More on Milwaukee Vouchers

Joseph Lawler and Philip Klein of the American Spectator have some helpful comments on my earlier post about the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of a recent report on Milwaukee’s voucher program. I had stated that the city’s public schools cost taxpayers about 50% more than the voucher program, and Lawler and Klein note that it’s really more like 100%. They’re right. The approved FY2010 budget is $1.073 billion and enrollment is 82,444 — for a per pupil figure of just over $13,000/pupil. The voucher is worth only $6,607.


My mistake was to rely on my recollection of the MPS spending figure used in a 2009 fiscal impact analysis of the voucher program, which turns out not to have included all the district’s revenue sources. 


But while I’m following up on this, I’d like to re‐​emphasize the final point of my earlier post, to which the Spectator writers did not draw particular attention: the Milwaukee voucher program is not a test of free market education. As I noted earlier, its total enrollment is legislatively limited to about 20,000 students, and in the past that limit was much lower. Additionally, there is a rigid price control on voucher schools — the voucher must be accepted as full payment, even though it is worth only half as much as public schools spend per pupil.


Think carefully about this. What entrepreneur would enter an industry whose total customer base is confined to a few thousand families in a single U.S. city and which has a rigid price control set at half the spending level of a government protected monopoly operating in that same city?


That is not test of market forces.