Choice Schools Just Another Faulty System to Manage

On WPT's Here and Now, the Secretary of the Dept. of Children and Families, Reggie Bicha, gave his luke warm assessment of Milwaukee's choice program.

What is becoming more evident about the implementation of choice, vouchers and charter schools, is that we are installing another fallible system along side a similar public school model. So now we have to watchdog both for abuses and failures. You can't tell me this won't cost us millions of dollars more and additional bureaucracies.

If we could only focus on the established public system in place, one that has been evolving and improving over the last decade. It wasn't NCLB that improved education, it was the educational community, advances in curriculum research and local public pressure to change. People have been pressuring schools for years, by choosing to move into communities with good schools, and leaving them when they fail. Now that people are staying longer in their homes, they are becoming more proactive, demanding better results.

Frederica Freyberg, Here and Now anchor, asked the right questions of Bicha, who gave surprisingly honest answers. Keep in mind; Choice schools are cheaper right now. But adding ten of thousands of students to their enrollment would cost the choice schools just as much, if not more money to run, when you consider the profit motive.