the initiative fizzled without measurable results, and the council stopped meeting in 2021 — during a mayoral transition and a COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately harmed Black residents.

Some suggest the effort fell victim to a culture in Milwaukee where ideas often languish without public commitment and coordination. But city leaders are optimistic a new effort under new leadership will yield progress.

Already Lanier’s group has helped Milwaukee gain certification within the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance network, allowing leaders to learn from other communities seeking to improve the lives of men of color.

“Things are changing,” Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley told Wisconsin Watch. “How do we have diversity of thought, diversity of people to really help us move the needle when it comes down to eliminating the racial disparities and the health disparities that we see in Milwaukee County?”

Black Male Achievement Advisory Council

Milwaukee has sought to address barriers for Black males since the 1980s, by which point all of the region’s job growth had shifted to the suburbs.

First came the Milwaukee African American Male Task Force, which led to the creation of African American immersion schools. Then the Milwaukee Parental School Choice Program, which provides funding for children to attend private school. Later was the Milwaukee Fatherhood Collaborative, which advocated for fathers’ rights and for more involvement with their children. The Milwaukee African American Male Unemployment Task Force was among other groups to come.

But the Black Male Achievement Advisory Council, created by a 2013 city ordinance, promised to be different.

Joe Davis Sr., a Common Council member at the time, spearheaded the plan to bring all such efforts under one umbrella to recommend policies and track progress through measurable data.

Following decades of “stealth depression,” Milwaukee was among the top 10 poorest U.S. cities, with 38% of its Black population living below the poverty level and deep disparities between Black and white males.

Only 3% of Black male eighth graders at the time read at or above grade level, 45% graduated on time from high school, and firearm homicide was the leading cause of death for ages 11 to 39 years old.

The National League of Cities, which supports local governments, agreed to assist Milwaukee with data tracking and coaching to reduce racial disparities in education, work and family outcomes.

Business, philanthropic and faith-based leaders joined city, school and police officials in monthly meetings of the Black Male Achievement Advisory Council.

“I cannot recall a time in the city where there was as much energy and cohesiveness across political lines — across business and municipal government, philanthropy partners all speaking and agreeing about a pathway forward — to address this issue,” former Common Council member Ashanti Hamilton told Wisconsin Watch.

The city budget at the time had allocated $100,000 in the council’s first year to fund initiatives supporting Black males.

But tension arose between Davis and then-Mayor Tom Barrett, the council’s co-chairs, before the council reached its first anniversary.

After the city allocated an additional $300,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant dollars to support the council’s goals, Davis called for a larger investment.

“Unfortunately, what I’m finding is that the mayor is not interested in taking a risk or claiming this particular issue on behalf of Black men and boys,” Davis said during a 2014 Common Council meeting.

The frustrations prompted Davis to resign as council co-chair that year. Speaking to Wisconsin Watch, he called Barrett “an obstructionist” who didn’t want to offend other residents by addressing challenges for Black males.

Barrett, now a U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, did not respond to interview requests for this story.

Obama issues My Brother’s Keeper challenge

But in 2015 the council saw an opportunity in Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, launched two years after the Florida reignited national discussions about the life-and-death barriers Black males face.

Obama challenged local officials to build “My Brother’s Keepers Communities” by ensuring Black boys enter school ready to learn, read at grade level by third grade, graduate from high school, complete postsecondary education or training and remain safe from violent crime.

Milwaukee officials joined nearly 200 mayors, tribal leaders and county executives across 43 states and the District of Columbia who have accepted the challenge.

In 2015 Barrett and Hamilton, who succeeded Davis as Black Male Achievement Advisory Council co-chair, created a five-year plan focused on 10 priorities for males of color:

• Increase high school graduation rates and readiness for college and/or the workplace.
• Increase rates of graduation from post-secondary education or job training.
• Increase rates of employee retention and promotion.
• Make workplaces attractive and accessible.
• Improve the administration of justice.
• Increase capacity to combat violence and victimization.
• Protect physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellness.
• Fuel creativity and entrepreneurship.
• Establish alternative community-based institutions to sustain achievement.
• Increase representation and participation in decision-making bodies and processes across all sectors.

The city laid out a variety of more specific goals in the plan, ranging from increasing graduation rates for students of color by at least 0.5% annually to boosting Black male voter registration rates by at least 3% annually.

While Hamilton cautioned against becoming frozen in a “search for perfection,” some council members worried about a lack of measurable metrics attached to several items. The Black Male Achievement Advisory Council allocated $50,000 to the Center for Self-Sufficiency to evaluate the plan’s metrics.

Carl Wesley, the center’s president and CEO at the time, told Wisconsin Watch he ran into brick walls while trying to collect baseline data from various entities relevant to the council’s efforts, and many of the plan’s goals were vague.

“It had things in there, like increase from this to that, but no one knew where they were to increase from,” he said.

The center couldn’t complete the project, so it didn’t get paid, Wesley said.

In 2018 the city joined Milwaukee Public Schools, Employ Milwaukee and the local United Way chapter in seeking funding from the My Brother’s Keeper Community Challenge competition, which required an action plan and a protocol for tracking data and benchmarks.

The application did not draw funding. My Brother’s Keeper instead named Milwaukee a “Community to Watch.”

Local officials at the time acknowledged Milwaukee’s lack of progress on improving outcomes for Black males. While the city saw increased engagement around such issues, it didn’t translate into lower crime rates or higher graduation rates.

“Many grassroots and nonprofit organizations make claim to a number of programs and initiatives that support Black men and boys, but operate in silos with inadequate resources and no unifying measures to reinforce efforts between them to collectively move the needle on outcomes,” Jeff Roman, a consultant who later directed the Milwaukee County Office of Equity, . “Where substantial investments are being made, little information exists on actual impacts, and the information that does exist suggests that little improvement is being made.”

The national a “strong city administration commitment to Black men and boys,” while showing a need for more targeted funding and better participation and coordination among government, nonprofits and other groups invested in Black male achievement.

The city’s Black Male Achievement Advisory Council stopped meeting in 2021 as Cavalier Johnson replaced Barrett as mayor and COVID-19 disrupted life.

“There was no individual person to pick it up and keep it moving,” Hamilton said, calling for leaders to make long-term commitments to things they say they care about.

Depending on municipal government to oversee initiatives carries risks, said Shawn Dove, former CEO of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, which worked with Milwaukee leaders. Political leaders often change, as do their commitments. Housing an initiative outside of government — but still inviting municipal leaders to participate — can bring more stability, he said.

Whether Johnson will revive the council remains unclear. His office did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s repeated requests for an interview. Nor did JosĂ© PĂ©rez, the Common Council president.

Nate Deans, the director of Milwaukee Public Schools’ Department of Black and Latino Male Achievement, hopes the council resumes.

The creation of his department, which provides mentors to 500 Black and Latino male students, resulted from the council’s recommendations.

“It’ll streamline the work that much more if we’re all at least meeting,” Deans said.

Christopher Walton Jr., who briefly served on the council before it stopped meeting, said restarting meetings could help.

“It’s a disservice to the community and to young Black males that we don’t have people putting their hand back on that to get that moving again,” he said. “And so I would definitely love to see that brought back up in full force and get moving again.”

‘Community to watch’ to certified city

Regardless, Lanier and the African American Leadership Alliance are forging ahead. He didn’t want Milwaukee’s My Brother’s Keeper plan to go to waste.

He called it a well-designed plan that was insufficiently resourced.

Lanier said he’s forming partnerships to strengthen the plan, with a focus on education, employment and anti-violence.

“We’re doing work in all of those areas in Milwaukee, but it’s segregated and fragmented and siloed,” Lanier said. “As a result, we don’t present as well as we could externally.”

That has included working with Johnson and Crowley to gain certification within the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance network, allowing Milwaukee’s leaders to learn from other communities that have improved the lives of males of color.

They include cities like Newark, New Jersey, and Omaha, Nebraska. Newark’s homicides plunged by 55% from 2013 to 2021, and Omaha’s homicides dropped by 30% from 2011 to 2022 due to cross-community collaboration, according to the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, enrollment for students of color in pre-kindergarten increased by 33% from 2013 to  2019, and in Yonkers, the city now has New York’s highest graduation rate for students of color: 91%, according to the alliance.

Lanier hopes My Brother’s Keeper will ultimately certify the state as well. That’s the case in Ohio, where and community members partner on best practices for boosting Black male achievement.

Marquette University’s Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach is helping Lanier identify metrics and compile data to populate a citywide dashboard to track the progress of Black male achievement. The center, which has worked with Lanier for several years, has identified and institutions working on equity issues.

Lanier envisions a future Milwaukee where Black people thrive. That will require making measurable progress and changing narratives in Milwaukee.

“Because if we open that door for us, just like everything else, that door is open for everybody else,” Lanier said at the May gathering. “It’s my job to get it done.”

Learn more

Those wanting to learn more about the African American Leadership Alliance’s collaboration to improve Black male achievement in Milwaukee can sign up for updates .

Editor’s note: Bevin Christie, project manager for Wisconsin Watch’s News414 service journalism collaboration with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, has worked as a consultant with the African American Leadership Alliance of Milwaukee. 

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch () collaborates with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Belinda Rodriguez depends on Milwaukee Public Schools busing contractors to transport her grandchildren to and from school. That poses problems. The bus sometimes arrives late to drive her 6-year-old granddaughter, Magaly Coronado, to her South Side Milwaukee school, or deliver her home.

That tardiness leaves Rodriguez anxious about the child’s whereabouts and wondering why one grandchild gets picked up and not the other, even though they ride the same route and live less than two miles apart.

“This is not good because sometimes we don’t have gas money or a car to take her to school,” Rodriguez texted to Wisconsin Watch in February — part of a series of messages documenting spotty bus service to her household.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Coronado’s bus driver has been late again this school year, including during a day Wisconsin Watch visited her bus stop in October.

School districts and have faced a years-long bus driver shortage, which the COVID-19 pandemic worsened. Bus delays and cancellations during the return to in-person learning in 2021 left many students late daily and even prompted families to consider switching schools.

Responding to the problem, the district eliminated hundreds of routes, added to drivers’ workloads and launched efforts to compensate families for the hassle of finding alternative transportation.

This included mailing reimbursement contracts to a small subset of households that faced the most severe busing problems. The school board separately allocated $500,000 in federal pandemic relief — tapping the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) — to compensate parents for transportation costs.

But school district officials left families largely in the dark about how to collect compensation, Wisconsin Watch found. Budget documents show the district did not spend the $500,000 it allocated, and officials say the district halted the parent contract program at the end of December 2021 after disbursing just over $8,200 to 124 households in a district that serves about 67,500 students.

The district says it fixed its driver shortage, eliminating the need for compensation. Parents disagree and said they could still use compensation for transportation inconveniences.

Busing reliability has improved over the past two years, parents told Wisconsin Watch through its with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. But drivers sometimes still show up late. Parents on those days must drive their children to school or keep them home due to a lack of transportation.

“When I think about myself and in getting my daughter to school, a lot of times we don’t rely on the bus because she was always getting to school late,” said Milwaukee Public Schools parent Sharlen Moore, adding that being reimbursed monthly for gas would be helpful.

Driver shortage leaves students waiting

Shiela Cusack of Milwaukee’s South Side remembers many days during the 2021-22 school year when drivers for Wisconsin Central School Bus, one district contractor, failed to pick up her daughter and take her across town to Milwaukee High School of the Arts.

During one of her multiple calls to the company, she was encouraged to apply for a bus driver position. She wasn’t interested.

Milwaukee Public Schools saw driver shortages that school year ranging from 30 to 70 drivers due to COVID-19 sickness or those who quit due to pandemic concerns, according to David Solik-Fifarek, senior director of business and transportation services. He described the disruption as brief.

“There were just some days where students were not getting picked up. Three days later, they were getting picked up again,” Solik-Fifarek said.

Buses failed to pick up at least 700 students on time or at all for the first day back for 40 of the district’s roughly 150 schools following the pandemic shutdown, the reported in October 2021.

The crisis prompted district officials to cut 600 routes, remove about 200 buses from service, increase driver routes from two to three and recruit more drivers.

Few compensation contracts returned

But those strategies didn’t immediately solve the problem as the district waited for new drivers to complete training.

The district sought to compensate the most affected families by mailing reimbursement contracts to about 1,000 households monthly between November and December 2021 where buses didn’t show up for multiple days in a row, Solik-Fifarek said.

School board directors Megan O’Halloran and Sequanna Taylor (who is now a county supervisor) additionally saw opportunity in the district’s $506 million final round of ESSER funding. The board unanimously approved their proposal to allocate $500,000 of the pandemic aid to reimburse families for bus passes, gas and mileage.

“Perhaps this a redundant amendment, and we already have plans,” O’Halloran said during an October 2021 budget meeting.

Local reported on the compensation vote, but the school district did not tell parents how to access the funds.

“I don’t think we did a great job with informing parents about that benefit,” said Aisha Carr, another school board director.

By the time the district mailed out the contracts, 124 of which were returned, 95% of bus routes were running on any given day, Solik-Fifarek said. The majority of contracts went unreturned for a variety of likely reasons, he added, including that the family had switched addresses, switched schools, didn’t get their mail or decided they didn’t need the small stipend.

The district had enough drivers in the pipeline by mid-December to further stabilize the busing system, allowing officials to end the compensation program, according to Solik-Fifarek.

“That was a very short-lived program,” he said.

The district did not spend the additional $500,000 it allocated for transportation stipends, according to a submitted to the school board directors. The document, an update on ESSER spending, proposed removing the stipend allocation in a budget revision.

“I think that’s extremely unfair,” Cusack said.

District officials did not answer Wisconsin Watch’s questions about whether the funds were reallocated for another purpose.

Wisconsin Watch asked school board president Marva Herndon and board member Henry Leonard about how the district spent the money. Herndon told a reporter to submit a public records request, and Leonard said he didn’t know where the money would have gone. Wisconsin Watch is waiting on the district to fulfill that request.

Bus route changes are a challenge

Some residents say the requirement that drivers work a third route has kept the system moving slowly.

“If (drivers) get a hiccup on their first or second route, it’s going to impact everything else that comes after it,” Moore said.

Heather Peña, whose sixth and seventh grade daughters rely on the bus, said late buses were a particular problem during colder temperatures.

In February Peña lacked a car, causing the children to miss school one day when the bus was late.

“I wasn’t going to have them waiting outside for a half an hour for a bus that was going to show up late and have them freeze their butts off,” she said.

Cusack’s daughter was often late to her first class due to unreliable bus service in February, the mother said.

“There’s still days where I have to take my daughter to school. She doesn’t even know if the bus is coming,” Cusack told Wisconsin Watch.

Adding an additional route to drivers’ schedules and offering them longer hours largely works, but it can create a time crunch, Solik-Fifarek acknowledged. He added any change to previous routines can create challenges.

“You set these routes up and then all of a sudden you add another kid, another kid, and another kid and before you know it, the route is running 20 minutes longer than it was a month ago,” he said. “And then it requires some fixing.”

Some drivers remain frustrated that the extra demands make staying on time more difficult, particularly when bad traffic or weather strikes, said Farina Brooks, a longtime bus driver and community leader.

Brooks’ first daily route starts on Milwaukee’s West Side. She then serves the Far Northwest Side. Her third route covers the East Side, she said.

In the early months of the busing overhaul Brooks would show parents her far-reaching duties on a map to assure them she wasn’t late on purpose.

“We have a heart. Most of us have children, and we understand that these babies have to stand out here. It’s not like we want them to, but there’s only so much we can do,” Brooks said. “We have to run the route the way it is and the way the times are set up. It’s frustrating to us because there’s nothing we can do.”

Information for parents

Milwaukee Public Schools contracts with a variety of busing companies to serve students. Those needing to report a busing issue can find phone numbers . Parents can separately contact the district’s transportation office by calling 414-475-8922 or emailing tran@milwaukee.k12.wi.us.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch () collaborates with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This is incredibly important for the sustainability of the public charter and parental choice schools that serve nearly half of all Milwaukee students, as they have historically received an average of 25% to 35% less in per-pupil funding than traditional district schools.

Thousands of parents rallied to make this win for Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s kids possible. Families knew something had to be done to deliver equal funding for their children and close the gaps that were robbing their kids of opportunities and sapping their educational outcomes. 

Through this deal, public charter schools will receive a per-pupil funding increase of more than $2,500, and private schools will receive $2,000 to $4,000 more per child. This investment is long overdue. Milwaukee was one of the birthplaces of private school choice in the late 1980s and charter schools in the early 1990s. The funding gaps have existed since the inception of both programs but have grown wider in the past five years, even as the students’ needs have grown due to the pandemic.

Together with a broad coalition of partners, has been working in a sustained, bipartisan effort to transform school funding in Wisconsin. This required effective, direct advocacy — and that meant getting parents involved from day one.

We started this year by giving school leaders financial support and training for nine family liaisons, who were crucial in ensuring that parents understood the legislative lay of the land and how to engage with lawmakers effectively. Families learned about the per-pupil funding gap and its impact on school budgets, how the state budget process works, who the key legislators and decisionmakers were, how to develop and share their personal testimonies and how to hold a meeting with elected officials and press them on key issues.

Our team also helped ensure families could attend legislative committee meetings, coordinating with school leaders and legislative staff on hosting parent-led at their schools with key legislators – members of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, education committee members and Milwaukee legislators — and providing Zoom access for parents who could not attend in person.

We worked with over 1,000 parents and family members who were fired up on the issue of unequal funding. These parents led meetings with 15 legislators and organized a letter-writing campaign to legislators on the finance committee, state Senate and Assembly leaders of both parties, the governor’s office and Milwaukee’s mayor. In total, more than 5,500 letters were sent from more than 600 parents. Busloads of families drove for hours to rally outside legislative hearings, and more than 50 parents before the finance committee.

Lawmakers listened. During the debate on the bill, legislators of both parties cited their engagements with parents as a critical factor in their vote to support increased funding. 

Rep. Robert Wittke spoke on the Assembly floor about the impact of his visits to schools and shared the promise he had made at one of our parent-led meetings: “I will keep a commitment that I made to 15 mothers that I sat down and talked with at the Rocketship school in Milwaukee. Their only parting words to me were that they wanted equalized funding so that their children and this school could continue to grow, and serve all of their children moving forward.”

Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August asked, “How can any one of us look these parents in the eye and tell them no?” 

After meeting with several parents, state Sen. LaTonya Johnson, a Milwaukee Democrat, delivered a passionate floor speech, revealing that she had utilized the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to enroll her child in a private school. “I’m not going to sit up here and consider rooting for charter or public or choice,” she said. “I’m not going to sit up here and make our children winners and losers. Because if they’re coming from communities where their access to public education is failing, they have already lost.” 

For Milwaukee’s public charter and private schools, this funding increase will help keep the doors open — especially critical after in Milwaukee have in the last three years due to financial shortfalls. national education leader and founder of the a charter school in Milwaukee, said it best during his testimony in front of the Assembly Education Committee: “The reason this is a lifeblood issue for us — this bill — is because we can’t continue to raise $600,000 a year. It’s not sustainable.”

It will help address pay gaps for Milwaukee educators, ensuring that schools are able to recruit and retain diverse, high-quality faculty and staff. And it will help stabilize our city’s ecosystem of high-quality school options while expanding access for even more families. This win shows what is possible when schools and organizations get parents involved and amplify their voices — not just at the local level, but all the way to the state Capitol and beyond.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

Today Sayavong is the principal of Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language (MACL), a Milwaukee Public School (MPS) just a half mile west of Marquette University. MACL is also home to the International Newcomer Center (INC), often the first stop for refugee children who arrive in Milwaukee. His school is preparing for the first wave of Afghan children who will soon be coming to town from Fort McCoy. 

Thousands of Afghans who were airlifted to the United States are now housed at the military base in west central Wisconsin. MPS officials say that federal officials have told them that approximately 500 of them will ultimately make Wisconsin their home, but the last count given was 399. We do not know exactly how many school-aged children will be in that settlement group. 

MPS officials believe that the majority of those Afghans settling in Wisconsin will find their way to the state’s major cities for several reasons. 

First, larger cities like Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay have the necessary infrastructure to help refugee children transition socially and educationally. City school systems have gone through this process before, most recently with children coming from Somalia and the Rohingya from Myanmar (Burma). 

Second, refugees from the same countries tend to cluster together. Along the interstate highway between Minneapolis and Milwaukee, in every large community there are Hmong families. 

Finally, many Afghans here are from larger urban centers. The capital city, Kabul, has a population of over 4.5 million, so larger cities might feel more like home. 

MPS is preparing for an unknown number of children to arrive. 

Retired Green Bay school board member Mike Blecha recalls the language challenges faced by Somali parents and students when they first entered his school district. No one in the district spoke Somali; no Somali parents spoke English. Finally, the school system found one Somali high school student who spoke French—a language widely spoken in Somalia, where France was a colonial power. That student became the translator.

Kourosh Hassani is the ESL Teacher Leader for MPS and speaks Persian Farsi. About 78% of Afghans speak Dari Farsi, so Hassani and others who came from Iran should be able to speak to Afghans in their native language. In addition, many of the Afghans coming here worked as translators to U.S. military and government officials and are fluent in English. While Somalians and Rohingya came to the U.S. not knowing anyone, many Afghans have contacts with U.S. soldiers they worked with, often fought with, side by side.

Erin Sivek is an English and English as a second language (ESL) teacher at the INC. For three years, she was an ESL teacher at South Division High School, first teaching mostly Spanish-speaking students. But soon her program was overwhelmed with students coming from other countries in Africa and Asia. She was asked to come to the INC by MPS officials because she seemed to have the ability to bridge gaps with students coming from these foreign lands.

She says she wasn’t sure that she could make the transition from high school to middle school, but now believes it was the right move looking back at the ten years she has been with INC.

MACL is a K-8 school, and refugee K-3 students are mainstreamed into regular classes with additional support from ESL teachers, a psychologist and social worker. The thought here is that, even if refugee children have received little or no formal education before coming to Milwaukee, the younger students are still only a couple of grade levels behind. They can catch up.

But for middle school students, the educational gap may be significant. Sayavong says that they have had students who didn’t know how to hold a pencil.

Sivek says there is a lot to learn even for students who can read and write in another language. Afghan written language is similar to Arabic script, moving from right to left and using a different alphabet.

Some students at INC come from countries with few computers and not much internet access. The entire MPS system is web-based, and students have to learn how to navigate on Chromebooks to accomplish their educational tasks.

Some students come from educational systems heavily dependent upon memorization and rote learning. Sivek says these students sometimes struggle to make the transition to instruction that centers critical thinking. Not all of these differences apply to students coming from other countries. Students from Zambia and Malawi, for example, have been educated much like students in the U.S.

There are also cultural and religious gaps to navigate.

During recess, a student asked Sivek why she didn’t wear a hijab because “You’re Muslim.”

She answered that she is not Muslim. 

“What’s your religion?” 

“I’m Christian.” 

Other girls responded “But we hate you, no wait, no we don’t.” The girls had to rethink their attitude.

Several years ago, she remembers talking to a male middle-school student: “We don’t have to listen to you,” he told her. “Men are in charge.” 

Her response was, “Let’s talk about this, if we can.”

Although Afghan children are coming from an ethnically segregated country, most of those coming to America have been exposed to a Western lifestyle, attending classes with both genders and seeing women holding positions of authority at all levels of business and government. Girls and women may wear head coverings but not the burqas that cover women’s bodies from head to toes.

Says Hassani, “They don’t want to be under the burqa.”

Some of Sivek’s fondest memories are of the students who return to visit her. “Even those who were with behavioral issues or who did not feel this was the place for them, we have students come back every year, whether they are visiting from high school or college; they often come back together: ethnic, religious, cultural groups
 that is one of the greatest things.”

Many students have traumatic memories of the difficult experiences they had when they were fleeing their home countries, and of living in refugee camps. 

Sayavong remembers that Rohingya refugees could not come to the United States right away because of COVID. In one family, the mother was diagnosed with cancer while the family was in a refugee camp in Malaysia. She died two weeks after her family arrived in Milwaukee. The young father, who had a four-year-old and a second grader, was trying to make a new life in a foreign country without a mother. The four-year-old cried every day in school. It took some time before he could function normally.

For students who experience trauma, the reaction may be one of resignation, says Sivek. She remembers one student who would write about missing home. For a while he stopped participating. Then he stopped coming to school altogether. It took some time to get him back on track. But he is now in college.

The emotional toll on the Afghan children who are arriving in Wisconsin now is still unknown. The experience of being uprooted and whisked thousands of miles away to an unknown land is sure to have an emotional impact.

This year INC will have a dedicated psychologist, a social worker and a parent coordinator who once was a student at INC after fleeing her home country in Africa.

Because many of the Afghans coming to the United States speak English, and some may have college credits or advanced degrees, MPS is looking at the possibility of hiring Afghans as classroom paraprofessionals, and ultimately transitioning them into ESL or classroom teachers. 

Many MACL middle school students go on to high school at Milwaukee High School of the Arts, just a half mile away. MHSA music teachers come to MACL for instrumental music. “Students might not be able to speak English yet but they can play the music,” says Sayavong. Their participation in the instrumental program becomes their audition for MHSA. In turn, the high school has added additional ESL teachers for their support.

But high school students who come directly to MPS without going through the INC program should have a full transition program as they have at MACL, says Sivek. Today, many high school refugee students are at South Division with extensive ESL support, but Sivek believes it is not enough. A more developed transition program was on the drawing boards several years ago but was never implemented. She hopes that the superintendent and the board take another look at creating a high school welcome center.

Sivek reflects on these experiences: “We are so fortunate that we do have students from all these different religions and language groups and countries. 
 And once they are integrated into the program, learning together, they see all these things they have in common.”

Concludes Sivek, “We are really going to have a great year.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

Ron Kelly saw a crowd of protesters as he turned into the parking lot to drop off his daughters at St. Marcus Lutheran School.

Their signs read “Save our public schools” and “Public dollars for public schools.” Several people held up a yellow and green banner with a caricature of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was visiting the private school that September morning last year as part of a nationwide “Back-to-School Tour.” She didn’t plan to visit any of the city’s traditional public schools, and the protesters opposed her advocacy for market-based school reform.

Kelly, whose girls attend St. Marcus Lutheran with the assistance of tax dollars, didn’t talk to the protesters, but he wanted them to understand something.

“You’re debating someone else’s child,” he said.

America’s experiment with school choice started here three decades ago, when an unusual alliance formed between school reform advocates and black parents, helped by the political backing of a white Republican governor and a black Democratic state legislator. Together, they pushed for the creation of a school voucher program to help low-income children pay tuition at private schools. In its first year in 1990, fewer than 350 students participated. Small though it was, Milwaukee’s program was the start to redefining education in this country.

Programs in other areas soon followed, including Cleveland in 1995 and Florida in 1999. Because of the political divisiveness and legal questions swirling around school vouchers, Democrats threw their support behind charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.

Today, 43 states and the District of Columbia have charter schools. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia offer school vouchers, which provide public money directly to families to pay for private school tuition. Eighteen states provide tax-credit scholarships, which are like vouchers but are paid for by contributors who receive a tax break in exchange for giving money to the scholarship fund. Five states offer education savings accounts, which give parents tax dollars in an account for approved educational expenses.

The spread has provoked a fierce backlash from supporters of traditional public schools, who say such programs drain resources and children from an already underfunded public system. Ahead of the presidential election, prominent Democratic candidates have cooled on charter schools, a position that puts them at odds with many black and Hispanic families.

Some of those fault lines were evident when DeVos visited St. Marcus Lutheran. Most of the students going into school were black. Most of the protesters were white. Kellie Hayes, who was walking her daughter to school, noticed the racial divide.

“The protesters didn’t look like us,” she said.

Milwaukee’s voucher program arose from a history of segregation. Some parents were frustrated by under-resourced public schools in predominantly black neighborhoods and integration plans that put most of the burden on black students to travel to white schools.

Howard Fuller, one of the original proponents of Milwaukee’s voucher program, led an effort to create a new school district out of a cluster of predominantly black schools in the city. When that failed, he and others got behind the concept of school vouchers, which had been advocated for years by Milton Friedman, a conservative economist and Nobel Prize winner.

“For us, it was never a free-market issue. It was a social justice issue,” Fuller said.

Fuller, a former Milwaukee schools superintendent who founded a charter school and is a nationally known school choice advocate, drew criticism from other voucher proponents about a decade ago when he pushed for greater accountability for Milwaukee’s voucher schools. He said he was trying to preserve the program at a time when the governorship and state legislature were controlled by Democrats. Voucher schools now administer state standardized tests and report the results alongside public schools.

Despite those changes, the debate about school choice is as polarizing as ever in the city, perhaps even more so after years of declining enrollment in Milwaukee Public Schools. The school district now enrolls about 65,000 students in its traditional schools. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has grown to 28,978 students this school year. Other students attend charter schools or use open enrollment to enroll in schools outside Milwaukee.

“It’s been a bit of a political football over the last 30 years,” said Patrick Wolf, professor of education at the University of Arkansas, who has studied school choice programs, including Milwaukee’s.

School vouchers also haven’t driven widespread improvement in student achievement. In a five-year of the program, students using school vouchers performed, on average, about the same as public school students, except for a small boost in reading scores for voucher students in the last year of the study. That year, voucher students were required to take state standardized tests and the results were released publicly. Researchers were unable to determine if the jump in reading achievement was related to the voucher program, the new testing requirements or a combination of the two, Wolf said.

Voucher students were, however, more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college and finish their degree, he said.

Last spring, a slate of public-school advocates was elected to the school board, and the new board members face myriad challenges. Some schools are drastically under-enrolled. Parents also have complained about large class sizes and cuts to music and art programs.

At a school board meeting in January, comments from the public painted a dire picture.

Sue Pezanoski Browne, who has taught art in the school district for more than 20 years, moved to a middle school in 2011 after her position at an elementary school was cut. Many of the older students at the new school had never been in an art class before, she said. She has since returned to the elementary level.

Saniya Booker, a 16-year-old sophomore at Bradley Tech High School, said she has at least 40 students in one class.

“We can’t even take our books home because we don’t have enough,” she said.

Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, told board members that the school district hasn’t received enough money from the state, and financial problems have been “exacerbated by private charter schools and private voucher schools.”

Of the students, she said: “They’re asking you for their basic needs.”

District leaders plan to ask voters in April for $87 million in additional funding, money they say will be used to lower class sizes and restore arts programs. Even if it passes, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Keith Posley said it won’t be enough. “It will not solve all of our problems,” he said.

Milwaukee’s school vouchers will cost about $230 million this year, primarily from state dollars. The school district will contribute about $37 million to that total.

At St. Marcus Lutheran, Superintendent Henry Tyson takes issue with the idea that his school has hurt the public schools. He has a map on a wall with the locations and test scores of about a dozen nearby schools. Most are public and most are low-performing. Two had zero students test proficient or better in reading last year, scores that he describes as “almost criminal.”

“The failure of a lot of these schools predates vouchers,” he said.

Marva Herndon, a retired computer programmer who won a seat on the board after years as a public school advocate, said the school district needs to do a better job of promoting its schools. A black woman who grew up in Milwaukee, she believes that an unintended consequence of past desegregation plans is that some black parents think their children need to leave their neighborhood schools to get a better education. Some black students were to predominantly white schools in the city or chose to attend white suburban schools through a voluntary integration .

“That mindset hasn’t changed,” she said.

The school district also was caught up in a scandal last year when Michael Bonds, the former president of the school board, was of taking bribes from a Philadelphia-based charter school company in exchange for votes that helped it renew and expand contracts despite financial concerns. The company, Universal Cos., opened three schools in leased public school buildings and took about $11 million in public dollars before abruptly closing the schools midyear. Bonds hasn’t been sentenced yet.

Herndon became concerned about school vouchers about a decade ago after she saw new charter and voucher schools opening in “dilapidated buildings, factories and garages.” She successfully pushed for a city ordinance in 2012 that required that new elementary schools have access to a playground.

She also wants to start collecting better data to show how many students leave voucher schools and charter schools after enrollment counts that determine school funding. She suspects some are pushed out afterward.

“It becomes a moneymaking venture,” she said.

For many of Milwaukee’s parents, the politics of school choice have little to do with the day-to-day decisions they’re making about their children’s education.

Hayes, who walked by the protesters at St. Marcus Lutheran last fall, said her daughter attended a high-performing public Montessori school before enrolling at the private Christian school. The public school offered chess, art and Spanish. But when she moved to a new neighborhood, she needed a school within walking distance.

“This was the closest school to us,” she said of St. Marcus Lutheran. “It was a blessing and a surprise.”

Jiquinna Cohen sent her three children to St. Marcus Lutheran with school vouchers. Her oldest daughter graduated from a Lutheran high school, but the younger two attend a public high school. Her son, Bakari Cohen, wanted to go to a more diverse school, she said, and her youngest daughter followed him there.

Kelly, who has three daughters at St. Marcus Lutheran, said his mother sent him to predominantly white schools outside Milwaukee through the voluntary integration program. When it came time to select a school for his daughters, Kelly said he didn’t have a good opinion of city schools and he didn’t want them to ride a bus outside the city like he did. School vouchers allowed him to look for what he wanted, a faith-based school with structure and discipline.

“A public school was never an option,” he said.

Cara Fitzpatrick is a former reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. She is currently writing a book on the history of school choice due out in 2021.Ìę

The city launched the Milwaukee Parental Choice program, which EdChoice calls the nation’s first “modern private school choice program,” in 1990. In the 2018-19 school year, 24 percent of Milwaukee students used vouchers at more than 100 participating private schools. Another 14 percent attend one of 42 charter schools in the city.

Early adoption and top-down efforts jump-started choice programs in the city, said Patricia Hoben, executive director of Milwaukee’s newest education nonprofit, City Forward Collective. “And yet, in many ways, we’ve stagnated in the number of quality seats.”

The stall isn’t due to low demand, she said; charter schools, voucher schools and high-performing district schools all have waiting lists. It’s just that the demand isn’t very 
 demanding. Most parents in Milwaukee have grown accustomed to taking a back seat to battles over what kinds of reforms should be allowed, she explained, and while pro-reform and anti-choice movements fight over school boards and policy, parents have had to settle for what’s available in the meantime.

Simply put, policymakers — the “grasstops,” Hoben called them — are not answering to parents and teachers — the “grassroots.” City Forward wants to change that, and in doing so push Milwaukee into expanding effective public education in the places where they are most needed, with dual targets of availability and equity.

“Our public institutions are as strong as the public demands them to be,” Hoben said.

The nonprofit plans to advocate for more diverse governing boards and teaching corps in district, charter and private schools across Milwaukee, as well as engage in community organizing to ensure that black and Latino families are not skipped over when it comes time to expand the most effective school models.

According to state data, only 1 in 4 Milwaukee students is enrolled in a school rated as “exceeding” or “significantly exceeding” expectations. Black students are the least likely to be among that lucky 25 percent; 40 percent of them attend schools rated as failing, compared with 13 percent of white students.

The city’s charter schools yield : There are great ones and charters that perform poorly. Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, for example, a pre-K-8 school where 97.3 percent of students are Latino, scored a 76.4, or “exceeded expectations,” on its 2017-18 state report card. By contrast, Milwaukee Collegiate Academy, a high school where 99 percent of students are black, scored a 55, or “meets few expectations.” The highest-performing charter in the city, Downtown Montessori, is a 3-8 campus that enrolls 70.5 percent white students.

“Milwaukee is sort of a petri dish of school reform,” said Anne Chapman of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a nonpartisan policy think tank, but at the end of the day, one thing is clear: Academic performance for Milwaukee students, especially students of color, remains “intractably low,” she said, regardless of which sector enrolls them.

Uneven or meager results and the disparities they create, Hoben said, are common in top-down education reform, whether mandated by the state or instigated by nonprofit partners. City Forward will be different, she said, by taking a community organizing approach, similar to Innovate Public Schools in San Francisco. City Forward’s goal is to get initial direction from the people on the ground — parents and teachers.

“It shouldn’t be a new way of thinking,” she said, “but in many ways in education reform, it is a new way of thinking.”

City Forward is a merger of two existing nonprofits, Partners Advancing Values in Education and Schools That Can Milwaukee, both focused on developing leadership and getting underrepresented groups onto governing boards and into parent groups and classrooms. Without deliberate effort, Hoben explained, disenfranchised people are often missing from the conversation. “There has to be a forum to engage them,” she said.

Spokesperson Isral DeBruin said the new nonprofit will combine the work of its parent organizations — most of which had to do with training black and Latino school leaders, as well as some grantmaking for quality school expansion — with community organizing, which will be completely new. City Forward is hiring and will likely have 12 full-time positions when fully staffed, DeBruin said.

Like many organizations seeking to increase school choice or promote various school models within districts, City Forward is funded by some large corporations and national philanthropies. But it also has financial support from a mix of individuals, small family foundations and Milwaukee businesses, and instead of taking a top-down approach, the priorities that arise from local families and educators will determine how those dollars are spent.

Through its philanthropic partners, City Forward will be in a position to help effective schools expand. However, community voice and leadership will determine when and where that money is spent, Hoben said. “If we scale a white-led system,” she said, “we’re scaling a problem.”

That problem, she said, is a disconnect between reforms that look good on paper and the lack of improvement those reforms are yielding for black and Latino children in Milwaukee schools. Before increasing the number of quality seats, City Forward wants to make sure it’s clear who will be sitting in them.

Many times, Hoben said, organizations lean heavily on the vision of one leader who believes a certain strategy is the right way to achieve a desired educational outcome — higher graduation rates, college and career readiness, improved test scores. But what the community doesn’t own, it won’t back in the long term, she said, which affects the ability to scale, as well as the staying power of new schools, teacher recruitment efforts and other reforms.

Hoben learned the value of this firsthand as CEO of Carmen Schools of Science and Technology, a Milwaukee-based charter network. Before designing its school model, the group spent a year in the community it aimed to serve, listening to people’s desires, needs and assets. “I to this day believe that’s one of the reasons we survived and thrived,” Hoben said.

Like Blue School Partners in Denver and Mind Trust in Indianapolis, City Forward will focus on expanding high-quality seats through teacher recruitment and training, as well as increased funding for new schools — whether charter, district or independent schools participating in voucher programs. But there’s also an equity component to City Forward’s mission.

About 89 percent of Milwaukee students identify as a race or ethnicity other than white, with more than half identifying as black. However, more than 70 percent of the city’s teachers are white, and just 16 percent are black. The number of black (4 percent) and Latino (2.5 percent) male teachers is especially small.

In addition to the proven benefits to nonwhite students of seeing teachers and school leaders who look like them, having Milwaukee’s majority cultures heavily represented among the teaching corps will make it more likely that culturally responsive practices and innovative ideas specifically targeting children of color will bubble up, Hoben said.

Excellence isn’t enough, she argued; it needs to be excellence for all.

“[The program is] costing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Because the voucher amount is substantially less than the funding level for traditional public schools, the program represents a savings to taxpayers so long as a significant portion of voucher students would have attended traditional public schools in the absence of the voucher. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau put the break-even point around , and it would be comparable in other districts. Dr. Robert Costrell of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas similarly estimated the break-even to be and found that the program saved around $32 million by 2008. Further, Dr. Martin Lueken of EdChoice estimated the breakeven point to be for the Milwaukee voucher program and found that the program saved Wisconsin taxpayers about $343 million by 2015.

Given that most students using the voucher program are from low-income households, it is likely that well over three-quarters switch from public to private schools. In fact, the of the Louisiana Scholarship Program – and the of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program – both found that 89 percent of children who lost the voucher lottery attended public schools without the voucher.

The bottom line? School choice saves taxpayer money in the Badger State.

“The data we’ve had for 20-some years pretty much shows that there’s not an appreciable — or any — difference in academic achievement of kids that get a voucher and those that go to regular public schools.”

While the inclusion of the caveat “not appreciable” could allow for substantial hedging, the preponderance of scientific evidence is hard to ignore. There is considerable research on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program — and most of the rigorous evidence reveals benefits.

The two random assignment evaluations of the program, published in the and , found that the program increased students’ test scores. The more recent by the University of Arkansas found that students participating in the program have higher achievement growth in reading than their matched peers in public schools, though similar achievement growth in math. An published in Policy Studies Journal found that students exposed to the voucher program are also 4 to 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in a four-year college and persist in college than their carefully matched peers in public schools. Although unable to use the same matching methodology, more by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty have similarly found higher proficiency rates on state exams for the program’s students.

Ironically, the day Evers’s interview was published, finding benefits of choice in the Badger State. Specifically, it found that private schools participating in choice programs in Wisconsin were 36 percent more cost-effective than district-run schools, on average.

There are also six evaluations that examine what happens to test scores for the children left behind in public schools. All six of the ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę of school choice competition in Milwaukee. In other words, school choice is a tide that lifts all boats in Milwaukee — even though in his interview Evers said “that just hasn’t happened.”

“If it is truly about [higher achievement], then I say it’s a program that hasn’t lived up to its original intent.”Ìę

While there is strong evidence that the program results in higher achievement for students, school choice is not just about test scores. Educational choice in Wisconsin has improved several other meaningful life outcomes. For example, a found that the program reduced drug crimes by 53 percent, property damage crimes by 86 percent and paternity suits by 38 percent. Other studies have found that the program increased . And the evidence suggests that the program has led to as well.

Education reform proponents in the legislature have many of the worst parts of the governor’s budget for school choice. But advocates for educational options for low-income families in Wisconsin must remain vigilant, as Evers seems willing to publicly ignore positive evidence on school choice.

Will Flanders is research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Corey A. DeAngelis is director of school choice at the Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.