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PATRICK MCILHERAN; Students Want to Know Why Learning's Wrong

Posted on: Sunday, 15 January 2006, 15:00 CST

By PATRICK MCILHERAN

School choice, the reform that soon could be crippled, started with an economist throwing around an idea: Suppose governments didn't try being the provider of education (they don't, after all, run grocery stores for the hungry) but just did the paying and let parents do the picking.

The debate's proceeded on an elevated plane: What is the nature of "public"? Does aid entangle state and religion in a way that student aid at Marquette University does not?

But choice in Milwaukee is now a matter of fact, not theory, and some of these facts, who are in school and ready to learn by 7:50 a.m., took time to talk to a columnist and pose questions anyone opposed to choice must answer.

The foremost: Why dim a child's prospects?

The students I visited learn at CEO Leadership Academy, at W. Roosevelt Drive and N. Atkinson Ave. Some had read a column I wrote about state Rep. Jason Fields' views on choice. They wanted their say.

Over and over, the high-schoolers questioned why anyone, by failing to raise the school choice enrollment cap and imposing a crippling seat-rationing plan, would threaten an education that works.

This answers critics who say choice is unaccountable: This school is working. If it weren't, the students would leave. Most had already done so elsewhere; they cite the disorderly surroundings or their own poor performance at other schools, usually in Milwaukee Public Schools, that led their parents to bring them to CEO. Their power to leave shows Milwaukee schools must now account to the people who have the most at stake: not taxpayers, but children and their parents.

Or just children, in the case of one boy who says he signed himself up when he couldn't learn at a previous school. His parents were indifferent, so when he heard about CEO, he got the needed forms and persuaded his father to sign.

CEO's director, Denise Pitchford, knows of at least one other student with a similar story. School officials contacted the father to make sure he consented, but it was the boy who took the initiative, just as other children told me how they get themselves up at 5 a.m., how they tell their mothers that, no, they'd rather not skip. They'd rather learn.

Think what it tells children who muster such will when they read that a rationing plan may well kick the chairs out from under them.

That answers another of the critics' claims: that these poor children and parents are intellectually unequipped to make a decent choice. To the contrary, the students point out that their parents or grandparents or aunts or themselves are fully capable of understanding that they're earning A's and B's now rather than F's. They can distinguish eagerness to learn from truancy and indiscipline. They see children, once failing, now reading "The Scarlet Letter" and calling teachers at home for help and getting it.

Pitchford confirms that teachers take calls in off-hours. A former MPS teacher and administrator, she says it's not that public schools have no good teachers. But the big urban system has been inimical to change and innovation, and while things may improve, the clock is running for children. Her team is betting they can do better today, staking careers on it, just as students are staking their futures. One girl tells me she now plans to be a pediatrician, something she hadn't dreamed of before she came to CEO. She says she hopes for a middle-class life someday, to send her children to a school as good as the one she's in.

If Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature can't disentangle school choice from their other fights over funding, if the governor vetoes for a fourth time a higher cap on the choice program, it will probably close the school that gave a future to this girl who lives on the block where Samuel McClain was beaten.

And no one will benefit.

Taxpayers won't save money if choice goes under. The cost of these children will shift to MPS, at $9,856 a year per child, according to Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. Alternatives such as Elmbrook, at $9,572 per student, or Wauwatosa or West Allis or Oak Creek, all between $7,600 and $8,400 a student, are still all costlier for taxpayers than the $6,351 that they pay now for each child's choice grant.

MPS may gain state aid again, this is an increase in costs to taxpayers but as researchers have repeatedly shown that choice students weren't doing especially well in public schools, their forced return will just mean the return of children who often were doing poorly enough to need to leave.

And Milwaukee won't benefit, nor will Wisconsin, when children who need all the help the community can offer are booted out of schools their parents and the children themselves prefer.

Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist.

His email address is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com

Copyright 2006, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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