Voucher school tour.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

One day in May, toward the end of the school year, Milwaukee grandmothers Gail Hicks and Marva Herndon loaded up Herndon's RV with a cooler full of water bottles and took two reporters and a state legislator on a tour of Milwaukee voucher schools.

Herndon and Hicks formed a group called Women Committed to an Informed Community, also known as the "mad grandmas," to bring attention to the voucher schools popping up all over the largely African American north side of Milwaukee in strip malls, rundown office buildings, old car dealerships, and abandoned factories.

"We are talking about the schools that fall under the category of LifeSkills Academy," says Hicks, referring to a Milwaukee voucher school that made headlines last year when the couple that owned it fled to Florida, taking with them millions in state education funds and leaving sixty-six students suddenly stranded, with no school.

Many of the schools Herndon and Hicks are concerned about are religious. But "we are not talking about schools associated with long-established churches," Hicks says.

In racially divided Milwaukee, most of the mainline parochial schools that take voucher students are run by Catholic and Protestant churches on the largely Hispanic south side, Herndon explains.

"On the north side, it's just loaded with fly-by-night, hole-in-the-wall schools, gas station schools," Herndon says.

Herndon and Hicks said they started calling some of these schools, with names like Daughters of the Father, and asking them about their religious affiliation.

"One of the buzzwords in our community is Christian Academy of ... whatever," says Hicks. "We started calling and asking these places, 'Which denomination are you?' They would answer, 'Oh, we're no particular denomination. We just talk about the bible.'"

"So then we'd ask, 'Which bible? The King James Bible?' And they'd say, 'No, we just talk about biblical principles. We don't use any particular bible,'" says Hicks. "Religion is their selling point, but they have no affiliation."

When she was in her early twenties, Hicks made friends, through the civil rights movement, with Polly Williams. Williams went on to become the public face of the national school-choice movement in the 1990s. Along with then-governor Tommy Thompson, she helped create the Milwaukee Parental Choice program while representing her largely African-American Milwaukee district in the state legislature.

"She had a different perspective," Hicks says of Williams. "She wanted African American kids to be able to go to parochial schools, and to have the public funds follow them. But somewhere along the line, all that got changed."

The original voucher program in Milwaukee was limited to 300 students whose families had incomes of less than 175 percent of the poverty level. Today there is no limit on the number of participants, and the income cap has been lifted to 300 percent of poverty. More than 25,000 children are in Wisconsin's school choice program today.

Numerous studies have shown that voucher students perform no better in reading or math than their public school peers. But Governor Scott Walker expanded school vouchers to nine new districts around the state this year. And the state legislature, with the backing of the powerful school choice lobby, has been pushing a raft of legislation to siphon public school funds into private voucher and charter schools.

The $6,442 per pupil in public funds attached to vouchers is more than the cost of tuition at many parochial schools. That, along with start-up funds for new voucher schools, creates a powerful incentive for cash-strapped parochial schools and unscrupulous, fly-by-night operators alike. As a result, parents in voucher districts have been inundated with marketing calls, flyers, and advertisements at taxpayer expense urging them to send their kids to private school for free.

Nowhere is the problem with turning public schools over to private business more evident than in Milwaukee, the birthplace of school choice.

"Academy of Excellence" is spelled out in snap-on plastic letters above a phone number on a temporary-looking sign on West North Avenue.

A teacher stands in the doorway of a rundown office building with peeling orange paint on cinderblock walls, watching children jump rope in the parking lot between rows of cars. A few little girls crouch on the...