The School Choice Advantage… According to DPI
A perspectives column for Dairyland Sentinel by George Mitchell
There was important news on the school choice front last week.
• On Tuesday, more than a thousand students, parents, and school leaders filled the Capitol rotunda to commemorate National School Choice Week. Single-digit temperature did not keep them from thanking legislators who support giving parents education options. Schools from across the state attended, representing Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee, Stevens Point, Madison, southwest Wisconsin, northeast Wisconsin, and central Wisconsin.
• On Thursday, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced that 21 new schools have joined one of Wisconsin’s parental choice programs, bringing overall participation from 415 schools to 433 schools statewide.
Predictably, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel deemed this un-newsworthy. This perhaps reflects the paper’s erroneous view that there’s no meaningful difference in achievement for students in private choice schools and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
DPI data show otherwise. See the charts, below, courtesy of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
The paper’s approach to school choice coverage is baffling. Wisconsin was ground zero for a movement that now has gone national. What can explain a newsroom decision not to examine closely the program’s history and current impact? Why are results, presented in a way that deprives readers of the chance to judge its value?
Columnist Alan Borsuk, a longtime former education reporter for the paper, wrote recently that “as popular as school choice has been, the overall achievement levels…aren’t much better than inMPS.” This is a pattern. Four years ago a column of his on the topic was headlined, “…I said results of voucher, MPS students ‘aren’t much different.’ Has my opinion changed? Nope.”
What do the data show? DPI Report Cards rank schools on a scale of 1-100. The department aggregates data on a number of categories. It takes into account demographic factors shown to have an impact on achievement.
The latest Report Card data for Milwaukee schools gives private choice schools an overall score of 69.3 compared to 57.3 from MPS. The choice score is 21% higher than for MPS. If readers know that, would they agree that choice scores “aren’t much better”?
The Report Cards break out data for (1) achievement on tests and (2) growth in test scores. On achievement — measured as raw test scores — private choice schools scored 60% higher than MPS schools. On growth, the choice advantage was 12%.
Historic DPI achievement data show a consistent choice advantage. On raw score achievement, the choice school advantage grew from 21% in 2016-17 to 60% in 2024-25. For the same years the growth advantage ranged from 9% to 12%.
That advantage is all the more significant because taxpayer support for private choice schools is, on average, less than two-thirds of what traditional public schools receive.
What Journal Sentinel readers know largely is confined to Borsuk’s view that the results “aren’t much different” and that choice scores “aren’t much better.” There was a time when editors would ask the simple question, “says who”? There was a time when readers would be entitled to more than dismissive.
