Teacher of the Year gives vouchers a failing grade.

• Author: Peterson, Bob
• Position: Milwaukee, WI - Cover Story

One recent winter morning, during the worst cold spell of the year, I found some caulk in my basement and took it to school. I teach at La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee, which was built in 1903. My classroom's third-floor windows are drafty, and on windy days, the kids who sit near the window often wear jackets to keep warm.

On this particular day, the wind chill was minus forty degrees. The big news -- apart from the weather and the Superbowl -- was that a Madison judge had declared the expansion of Milwaukee's school-voucher program unconstitutional.

I was relieved by the news. Republicans around the country have been pushing the idea of using publicly funded vouchers to send kids to private school. And Wisconsin has been in the forefront of this effort.

Vouchers are a top item on the conservative agenda. The religious right wants to use them to tear down the wall of separation between church and state. By using public funds for private, parochial schools, religious conservatives strike a blow against secular, public education. Vouchers serve that purpose, just as they serve the broader conservative movement's goal of cutting government entitlements and denying government responsibility for social services.

For sixteen years. I've taught public school in Milwaukee's central city, and I've been active in school reform. I know that vouchers won't seal the windows at La Escuela Fratney.

Vouchers have been synonymous with Milwaukee ever since 1990, when Wisconsin began an experiment allowing low-income children in the tend nonreligious private schools inside city boundaries. The courts upheld that original program. In the 1996-1997 school year, some 1,600 Milwaukee students received roughly $4,400 each to attend nonreligious private schools.

In 1995, the Wisconsin legislature expanded the Milwaukee voucher program to include religious schools and to allow as many as 15,000 students to take part, but the state suspended the expansion because of a lawsuit charging that it violates the state constitution. Until this fall. when Cleveland began a low-income voucher program that also included religious schools, Milwaukee had the only voucher experiment in the country. (Cleveland's program is also being challenged in the courts, but was allowed to proceed until a final ruling.)

One of the big myths of the school-choice movement is that private schools are always better than public schools.

But in Milwaukee, vouchers gave rise to some fly-by-night private institutions.

The schools that initially took part in the voucher program were longstanding private institutions that, over the years, had built an infrastructure and a reputation attractive to tuition-paying students. Then the project started some new private schools -- and they began to fail.

Two voucher schools closed unexpectedly in mid-year amid charges of inflated enrollment figures and missing or fraudulent financial records. Two others were unable to pay their staff regularly, leading to an exodus of teachers and students. A fifth

One of the schools that closed, the Milwaukee Preparatory School, may have been obliged to return up to $300,000 due to exaggerated enrollment figures, but the state could not complete an audit because of missing financial records. The school's founder skipped town. He was eventually arrested in Texas and charged with criminal fraud. Charges are...