By Patrick McIlheran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
patrickmcilheran@yahoo.com

Last Updated: January 9, 2005

Brother Bob Smith tells of taking some students on a trip to historical sites in the South. In Nashville, one child was impressed upon seeing horse-drawn carriages offering rides. Another boy pointed out that such carriages rolled around back home, in downtown Milwaukee.

But it turned out the first child had never been to downtown. As Smith notes, the boy had grown up only a few miles to the north.

Such limits characterize the experience of the poor, says Smith, who as head of the Messmer Catholic Schools on Milwaukee’s north side sees many children from such a background.

“If you don’t have the opportunity to expand your field of vision, that’s all you’ve got,” he said.

Such constraints come up when people discuss Milwaukee’s school choice program, which lets poor parents take their state school aid with them to private schools.

Some critics have been open in e-mailing their doubts to me: Are poor parents, themselves poorly educated, equipped to make such a choice?

The chief opponent of school choice, the state teachers union, isn’t so blunt, but it hints at the idea: One posting on its Web site, for instance, a recounting of choice schools’ failures, centers on the notion of bamboozled parents. “Many lost voucher gamble,” reads one part.

All of this is premised on an imbalance: Ignorant parents should defer to smart professionals in choosing schools. Smith suggests a different imbalance as more critical: Parents’ innate passion for the interests of their own children is more reliable than the detached and divided attention of an educational bureaucracy.

“Too many times, educators believe they know more than a parent,” he says, particularly when parents are poor.

The remedy is belief and trust in parents, even impoverished ones. While circumstances may limit their background or vision, they do not, in Smith’s experience, impede their drive to see their children succeed. Parents whose children haven’t been so far as downtown still manage to seek better schools when they can.

Choice harnesses this drive and rewards it. A private school that a parent chooses is, by the fact of that choice and the money it brings, more accountable to that parent than are public schools, where money doesn’t come through parents. School choice puts not only money but power in the hands of poor parents.

That’s critical. By giving poor parents the same say over their children’s future that is held by tuition-paying middle-class parents, the arrangement gives them dignity, treating them as adults rather than clients. It strengthens families by reinforcing parents’ authority and broadening their options.

Not to say there aren’t choices within the Milwaukee Public Schools. Rufus King, the public high school near Messmer, offers an excellent education to children from poor neighborhoods.

But King, which picks and chooses its students, cannot accommodate all the neighborhood’s kids. Some wind up at North Division, also nearby, where last year the graduation rate of only 50% was the highest in years.

Smith points out that these extremes, North and King, are in the same district, with the same pool of students and the same state funding - so neither factor can be blamed.

Nor can one blame the school in the middle, Messmer, as so many choice critics do, as “siphoning off” good students. No one, after all, levels such a charge at King.

Least of all does it make sense to disregard the public value of the education Messmer delivers to these children of a poor neighborhood, just because it is an option outside MPS - or to doubt the validity of parents’ choices because those parents don’t have college degrees.

That horizon-broadening education - Messmer graduated 98% of its students; 87% went on to college - is one way life in Milwaukee gets better. Your taxes helped fund it, which should satisfy those on the political left, yet this happened through private initiative, not a state bureaucracy, which should please the rest of us.

And it happened in a way that put parents in charge of their own families’ destiny. To anyone who values human dignity, that’s the best part of all.

Patrick McIlheran is a columnist for the Journal Sentinel and works on the newspaper’s design desk. His email address is patrickmcilheran@yahoo.com