From history to poverty to treating kids like wildlife, errors compound
Bungling facts is bad enough. The harm’s far greater when you’re paid by taxpayers to profess them at Wisconsin’s flagship state university.
A case in point: A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of education policy revealed a grave misunderstanding of school choice as practiced here — and in the process slandered the Wisconsinites who educate more than 60,000 children.
Assistant Professor Christopher Saldaña was speaking last month on a panel, “Preserving Rural School Districts from the Threat of Vouchers.” It was a webinar for a group run by unions and school boards, called Wisconsin Public Education Network, that’s fervently opposed to any options not controlled by unions and school boards, so you wouldn’t expect the panelists to say nice things about competition.
Even so, Saldaña was breathtaking: “I think one of the things we didn’t have a chance to talk about today is the history of vouchers and the history of choice, right?” he volunteered. “If you think back why these kinds of programs and policies were created was after Brown v. the Board of Education to escape desegregation.”
He claimed the same motives continue in “the kinds of policies that are being sold today. You know, they’re repackaged, they’re remarketed, they come with promises and fancy whistles and bells, but they’re not much different. They aren’t different from, you know, what they were originally designed to be all those years ago.”
Bluntly, Saldaña’s wrong. He teaches educational leadership and policy analysis in UW-Madison’s teacher college and has since 2022, so you’d expect him to have a better grasp of our state’s recent history. Even popular accounts by liberal journalists make clear that in Wisconsin, the idea of empowering parents with money to pick a better school never was about “escaping desegregation.”
It was instead about escaping discrimination — about black parents in Milwaukee, weary of a system that ill-served their children, demanding power, the state saying yes, and courageous educators in independent schools trying whatever they could think of to give children a shot. The result after 35 years is an array of schools that includes among its largest some of the most racially integrated in Milwaukee — and best-performing.
Saldaña went on: “We can think about, you know, the pot of money that we’re taking out of public education,” apparently unclear that in Milwaukee, no choice funding comes out of MPS’ budget, and in the rest of Wisconsin, a too-complex system nevertheless indemnifies districts from any loss of per-pupil revenue.
“It’s a separate system,” he said, “that doesn’t serve kids who have disabilities.” Wrong: About 3,500 disabled kids use the Special Needs Scholarship program, while thousands more are accommodated by private schools for no added aid.
“It’s a separate system that doesn’t serve kids who are learning English,” said Saldaña, unaware that 10 percent of choice students statewide are learning English. At Milwaukee’s St. Anthony, of 1,485 students, 60 percent are learning English, and it’s been so for years.
“It’s a separate system,” said Saldaña, “that doesn’t serve kids in poverty.” Wrong. Every child in choice schools enrolled under an income limit, their parents earning no more than 2.2 times the poverty line in most of Wisconsin, 3 times poverty in Milwaukee or Racine. Statewide, 67 percent of kids using choice are “economically disadvantaged.” It’s 100 percent at St. Anthony’s, 44 percent at Northland Lutheran in Kronenwetter, or 47 percent at Our Lady of the Lake in Ashland, to pick at random.
Saldaña bungled so many facts, and in service of an awful cause: He and his fellow panelists were touting an idea they’d unveiled in an academic journal. It’s that, with falling birthrates, rural school districts are running short of the denominators in their per-pupil funding — that is, children — and must be protected against having to downsize or consolidate.
The answer from Saldaña and co-authors? Declare vast tracts of rural Wisconsin to be “education preserves,” akin to wildlife preserves, where the state would conserve the natural resource — that is, the student population — by prohibiting rural parents from using school choice. “Even modest enrollment losses to school choice options can trigger a downward spiral that threatens not only rural districts but the communities they serve,” write the authors, and they know where to turn: “State hunting laws are instructive for voucher and charter management.”
The truth in places like Mattoon is just the opposite.
After the school district closed the elementary school in Mattoon, leaving kids with long bus rides to Antigo, school choice allowed the community to push back by finding a nonprofit to reopen the building. One did — though not without a legal fight when the Antigo district, irate at losing its monopoly over Mattoon children, tried blocking the sale. In a case broadly covered in the media, the district lost, Mattoon families won, and this year 44 kids go to school in their hometown because of school choice.
Saldaña and his co-authors want no more of that. Since the strength of the traditional public school system, with full buildings, undiminished staffing and “widespread protection” against “gender identity discrimination,” is their priority, the interests of actual rural children in getting a decent education get squashed.
The authors go on for pages about a state’s right to manage “wild game,” imagining such a comparison will justify telling parents to pipe down and accept being managed. Referring to hunting laws they claim are somehow applicable, they mention “bag limits” for “black, gray and fox squirrels” and sanctuaries for “game birds, animals or fish.”
Unclear whether any families daring to move out of a fading rural district would get shooed back in by the DNR. Maybe that’s the next paper.
What becomes clear, though, is how a professor could be so carelessly blind to facts, so 180 degrees wrong on them: By being wrong on principles. He failed to grasp that in education, the priority is the good of individual children, not the maintenance of the machine or its operators — that children are humans, not a huntable resource.
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.
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