PAVE History
Throughout its nearly two decades, PAVE has brought diverse partners together to work toward innovative solutions to many of the problems facing urban education.
While its methods to achieve change in urban education have evolved over two decades of work, PAVE's mission has remained the same: to make excellent educational opportunities possible for low-income families in Milwaukee.
1980s - 1990s
In 1987, a group of Milwaukee business leaders came together to start the Milwaukee Archdiocesan Education Foundation, an organization developed under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to support Catholic schools in Milwaukee. These founders were driven by concern for the declining enrollment in the city's Catholic school system, which had served families in the city for generations. The group's early efforts included a collective marketing effort for Catholic schools in the city, and a professional development program for teachers in urban Catholic schools.
Motivated by concern for the state of the city's overall educational system, and by a desire to give low-income students in Milwaukee greater access to excellent educational opportunities of all types, the leaders of the Milwaukee Archdiocesan Education Foundation formed PAVE in 1992, and developed a scholarhsip fund that would make it possible for low-income families to send their children to over 120 private schools throughout the city.
Throughout the 1990s PAVE invested millions of dollars in scholarships for low-income families, and helped form a coalition that advocated for the development of a program which would offer State vouchers for low-income families to attend private schools in the city. When the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the "Choice" program from a challenge on constitutional grounds in 1998, the program began a period of expansion, changing the scope of PAVE's scholarhship program.
2000s
PAVE scholarships and "Choice" vouchers transformed low-income families from dependents on charity or public services into customers for schools that best meet the needs of their children. "Market based education reform" had gathered momentum, and in 2000 PAVE moved to address the "supply side" of the marketplace by developing a leadership support program and a capital investment program to increase the number of seats in high quality schools available to low-income families.
PAVE’s Capital Investments Program invested over $16 million in school expansion projects in the city between 2001 and 2005, leveraging over $60 million in additional private investment and adding over 2,000 seats in high quality schools in the city.
PAVE’s leadership program gained State approval as an alternative licensure program, and has trained and supported over 40 outstanding school leaders.
In 2006, PAVE consolidated its three main areas of areas of support, scholarships, capital investments and leadership development, and focused them on the critical need to increase the capacity of schools which serve urban students. PAVE's current and upcoming school development projects will facilitate school improvement through program development in the summer months and after-school, the fostering of partnerships with outside groups to enrich learning and provide supplemental services to families, and, in some cases, the development of new facilities to house expanded enrollment and programming.