Supply Side of Educational Choice
By Martin Sweet, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, 2003
Having endured the political struggles to establish school choice programs and the legal maneuvers to constitutionalize voucher programs, school choice advocates are now faced with a new round of challenges in their quest to improve the quality of education for children: the physical capacity of the best private schools involved in the school choice program is not large enough to accommodate the increased demand for seats in their classrooms. The supply of high quality education has yet to rise to meet the new demand spurred by school choice. This lack of space threatens to undermine much of the rationale behind school choice.
The voucher program operating in the Milwaukee Public School system over the last decade will soon involve 15,000 students opting out of the public school system and electing to attend approximately 110 private schools. The exceptional private schools in the choice program - those schools that have very high graduation rates and test scores - are routinely turning away qualified applicants. Because it is the best private schools in this program that spur the public schools to reform, the turning away of these students challenges choice advocates to consider ways to expand the physical structures of high-achieving private schools.
In the Milwaukee school choice program, the State of Wisconsin provides a voucher of not more than $5800 for each public school student attending a private school. This amount of money must cover the private school's cost of educating the child, specifically including direct instruction, building administration, transportation, instructional staff services, pupil services, and general administration. Yet the Milwaukee Public School system routinely spends approximately $9000 per pupil and does not even include the amount of money budgeted by the public schools for capital projects and debt service. Therefore, private schools involved in the choice program must not only educate children for about half the cost of public schools, they must use this same money to try to expand their infrastructure to accommodate the burgeoning demand for their services. Given the dilapidated state of most parochial school buildings and the risk of planning on the long-term viability of such a politically contentious program, it is no wonder that school choice advocates face a daunting task.
Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE), a not-for-profit organization in Milwaukee, has come up with one solution to the supply-side dilemma. By acting as a funding agent for less specialized foundations, PAVE has been able to use its expertise in assessing the feasibility of school infrastructure expansion to target philanthropic dollars toward this end. Yet PAVE's involvement in the supply side of school choice is quite different from outright charity. Instead, PAVE works with recipient schools to train their school leaders to write business plans, understand the financing of multi-million dollar projects, and place schools in the context of being a neighborhood resource. PAVE limits its direct giving to schools to five percent of a project, but will also work with local banks and investors in securing low interest loans for those schools best positioned for infrastructure expansion projects