A Portrait of the Nation's Most Famous Voucher Program: From the Classroom
by Alan Borsuk and Sarah Carr (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
The rhetoric is always heated about Milwaukee's controversial school voucher program. But, too often, the rhetoric is out of touch with reality.
Recognizing that even education reporters can lose perspective when their writing becomes too removed from the realities of the classroom, we decided to visit all 115 schools in Milwaukee's program, the oldest and, until now, the largest school voucher effort in the country. The program enabled more than 14,000 children to attend private schools in Milwaukee in 2004-2005, 70 percent of them enrolled in religious schools. The state paid up to $5, 943 per student to the schools.
For years, we heard proponents hold up the shining stars of the program as evidence of the promise of vouchers. And we heard opponents point to the eyesores as evidence that vouchers had failed.
But little was actually known about what went on in the voucher schools, and we sensed the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Quite frankly, we had no idea about the quality of dozens of schools. And there is almost no government oversight or other outside scrutiny of the educational programs at the schools.
In hindsight, our goal was fairly vague when we began our project. We knew little beyond that we wanted "to see what was out there." And our main selling point to our editors - and to ourselves - was that we would be doing something no one else had done: visiting all of the schools involved in reform that made Milwaukee famous, at least in education circles.
We sent letters to the administrators at all the schools, explaining our intentions, and then began calling to schedule visits. We cajoled all but nine schools into letting us in, at least briefly. A typical visit involved an interview with an administrator about the history and goals of the school, a tour, and visits to a couple of classrooms. At some schools, we went into more depth, interviewing teachers, students and parents, and returning for follow-up visits.
A core assumption when we undertook the project was this: While you don't become an expert on a school by spending an hour and a half or two hours there, you can learn a lot.
We believe the results from our visits proved that true.
Our goal was not to pass judgment on how good a school might be, just as it was not to pass judgment on whether the voucher program as a whole is a good or bad idea. But in light of the collapse of several of the voucher operations that appeared to meet few people's definition of a school, an underlying purpose of our visits was to find out what the $83 million in voucher money provided by the state of Wisconsin in 2004-2005 was buying.
How do you get a handle on what kind of place a school is? Some -including former Milwaukee school superintendent Howard Fuller, the most prominent advocate of Milwaukee's voucher program - have said that you can sometimes get a good feel for what a school is like within seconds of walking into a building. It isn't necessarily something that is tangible, Fuller once told one of us. To a large degree, we agree. That intangible sense of "the feel" of a school was sometimes a key to our observations.
To those who wonder how to arrive at a "feeling" about a school, try these strategies: Does the first person to greet you in a school, often a secretary or administrator, appear welcoming and competent? Do the teachers spend more time on learning activities and lessons or on getting students settled down, dealing with behavioral issues, or simply hanging out? If the bulk of the time isn't being spent on something that can clearly be identified as forward movement, that isn't a good sign. Finally, is this a place where you, as a journalist, want to spend time, or are you turned off by it? If you are turned off, it might be an indication that the students and teachers are as well.
At the same time, there are other tangibles that we looked for: Can a principal articulate the purpose of the school and describe the curriculum choices reasonably well? Are there signs of learning present? Student work posted on walls, textbooks and other materials being used? Wall charts showing student progress? Signs that the classrooms were being used a lot. In many ways, we found that clutter was better to see than tidiness.
Do the classrooms appear to have sufficient materials such as books or supplies? Are the rooms themselves adequate, including lighting and ventilation? Is there a sense of order in the school and of a program being followed throughout the building and in classrooms? What credentials do the teachers have? If you stop to chat with a few teachers or students - preferably at random - what do they say about the school and what they're doing in class? Are test scores made available (in the case of voucher schools, that is entirely a voluntary matter) and, if so, what do they generally indicate? Is the leadership of the school able to describe how the business operations are handled?
When it comes to instruction, can you see links between the philosophy articulated by the administrator and what you see in classrooms and elsewhere in the school? If they say that parent involvement is key, are there parents present in the school either during the school day or at other times (parent board meetings, for example)? If they say that student learning is project-based and student-directed, are students able to tell you in some details what they are currently working on? Do students show signs of being engaged in what they're doing, ranging from simple enthusiasm in answering a teacher's questions to the quality of their responses? Does a teacher respond to a student who is clearly not engaged (staring into space, doodling, facing away from whatever is going on)and if so, how?
Ask questions like these and you can learn a lot inside a school.
While we found a handful of the schools alarming, many appeared at least to be high-quality operations. More than half the schools were fairly traditional Catholic and Lutheran schools. One striking overall observation we made was how many schools were struggling with the same kind of issues and challenges pervasive in the public school system. There was less difference between the voucher and public schools than the rhetoric from advocates of either system would lead people to expect.
Is it possible to give a reporter a snow job during visits of this kind? Yes. And we were specifically suspicious it happened at several schools. But consider some offsetting aspects of that question: We also spent quite a bit of time talking with others who are familiar with the voucher schools as part of building our knowledge of each school; our visits rarely took place without some underlying knowledge of the school. Furthermore, in the totality of more than 100 schools we visited, we believe we gained a picture of the voucher program with enough depth to overcome a few questionable visits. We are confident of our overall observations. And given that you would expect a school to put its best foot forward when a reporter visits - who wouldn't - it was remarkable how some schools still made bad impressions.
Although we did not want to judge schools, we also did not want to pull our punches in describing what we saw. After much debate, we decided to run sidebars with the main story on the first day of our series, giving seven scenes from schools where we saw things that were impressive and seven scenes from schools where we saw things that were, shall we say, also impressive. But in a different way.
We also ran a list of the nine schools that would not allow us in to observe their operations - something that was within their rights but that we thought showed a negative disposition toward public accountability - and how much money each had received from the state in 2004-2005.
Before the start of school in the fall of 2005, we posted online summaries of information we gathered and observations we made at every school in the voucher program. It is the most detailed set of observations of the voucher schools done by anyone, and we want the observations to be as available as possible to parents. They will remain online indefinitely, and we plan to update them with fresh information.
In hindsight, we succeeded in bridging what has always seemed like an unnecessary gulf in some education reporting between "in the classroom features" and harder, newsier, more policy-oriented stories that don't involve too much time in the classroom.
We used all our visits to write stories that aimed to give a hard-edged assessment of how Milwaukee's most distinctive education experiment was faring. And we learned far more than we ever would have by reading a study or by interviewing a policy wonk.
Our experience points us to the need for education reporters to go beyond using classroom visits for color or to come up with feature story ideas, and use them for qualitative research that can inform broader policy stories. We are not suggesting that other newspapers don't do this at times. But there does seem to be a tendency of educations reporters, ourselves included at times, to look to the classroom for features and to studies, school board meetings or speeches for "education news."
There simply aren't many education researchers out there doing qualitative work, and so much of the quantitative education research comes from overtly political sources.
Our voucher project involved a large commitment of time, something that is a relatively rare opportunity for us. It involved major resources of space, and it tackled an overarching question important particularly in Milwaukee.
But one lesson from it can be applied in less sweeping efforts as well: The best stories are sometimes right in the classrooms we cover, if we just go look for them.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series on voucher schools can be found here
The short descriptions of all 115 schools that were in the program during the time the Journal Sentinel did its reporting are here