April 15, 2010 1:58PM # More on Milwaukee Vouchers By [Andrew J. Coulson](https://www.cato.org/people/andrew-coulson) --- SHARE [Joseph Lawler](http://spectator.org/blog/2010/04/15/the-failure-of-school-vouchers) and [Philip Klein](http://spectator.org/blog/2010/04/15/re-milwaukee-school-vouchers) 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](http://www2.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/portal/FY10AdoptedAmdBudget.pdf) and [enrollment is 82,444](http://mpsportal.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=367&mode=2&in_hi_userid=2&cached=true) — 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](http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP/Milwaukee_Eval/Report_07.pdf) 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. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).