Department of Education Reform

Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

The MPCP was established in 1990 as the first urban education reform in the U.S. built around the idea of permitting parents to enroll their children in private schools of their choosing at government expense. In its first year of operation, the MPCP enrolled 341 students in the seven secular private schools participating in the program. The MPCP remained a small pilot program throughout the period of University of Wisconsin Professor John Witte’s government-authorized evaluation of 1990-95 (figure 1). Although Wisconsin lawmakers created the conditions for program expansion in 1995 – raising the enrollment cap from 1.5 to 15 percent of K-12 students in the MPS and allowing religious schools to participate – those changes were not implemented until the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled them constitutional in 1998. Program enrollment immediately jumped more than 400 percent and the MPCP was quickly transformed from a small pilot initiative to a large and maturing parental school choice program.

MPCP Enrollment

Source: The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Baseline Reports, by Patrick J. Wolf, SCDP Milwaukee Evaluation Report #1, February 2008, available at http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP/Milwaukee_Eval/Report_1.pdf.

Milwaukee Evaluation Baseline Reports

Milwaukee Evaluation Second Year Reports

Background

Participant Effects

Competitve Academic Response

Economic and Demographic Effects

School Capacity Effects

Funders

Background
	School choice remains an important and contentious education reform policy. Supporters argue that students benefit from being enrolled in schools of choice, such as private schools or public charter schools, instead of being assigned to a particular public school based on residency. Opponents question whether schools of choice actually deliver more value added to students than do assigned public schools, and claim that the choice-induced exit of highly motivated students and parents would harm students left behind. The School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) is a study of education scholarships and other education interventions on schools, individual students, parents, and communities.
Participant Effects
	The primary purpose of the participant effects study is to collect information on how receiving a scholarship affects recipient families over a period of at least five years. In particular, we will focus on whether scholarship recipients benefit academically by virtue of having been given a scholarship. We will also examine the differences between the public and private schools in evaluation sites that may account for any academic benefits of receiving a scholarship to attend private school. In addition, we will study a number of other issues related to the effects of the program on participants. We will collect information on how receiving a scholarship affects parental reports of satisfaction with schools and family interactions with each other, particularly regarding education. We will also collect information on the smaller charter school populations that may participate in the program and on how charter schooling affects important cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. The availability of scholarships will be advertised on a very extensive basis. Therefore, it is expected that the number of eligible students will exceed both the number of available scholarships and the number of available seats in preferred private schools – thereby enabling the lottery to be both a fair way to allocate scarce resources and an instrument for conducting an experimental evaluation of the program. Attempts will be made to follow all initial study participants through the course of the study, whether they (1) avail themselves of the programmatic treatment, (2) decline the treatment offered to them, or (3) are not offered the treatment.
Competitive Academic Response from Urban Public Schools
	This part of the research design will investigate whether the public schools improve their academic performance in response to the challenge of the scholarship program.
Economic and Demographic Effects of School Choice
	Economic theory suggests that choice may have important impacts on neighborhoods and communities more generally. In the absence of voucher programs, nearly ninety percent of parents currently choose schools by choosing neighborhoods (that then give them access to particular public schools). We will analyze the economic and demographic impacts by utilizing vouchers for education at private schools, as well as observing the effects of charter and public school choice.
School Capacity Effects
	This will be an analysis of changes in private and charter school capacity in response to the scholarship program. To assess this we will track changes in the number of schools and number of seats in demonstration sites compared to similar but unaffected areas. We also will measure the extent to which any new capacity involved more complete utilization of existing space or the addition of new space.
Funders
	The research of the School Choice Demonstration Project is supported by a diverse set of funders, including the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Kern Family Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Robertson Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation. Although we thank them for their support, we acknowledge that the methods and conclusions contained in our studies and reports are solely based on the professional judgment of the researchers and do not reflect any institutional position of our funders or our respective universities.