Dan McGroarty - author, Break These Chains, The Battle for School Choice; Lynde and Harry Bradley Fellow, Institute for Contemporary Studies; former special assistant and deputy director of speech writing to President George Bush;published essays on education reform and politics.

I'm here to talk a bit about the study I've done in the last three years. It's what I call a battlefield or street-level view of the one publicly-funded, private school choice program that's been in existence in the United States since 1990. It is the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

I won't rise to the grand level of methodology, but perhaps I'll shed a little light on the method in my madness, going out to Milwaukee to study this program.

I had been interested in the theory of school choice and had followed the school choice debates for many years. There were no programs on the ground to study. But after 1990, a program did exist and the opportunity presented itself to go and look at school choice in existence. It struck me as strange that the argument continued to be waged from what I call 30,000 feet.

My view was to go to the schools, to go to Milwaukee, to take a look at the program everybody was arguing about and to observe it as closely as possible, from street-level.

When I first went out to the schools participating in this program, I believed I would go into a school and find as many researchers running the hallways, elbow to elbow with the students, possibly more people picking this program to death, studying it from every vantage point than there were students and teachers in the schools.

I was astonished, but perhaps I shouldn't have been. There were very few such people. In fact, it had been a number of years since people from the media poked their heads in, or any other scholar had actually come to the schools. Everyone was content to argue about this at a distance.

I'm not somebody who is opposed to the theoretical approach, but it strikes me that we had moved on the issue of education vouchers and school choice. We discussed these things in theory, but the movement has picked up speed. We ought to be talking about practice. We ought to examine the myths, both pro and con, about what we think we know. So I hope in this way to have opened a new window onto the debate.

I have organized the beginning of my remarks today around three myths, three widely-repeated statements about school choice and vouchers.

These three myths happen to be from the voucher opponents, by the public teachers unions and the public education lobby. Each one of them should be compared against the reality I found in Milwaukee, a city which is in some respects a microcosm of our urban education problems in every city across America.

The first of the myths I want to touch on today is that vouchers hurt minorities. In some ways this is the closed-loop logic of the liberal anti-voucher forces. They come to the view that vouchers siphon off public money from public schools. "Public money." Remember that phrase. Public schools educate most of our minority students. Therefore vouchers must hurt public schools. The argument kind of revolves on itself.

An adjunct to this argument is that vouchers are a threat to the neighborhood school. Anybody who's followed this debate very much will know that the neighborhood school image is often invoked by the public education establishment and the opponents of vouchers.

A practical aspect fascinated me when I got to Milwaukee and began to talk to the parents and students and break down the barriers of parents who were wary about talking to outsiders about such fundamental things as the education of their children.

What I found was that the neighborhood school doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because every morning first-graders get on a bus, some go here, some go there. In the neighborhood of Palmer Elementary School in Milwaukee, a first-grader can be bused to 88 different areas.

Polly Williams, the mother of school choice in Milwaukee, the black liberal, Democratic, former welfare mother herself, made a strange-bedfellow alliance with Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature, and with Governor Tommy Thompson, to push this voucher program through. That's a political lesson we'll want to come back to.

She told me she believed this effect of busing was the motive force behind school choice and a return to the neighborhood school and that it was also responsible for gangs in the urban areas. Young children were sent into neighborhoods so hostile for such long periods of the day that they needed to make alliances with the older children on their bus and the older children in their neighborhood to get safely to and from the neighborhood. And that that was a kind of feeder system for the gangs.

These are the kinds of things I think we should focus on as we look to the future. What creates the constituency for school choice? What are parents up against, whether those parents are from the urban areas, whether they are minority members, whether they are from suburban areas, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, whether or not they disagree with us on many other issues?

Polly Williams would disagree with Governor Thompson on many other issues. But when it comes to the children, there's a common ground for a program like this to move forward. Do vouchers hurt minorities? Well, if you can see that the neighborhood school is destroyed by things like forced busing, then vouchers are an opportunity to go to the neighborhood school down the street. It might happen to be a private neighborhood school, maybe a non-denominational, non-sectarian school, a community school in an urban area. It may be a Catholic school, a Lutheran school, maybe a Moslem school or a Jewish day school. But vouchers suddenly restore that choice to parents.

That's what I found, and that's the way I found parents looking at it in an intensely pragmatic way, once I took the trouble to go and actually sit down and talk with the people who were affected.

Milwaukee, like many other cities, is majority minority in terms of African American and Hispanic populations. Ninety-six percent of the students using vouchers in the first five years of that program were African American or Hispanic. They were represented and even over-represented demographically in terms of their participation because of their enthusiasm and interest in this program.

This tells me that people who did not have what some people call "checkbook choice," found that when they had the opportunity to use a voucher they were very anxious to use it. They found, for the very first time, that the schools began to look seriously at them as parents concerned about the education of their children.

The myth that vouchers hurt minority students cannot withstand even a few minutes' time spent looking at the program as it has operated in Milwaukee.

The second myth we hear is that private schools work well because they select students. They say school choice and vouchers will work well because the private schools will choose the best students and pull them into the program with vouchers. They'll skim the cream of the crop.

This argument sounds like it works in theory. But when you take a look at it in practice it is almost completely inverted. What comes into play is really common sense.

When I began to interview parents, I found that the parents with students doing well in the public schools were not anxious to move their children from the public schools. Parents who were frustrated with the public schools were those with children who had, on average, more behavioral problems in public schools and had lower levels of achievement in public schools. Their children weren't from the upper end, they weren't from the middle, they were in fact lower in both respects than the typical public school students. Their parents were casting about for options. Those parents were looking for a better educational environment for their children. Those were the parents who used the vouchers. And statistically, over time, we've seen that this is the pool from which most of the voucher children have been drawn.

If anything, that indicates to us that the private schools have to be open, as we often hear they're not. The private schools have to be open to educating all children and all comers in the urban areas. And that, again, is what I encountered when I went to Milwaukee. Open schools is a factor to keep in mind as you ask yourself, as the evaluators of Milwaukee's choice program did, whether or not the program works.

Remember that the students are drawn, not from above-average levels or even the average level, but from below average.

So what would it mean to say the program works? Do students educated through vouchers have to out-perform the above-average students? Do they have to come up to the middle? None of those measurements can be made without political scrutiny. People who are opposed are predisposed to see that the program doesn't work.

And that's the third myth, the myth that has dogged the program for quite some time. They say that choice doesn't work, that choice, after these years in Milwaukee, doesn't work.

The last revenge of Herbert Grover, the former state superintendent of Wisconsin, was to appoint the man who would study the program and study it to death every year. It's a long story, but it's part of the political story that surrounds the pedagogical efforts that go on in our schools. The program in Milwaukee was evaluated, officially, by an academic who was appointed by the state school superintendent. He had opposed the program and had, himself, sued to stop it. He failed in that suit. The academic found in the first year that, after seven to eight months, the students who started lower than everyone had not equaled or exceeded the average performance of the public school students. Therefore, he claimed, the choice program was a failure. Wasn't working.

This particular outside examiner had held the evidence, held the data, in a proprietary fashion. He never allowed anybody else to take a second look. He released studies that from year to year would include a table which might indicate that there was some positive movement for choice, but in the second-year study, that table would be gone. The measure would be slightly redefined, and the news would be pretty uniformly negative about the program.

That changed just this year, under legal pressure and the pressure of public opinion. The official evaluator of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was forced to make public his data. He did it in an indiscriminate way, releasing it onto an Internet web site. Outside evaluators from Harvard University, Paul Peterson in the last couple of months, have looked at the data. Lo and behold, they found that in significant ways the school choice students have improved. They have benefitted. In particular, the minority students in the program in three to four years have narrowed the gap in student achievement between themselves and white students by 33% to 50%.

Those who follow the education debate know that for decades we've been working and spending billions of dollars in the public schools to try to narrow that gap. This is a remarkable finding, one that was suppressed. It was there in the data to be found only when the data was released for outside review.

Does school choice work for students?

The opponents of public school choice often contrast the inner city public schools, which are having difficulty working, and the posh, high-tuition prep schools. They say, "Well, children will be better off in posh schools, but nobody provides a voucher to pay their way into those schools." They act as if the private schools in the urban areas are invisible. They're not invisible. They are there. They do extraordinary work every day with a population in our cities that we are told are not educable.

Nevertheless, the private schools I visited are producing graduation rates of 88% to 99.9% while the public schools in Milwaukee produce graduation rates of about 44%; for African American students, 25%.

For African American male public school students, the graduation rate is so low that, during the time I was studying the program, Milwaukee stopped keeping track of their graduation rate. They changed their methodology and didn't announce the reason why. My suspicion and that of community activists in inner city Milwaukee is that female African Americans were bringing that rate up, and they didn't want to produce separate rates which would show the current graduation rate of African American males.

One of the people I interviewed said that is because they would have shown that African American males have a higher incarceration rate than graduation rate. That was uncomfortable, so they quit keeping track.

This is like a Petri dish experiment. It doesn't get any more perfect than this. We could all walk from the worst public school in the City of Milwaukee, North Division High School, and watch children walking through the neighborhoods from that school to Mesmer High School, a private, former archdiocese school, now independent. Mesmer conducts itself, it says, "In the independent tradition of Catholic education." Mesmer produces a graduation rate of 99.9 percent.

If you call Brother Bob Smith, who runs Mesmer High School, he will tell you what the graduation rate is. He will immediately start talking about the student or two who didn't graduate and the plans he is making to make sure that they're in over the summer to earn the credits they are short. If you go into that school, you'll see a ribbon of names running down the wall, the names of the students and the colleges to which they've been accepted. In the inner cities, if a student can run the gantlet, if they can make it through and get that high school diploma, they will find colleges falling all over themselves to enroll them. But the point is, too many of them don't make it through.

I noticed those images once I got close enough to see whether choice measured up against the myths or, in fact, as I found in most cases, those myths completely stand on their heads.

Now I want to talk a bit about the recent mention of private school choice and the echoes of the Milwaukee program that made their way into the presidential debates. The issue was almost invisible in the most recent elections. Many conservatives and many people who are interested in private school choice felt a general feeling of frustration. I'm going to argue that, on further reflection, that might have been a good thing, that it was invisible.

We saw President Clinton announcing, in a way, almost like a magical incantation, "I am for school choice; I am for school choice. I am for public school choice," as he put it in the debates. He took the issue cleanly away from under Senator Dole. He then talked about Milwaukee, a program which was supposed to be a dismal failure. He said, "You know, in Milwaukee the results are ambiguous." They are ambiguous. He knew and had been briefed, I'm certain, about the studies I've referred to. When the President has upgraded the program to "ambiguous," then the program clearly must be a success.

A few days after that, Chester Finn published a very fine piece for the Wall Street Journal. He wrote, "The debate for choice is over. The philosophical debate has ended, and a victory has been won." President Clinton had to act as if he believed in this concept of choice. He had to upgrade the status of Milwaukee from a dismal failure to ambiguous. And he had to say that, "Well, it shouldn't be tried on the federal level, but it ought to be okay for localities to make these experiments."

It ought to be okay for conservatives to look at localities to make these experiments. That's why I say we shouldn't be too concerned about the national level. The lever for choice won't come from within the Beltway.

Conservatives ought to be worried about succumbing to the temptation to come up with a one-shot, one-size-fits-all solution ordered from Washington, lest we cause the federal government to be more intrusive in the matter of education than we would like it to be. That's true for vouchers or anything else.

When we talk today about how we can proceed and then win this battle, the good news is the battle can be won. In some respects, as Chester Finn says, I think the philosophical battle has been won.

The contest between the sheer force of public teachers unions and the desire of parents remains to be fought. But it's always good to have principle and philosophy on your side.

The extended battle won't be won in Washington. That's also the bad news. The battle's going to have to be won in small skirmishes in states and in cities, over and over again, as it was in Milwaukee.

When I started studying education choice, people said, "It's interesting but too small." How could it matter? How much more important is it to look at California, where the ballot initiative failed, or at Washington State, where a voucher ballot initiative failed in the last election cycle. Twenty ballot initiatives up, and twenty failed. That press release is available at the National Education Association. They have it ready. They just change the number. They are quite ready to mobilize against these occasional ballot initiatives.

I'm saddened by the fact that the ballot initiatives consume enormous amounts of money, money which could otherwise have been spent putting together privately-funded pilot programs like the Milwaukee program, funded by philanthropists or community people, concerned citizens in the community. More actual demonstrations will give proof that these programs work, rather than tilting at windmills through the initiative process.

I know that's a very strong statement. But I have looked at a program that was at one point said to be so invisible that it couldn't possibly matter. That has taken root and grown. It has expanded and produced results. It's showing success in a way conservatives ought to applaud. These initiatives can be fought for and won at the local level. The force behind them can come from the community itself.

The Milwaukee program is, in many respects, similar to a program now begun in Cleveland. In New York City, the New York City Archdiocese has offered to take 5 percent of the worst performing students in the worst public schools and bring them into their system and educate them for the City of New York. Mayor Giuliani's effort to help make that happen is rolling. They're going to have to make it happen with private money.

I can cite programs like Golden Rule in Indianapolis, the first of the major privately-funded programs that Pat Rooney began. The CEO program that has franchised that idea out into many other cities and states, 20 or 27 cities and states across the country. Out there, away from the Beltway, this movement is building.

Let me give you two images from the battlefront, if you will. I mentioned Polly Williams of Milwaukee briefly. I'm trading on the fact that you all at least know a bit about this person who was so important in the beginning of this battle for school choice. She used to tell me, when we were doing our first interviews, "You know, I would go out and take this message into the beauty parlors. I would take this message to meetings in the church basements. I looked out into the audience and saw they were all mothers, almost all of them were black.

AI knew many of them from my neighborhood. Some had been on welfare. Some were off. They would work a job; they would fall into the employment market and fall back out. They often didn't have husbands. They had no political power.

AI looked out and I thought, this is my army. No political power, no clout, no special pull in Madison, no one from the media interested in what we do. All we are are parents, concerned for our kids. That's all we are."

And she stopped. She thought and she said, "All we have is the moral authority of a deep concern for our children. That's all we are, but that's all we need."

She mobilized that army. She looked at what she had and turned it into a force which would jump on eight or nine buses and go up to Madison for the hearings. They would go to any public hearings that were scheduled, not just in the courts but in the legislature as well. They would force their way into the legislators' attention and say to them, "If you deny us this right over our children's education, you have to deny us to our face because we're here to claim it." That's one image.

The second is the children themselves. And this is a story Clint Bolick tells. He may be a friend to many of you here. He's the Washington-area, public-interest lawyer who came out to defend parents in this case and to work with Polly Williams to make sure, once vouchers made it through the legislature, that the effort could survive the litigation that followed.

Clint told me this story about the day he was called and told that the program had passed constitutional muster in Wisconsin. He said, "You know, I thought back to the day that we were arguing in Madison. We wanted the parents and the kids to come up on buses. They were running a little bit late.

AI stood up, and I was making the argument before the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. I turned around and saw the courtroom fill up with all the typical people who come in and sit down for whatever trial is going on. All the public school lobbyists were already there there and their legal counsel, filling up the small number of seats. I thought, 'There's no room. There's no room for the parents even when they get here, and where they are I don't know.'"

Clint turned around several times and finally, about three-quarters of the way through the proceedings, he turned around and looked. At the back of the room, he saw a little bit of movement. Through glass windows, he saw children, with their noses pressed against the glass. They were looking over Clint Bolick's shoulder at the judges in the front of the room. And Clint thought, "They finally got here."

When the decision came down and the case was won, he remembered those children. He thought, so many little faces struggling, on the outside looking in.

Thank goodness at this point they're on the inside now. That was the constituency and the kind of moral impetus that pushed this program over the top.

A tiny program, one program in one city in one state in the country. But it's one we have to look to if we want to do the difficult work of bringing this movement to where it can be. It's not just for parents in one city or one state, but for parents everywhere, who are the first educators for their children and the most concerned with the options and the educational alternatives they have for their children.

This address was delivered to the Council for National Policy in McLean, Virginia in February, 1997.