But Walker will now have a more difficult job pushing his privatization plans after the horrific results of the countries longest running voucher program:
jsonline: Based on a new and tougher yardstick for academic competency in Wisconsin, about 90% of the students in Milwaukee's private-school voucher program are not proficient in reading and math, according to recalibrated fall 2011 state test results released this week.
Milwaukee Public Schools' latest Wisconsin Knowledge and Concept Examinations scores show that about 85% of the district's students score below proficient in reading, and about 80% score below proficient in math.
For the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in reading, 9.9% of voucher students tested proficient or advanced, while MPS had 14% of students scored proficient or advanced In reading.
For the program in math, 12% of voucher students scored proficient or advanced, while 19.7% of MPS students scored proficient or advanced in Math.
Students in MPS as a whole outperformed students in voucher schools in the recalibration of the scores - outpacing them by about 4 percentage points in reading and an even larger margin in math.
I bet if one corrects for students with disabilities (i.e. the voucher schools take very few such students, leaving the public schools with an outsize percentage) that the apples-to-apples gap is even bigger than that... looks like we don't have the data to know that for sure, but that was definitely the case with the 2010 WKCE data.
ReplyDeleteBut this can't be right. I just saw a voucher hustler on Public Television earlier this week talking about what a great success voucher schools in Milwaukee were.
ReplyDeleteWhy would he lie?
Of course, the most important metric is: are the voucher schools making a profit?
And now we have Scott Voucher Jensen trying to steal the election from Daniel Riemer by sending out write in stickers for Peggy Krusick.
ReplyDeleteSo much for the initial underlying principle supporting voucher schools; that the competition created would result in improving achievement and performance in public schools. After 20+ years it's time to end this failed experiment.
ReplyDeleteSo much for the initial underlying principle supporting voucher schools; that the competition created would result in improving achievement and performance in public schools. After 20+ years it's time to end this failed experiment.
ReplyDeleteWhat we've found here in Indiana just since vouchers have been enacted is that the incoming kids from the public schools are so deficient discipline-wise, that it takes a while just to get them to behave before you can even begin to educate them.
ReplyDelete