Voucher advocate, critic spar at Marquette

School choice advocate Scott Jensen said Wednesday that the Republican-controlled Legislature will likely boost funding for public schools in the next legislative session.

But the former lawmaker, with ties to President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, said he also expects legislators to continue the expansion of the state’s voucher programs by simplifying their regulations and lifting the enrollment caps that have created waiting lists in some communities.

“Choice isn’t going to end. It’s here for good. So let’s give all parents across the city and the state high-quality options to choose from,” Jensen said during a debate with Julie Underwood, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law and education professor and voucher critic, at Marquette University Law School.

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Underwood questioned how the state can continue to adequately fund public schools while continuing to support the expansion of taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools.

“It’s expensive,” Underwood said of the state’s three voucher programs, which cover Milwaukee, Racine and the rest of the state.

“We have a program that now costs us $247 million. All at a time when the state of Wisconsin has been one of the biggest public school cutters in the United States,” she said. “It concerns me that the solution would be to continue to shift resources from public to private, or to shift the bill to the public schools.”

Jensen and Underwood squared off as part of a discussion on the lessons learned from a quarter century of school vouchers in Wisconsin, moderated by Alan Borsuk, a longtime education journalist and fellow at the law school.

Wisconsin's is the largest voucher program in the country with 261 schools and more than 33,700 students taking part. As part of the program, students receive state-funded vouchers of $7,232 or $7,969, depending on the grade, to attend private schools, most of them religious.

"Nearly a quarter of all children in the city of Milwaukee receiving a publicly funded education are doing so through the voucher program," Borsuk said in setting up the discussion.

Borsuk: Table set for major school choice push

Jensen and Underwood are among the leading voices in the decades-old debate over vouchers in the state. Former chief of staff under Gov. Tommy Thompson, Jensen is now senior strategist for the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos, who has been tapped by Trump to head the U.S. Department of Education.

Jensen called DeVos "a visionary" who has worked with private and public schools — namely the Grand Rapids district in Michigan. He said Trump's proposal to invest $20 billion to expand school choice is "like much of the Trump agenda ... pretty vague." 

He speculated that choice proponents could advocate for federal vouchers for special education, or a tax credit for businesses and individuals who fund scholarships that allow students to attend voucher schools, similar to a bill proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

"It's early and the white paper during the campaign was pretty brief," he said.

Underwood said DeVos' lack of an education background made her "probably the least traditionally qualified nominee for secretary of education," and said her appointment signals an interest by the Trump administration in school privatization and deregulation.

She hopes the $20 billion would be used to "support the infrastructure and children across the United States."

School voucher programs grow in 2015-'16

The two found little to agree on Wednesday, but one point of common ground was that vouchers are not the panacea reformists had hoped. In general, voucher schools perform no better, or only marginally better, than public schools serving similar students. Another was the need for greater accountability.

"There are some things we would do differently if we started all over again," Jensen said.

He said the only way choice works is if parents have the information — rankings, test scores, curriculum — to make informed choices about their children's schools.

"We've only now, sadly, begun to get to that level where that sort of information is available to parents," he said. "That sort of thing should have been done long ago."