Parochial, private schools draw pupils -- and questions about success

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer

Do private schools attain their most fundamental goal of providing a better education than the public schools?

MILWAUKEE -- Low-income parents here can use taxpayer dollars to send their children to a private school that emphasizes African heritage. Or one that uses Montessori's hands-on approach. Or another that requires students to wear school uniforms.

They are all part of the increasingly popular state-funded voucher program. It allows parents to enroll children in 103 private and parochial schools that emphasize characteristics important to them and otherwise would be out of their financial reach.

There's one thing they don't know, however: whether the private schools attain their most fundamental goal of providing a better education than the public schools.

That's because voucher students are not required to take standardized tests and can't be compared to their public school counterparts. And the schools themselves are subject to only the most minimal regulations, under the sometimes flawed theory that parents are the best arbiters of education quality.

"The mythology that private schools are all good is crazy," said John F. Witte, a University of Wisconsin professor appointed by the state to evaluate Milwaukee's voucher program. "I would say they are about like the public schools in their range."

President Bush and Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige have endorsed this market approach to education. They say private schools will raise achievement for students who attend them and for students in public schools, which they contend would be transformed by competition.

In his education plan, which will be debated by the Senate as soon as next month, Bush has proposed offering parents of students in low-achieving public schools the option of $1,500 a year in federal money to pay private school tuition.

Obscured in the debate has been the question of accountability. Bush is not proposing that private school students be required to take the standardized tests that he wants to impose on public school students in grades 3-8.

In Milwaukee -- which has more students participating in publicly funded school choice programs than anywhere else in the United States -- "we have choice, but no accountability whatsoever," said Paulette Copeland, president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, the local teachers union. "For all we know, we have happy parents with miseducated children. We have no idea how the children are really doing."

Voucher supporters say the lack of regulation is essential for the program to survive. Tests and regulations, they contend, would lead to a government-imposed curriculum and ultimately jeopardize the legal status of religious schools, which make up the majority of the schools in the program.

Also, they say, many schools in the choice program offer their own tests, though they are usually not comparable to public school tests.

"What the Milwaukee parental choice program does is give the opportunity to people of low income to have the same choice as people of upper income to choose schools for their kids," said Nivard Scheel, assistant to the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One-third of the city's voucher students attend schools run by the Archdiocese, which reversed a long slide in enrollment by participating.

In his evaluation of the voucher program, Witte found that large majorities of parents liked the academic offerings and the disciplined atmosphere of the private schools they chose.

But Witte found no significant differences between the math and reading scores of voucher students and the scores of low-income students who remained in public schools. Two other researchers found increases in student achievement among voucher students, but those improvements were not seen as significant or involved too few students to be considered reliable.

Witte's research ended in 1995, when the Wisconsin legislature stopped funding it after he testified against expansion of the program. The program ultimately became the nation's largest publicly funded voucher effort.

Evidence of the education benefits of voucher programs in Cleveland and Florida is no clearer. In Cleveland, researchers have found signs of academic improvement, but those findings are clouded because investigators could not identify reliable groups of public students with which to compare them.

A recent report in Florida found that struggling public schools faced with the threat of losing students to vouchers showed more improvement on standardized tests than other schools. But critics contend that researchers ignored factors such as extra teachers and other resources that were funneled to the failing schools.

Wisconsin legislators are considering a long-term study to assess the benefits of school choice. In Milwaukee, the broad array of publicly funded education options includes the voucher program that enrolls 9,638 students, 11 charter schools attended by 5,000 students and a program that allows nearly 6,000 more to attend schools in nearby suburbs. Many thousands of other city students are allowed to attend classes outside their neighborhood school boundaries.

Many school reform proponents see these education options as the most important change brought by vouchers.

"This is about allowing parents to choose what they think is best for their children," said Howard Fuller, a former Milwaukee school superintendent and director of Marquette University's Institute for the Transformation of Learning, which advocates school choice. "Parents make decisions around a variety of issues. Smaller schools. Some want faith-based institutions. I want people to have choices."

The wide range of education options has forced public schools to work harder to attract and retain their 100,000 students via infomercials, billboards, open houses and radio spots. They have something to sell: Dropout rates have declined four straight years and reading scores have improved the past three.

"We can't contemplate doing business as usual because we have not done a good job in the past of extending ourselves to students and parents," Milwaukee School Superintendent Spencer Korte said. "Now, we need to do it to survive."

The decade-old voucher program has enjoyed a secure place in the education landscape since 1998, when its constitutionality was upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal challenging the program.

The vouchers, worth $5,300 each, are available only to students whose parents earn less than $30,000 a year for a family of four. The program diverts $49 million in state money to private and parochial schools, a cost borne half by Milwaukee schools and half by the state's 425 other school districts.

The private schools are required to admit all eligible students and must accept vouchers as full tuition. But the schools are subject to almost no other regulations. There are no mandatory guidelines in the choice program for curriculum, testing or even attendance.

That hasn't dissuaded parents who have chosen vouchers. Cheryl Bowen, for example, believes her two children went awry in public school. When it came time for her grandchildren to go to school, she used state-funded vouchers to send them to St. Rafael the Archangel, a Catholic school two blocks from their home.

"They go to Mass once a week, which I like," Bowen said. "I like the fact that they wear uniforms. There is no fighting at their school, and they have none of that silly competition over clothes."

Bowen acknowledges that she knew little about the school's academic track record. "I really didn't investigate that," she said..

Other schools, however, have distinguished themselves by their dubious academic offerings. Last summer, Sensas-Utcha Institute of Holistic Learning was set to enroll 135 city children in a curriculum that said students could gain knowledge from books simply by resting their hands on them. The headmaster had a Ph.D. that state officials said he purchased over the Internet.

Yet the school was fully qualified for state vouchers. Ultimately, it didn't open, but only because it lacked a suitable building.

"The Milwaukee choice program is so unregulated as to allow very questionable schools to participate with no oversight," said Greg Doyle, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. "There are a couple of schools where there is a serious question as to whether or not students are advancing intellectually."

Voucher supporters say such schools are the rare exception.

Julia Doyle, an administrative assistant, has enrolled three of her four children in Milwaukee's choice program.

"Without a doubt, it's highly important for a parent to be able to look at the individual child, and be able to assess the child's personality and decide where you think they will best fit," Doyle said.

Two of them attend the Marva Collins Preparatory School of Wisconsin, where enrollment has quadrupled -- to 300 -- since it opened in 1997. The school offers the same mix of education basics -- phonics, poetry, vocabulary and rigorous expectations -- that its namesake emphasized to produce test score gains that brought national attention to her first school in Chicago.

Ninety percent of the school's students are low-income and two-thirds come from single-parent homes. But the school, one of the few to offer standardized tests comparable to the public school test battery, has decisively outperformed public schools.

Robert Rauh, the school's principal, said: "There's no magic here -- just a lot of hard work."

Sourced from: The Washington Post