In 1996, voucher advocates were rebuffed by experts who predicted that the transfer of tax money would deplete funding in already-underfunded public schools. The public was not ready for that trade-off.
Today, Corbett couldn't care less.
"They're either going to downsize or they're going to get competitive and vie for the students," Hizzoner declared.
But this whole voucher business is a faith walk. There is no credible evidence that the achievement of public- or private-school students has been improved by the availability of vouchers.
But the advocates are still reading from that old testament.
"Parents," Harrisburg Assistant Superintendent of Schools Sybil Knight Burney said last week, "are the ultimate accountability standard."
Really?
She might want to read "Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools," a report of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a longtime choice advocate.
The October 2007 report showed that only 10 percent of Milwaukee's public-school parents have been the "active consumers needed . . . to exert market-based influence" on public schools.
Local parents, the report said, "simply do not appear engaged enough" to ensure the desired outcomes.
It's been 20 years since I went to Milwaukee to look at America's first full-blown voucher program.
Democratic Wisconsin state Rep. Annette "Polly" Williams had gone toe-to-toe with teachers' unions and others who opposed her proposal to allow public-school parents to move their children and tax dollars to the schools of their choice. She beat them all.
The state assembly allowed Milwaukee parents to take $2,500 of the state's $4,500-a-year per-pupil subsidy and spend it on any school they chose. Within weeks, "private" schools opened in some of the buildings left empty by the collapse of Milwaukee's parochial-school system. It looked promising even to me.
