Social Policy Commons^™

Milwaukee Independent Charter Schools Study: Report On One Year Of Student Growth, John F. Witte, Patrick J. Wolf, Alicia Dean, Deven Carlson

School Choice Demonstration Project

The general purpose of this evaluation is to assess the effectiveness of independent charter schools in promoting two desirable student outcomes: student achievement growth and educational attainment. Independent charter schools are authorized by non-district entities and are considered “independent” because they are not a part of the Milwaukee Public School District. We will estimate achievement growth of independent charter school students in grades 3-8 over four years in reading and math on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE). Similarly, in later reports we will track student attainment, specifically whether uppergrade cohorts in our evaluation graduate from high school. Case …

A Protection Post-Mortem On The "Death" Of Multiculturalism In Germany, Erin Mooney

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Noticeably absent from the recent pronouncements of the “death” of multiculturalism in Germany, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own conclusion that the policy had “utterly failed,” has been any interest to seriously examine, let alone address, the reasons for such a failure.

Conference Schedule, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Brookings Mountain West

The Political Demography and Geography of the Intermountain West Conference

The Intermountain West region, including Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, is the new swing region in American politics. Many national observers and commentators have only a superficial understanding of the profound economic, political, and social changes that continue to reshape this region. Brookings Mountain West is pleased to offer a collection of contemporary research papers on recent demographic trends that alter this region and its politics. These studies, including a public opinion survey that explores attitudes on state and national politics, alternative energy, education, deficits, health care, immigration, and other topics illuminate the political landscape of this …

The Intermountain West Today: A Regional Survey, Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman

Brookings Mountain West Publications

What does it mean to live in the Intermountain West today? What issues are most and least important to the region’s residents? Do Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah have a collective identity or are state-level differences too great? Is there an identifiable Intermountain West personality? Today we will present the results of a unique survey that attempts to answer these questions.

Unlv / Brookings West: Intermountain West Region Regional Survey, University Of Nevada Las Vegas, Brookings Institute

Brookings Mountain West Publications

The 2010 Intermountain West Public Opinion Survey documents responses from 2,000 residents of the Intermountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah). Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications conducted the survey from August 23 – September 1, 2010. A minimum of 250 respondents for each state are included in the results for this survey. Respondents included 1,700 landline interviews and 300 cell phone interviews. Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications provides strategic planning, communications, project management, and research services to a wide range of non-profit organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and candidates for elected office.

The survey includes an extensive series …

Evaluation Of The Impact Of The Dc Opportunity Scholarship Program: Final Report, Patrick J. Wolf, Babette Gutmann, Michael Puma, Brian Kisida, Lou Rizzo, Nada Eissa, Matthew Carr, Marsha Silverberg

School Choice Demonstration Project

The District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003, passed by Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. As part of this legislation, Congress mandated a rigorous evaluation of the impacts of the Program, now called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). This final evaluation report presents the longer term effects of the Program on families who applied and were given the option to move from a public school to a participating private school of their choice.

Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists, Meagan Batdorf, Daniela Doyle, W. Holmes Finch, Brayan Hassel, Brayan Hassel

School Choice Demonstration Project

In 2005, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, with the support of the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, published a report showing that charter schools were greatly underfunded compared to traditional district schools in the 2002-03 school year. This report uses FY 2006-07 data, the most recent available when this project began, to describe the state of charter funding, and to see if it has changed since the last report. It includes all of the original 17 states and Washington D.C., as well as seven new states. The new edition also improves our method of analyzing …

The Mpcp Longitudinal Educational Growth Study Third Year Report, John F. Witte, Joshua M. Cowen, David J. Fleming, Patrick J. Wolf, Meghan R. Condon, Juanita Lucas-Mclean

School Choice Demonstration Project

This is the third-year report in a five-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The MPCP, which began in 1990, provides government-funded vouchers for low-income children to attend private schools in the City of Milwaukee. The maximum voucher amount in 2008-09 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used a voucher to attend either secular or religious private schools. The MPCP is the oldest and largest urban school voucher program in the United States. This evaluation was authorized by Wisconsin Act 125 enacted in 2005.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program’S Effect On School Integration, Jay P. Greene, Jonathan N. Mills, Stuart Buck

School Choice Demonstration Project

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP, or the Milwaukee voucher program) on integration in public and private schools.

Family Voices On Parental School Choice In Milwaukee: What Can We Learn From Low-Income Families?, Thomas Stewart, Juanita Lucas-Mclean, Laura I. Jensen, Christina Fetzko, Bonnie Ho, Sylvia Segovia

School Choice Demonstration Project

This report, designed as one component of the comprehensive evaluation of the Milwaukee school system being conducted by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP), is based on focus group conversations with low-income families whose children attend Milwaukee public and private schools. The report seeks to elucidate the demand side of school choice from the perspective of the end users. More specifically, it describes the experiences of low-income families and uses their insights to better understand the strengths and limitations of their attempts to exercise parental school choice. Among its distinguishing characteristics, Milwaukee has the first publicly funded means-tested voucher program …

Milwaukee Longitudinal School Choice Evaluation: Annual School Testing Summary Report 2008-09, Jeffery R. Dean, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

With the passage of the 2005 Wisconsin Act 125, private schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) have been required to administer annual standardized tests in reading, mathematics, and science to their MPCP students enrolled in the 4th, 8th, and 10th grades. The law further directs Choice schools to submit copies of the scores from those tests to the School Choice Demonstration Project for processing and reporting to the Legislative Audit Bureau. During the 2008-09 school year, MPCP schools administered either nationally normed tests, such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, or the state criterion-referenced Wisconsin Knowledge …

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Descriptive Report On Participating Schools 2008 – 2009, Brian Kisida, Laura I. Jensen, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

This report is the third in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) that will provide descriptive information about the schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This year’s report contains a new section that examines schools from both the public and private sectors that are no longer receiving public funds.

The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation Of The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary Of Third Year Reports, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

The city of Milwaukee is often called a laboratory for experimentation with parental school choice. Milwaukee is home to the first urban school voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), which has grown over the past 19 years to enroll 19,803 students in 127 different private schools in 2008-09. A total of 59 public charter schools operate within the city’s boundaries, enrolling 17,158 students last year. Even students in the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system have a variety of magnet, community, open enrollment, and inter-district school choice options available to them, so long as transportation funding holds out. When …

School And Sector Switching In Milwaukee, Joshua M. Cowen, David J. Fleming, John F. Witte, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

In this report we analyze the movement of students to and from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). We also analyze student mobility between schools within each sector. The analysis rests on two separate sets of data: the administrative records we have collected as part of our separate analysis of academic achievement in MPCP (Witte , Wolf, Cowen, Fleming, & Lucas-McLean, 2010), and the results of an extensive set of surveys collected from parents of private and public school students.

Creating A Comprehensive Profile Of The Academic Competitiveness Grant, Kelsea Klein

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The recent push for more Americans to attend postsecondary institutions has led to the development of numerous and far-reaching government student financial aid programs. These programs have aimed at supplying the whole of the population with financial assistance regardless of color, gender, or age. However, the distribution of the aid has encountered many problems as critics argue that the recipients of the aid are primarily limited to a narrow subgroup of the population. A new program created under the Higher Education Reconciliation Act of 2005 called the Academic Competitiveness Grant is no exception. Preliminary logit analysis of the reception rates …

Head Start: It Works For Indiana Children And Families!, Jennifer Dobbs-Oates, James Elicker, Volker Thomas

Center for Families Publications

This technical report summarizes new and existing data to address the question, “Does Head Start work for Indiana children, families, and communities?” Data sources consulted in this study include the state Head Start Program Information Report, local Indiana Head Start and Early Head Start Programs, existing national studies of Head Start and Early Head Start, and local and national data available on children’s development in early care and education programs for low-income families. This report concludes that Indiana’s Early Head Start and Head Start programs are indeed providing substantial benefits to children, families, and communities. The report summarizes the outcomes …

The Discursive Construction Of ‘Children’ And ‘Rights’ In Irish Early Childhood Policy, Rachel Kiersey, Nóirín Hayes

Conference Papers

This paper explores the construction of knowledge about ‗children‘, ‗rights‘ and ‗ECEC‘ in Irish early childhood policy discourses. This research forms part of a wider thematic research project exploring Irish early childhood policy design from a number of angles; this strand of the research is concerned with ―revealing meaning‖ from Irish ECEC policy texts through a critical discourse analysis study. The theoretical goal of a critical discourse analysis study aims to understand how specific realities have come into being in the policy area; how they are reproduced through policy literature, how language use is an integral facet of social processes, …

Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Since its inception in 1948, the state of Israel has based development plans on an agenda of nation-building that has systematically excluded Palestinian Arab citizens such as the indigenous Bedouin. Policies of relocation, resettlement, and restructuring have been imposed on the Bedouin, forcing them from their ancestral lands and lifestyle in the Naqab (or Negev, as it is called in Hebrew) desert of southern Israel. The rapid and involuntary transition from self-sufficient, semi-nomadic, pastoral life to sedentarization and modernization has resulted in dependency on a state that treats the Bedouin as minority outsiders through unjust social, political, and economic structures. …

The Loss Of Egypt’S Children, Cindy Ragab

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Under the fierce rays of the desert sun, in the heat of the summer, young children are forced to remove pests from cotton crops for eleven hours per day, search for recyclable goods among animals and the pungent stench of city dumps, and are sold to elderly male tourists through temporary marriages by their parents. This is the hideous reality for millions of child laborers in Egypt. Child labor is a manifestation of the pains of extreme poverty on the world’s most vulnerable population. Childhood is lost. Children are forced to take on responsibilities that in normal circumstances push adults …

"The Female Entrepreneur"?, Cath Collins

Human Rights & Human Welfare

I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions …

A Few Drops Of Oil Will Not Be Enough, Stephen James

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn provide a rich description of the various kinds of violence, deprivation, depredation and exploitation that women experience on a vast scale in the developing world. They write of sex trafficking, acid attacks, “bride burning,” enslavement, spousal beatings, unequal healthcare (something the USA still struggles with), insufficient food, gendered abortions and infant and maternal mortality. They are right to identify the education of women and girls as part of the solution to the widespread “gendercide.” However, their approach focuses too much on the capacity, indeed the virtue or heroism, of individual women. It does not take …

From Outrage To Action, Henry Krisch

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Kristof and WuDunn provide a vivid panoramic view of problems faced by women (primarily in the “developing” world), what has been done and what more could be done to help them achieve dignity and autonomy in their lives, and how vindication of their rights could contribute to the broader social development of their societies. In this they provide us with important insights into how human rights might be effectively proclaimed and successfully implemented. In reviewing their considerable contributions, I shall also suggest some limitations on both their analysis and their policy recommendations.

The Impact Of Policy Tool Selection On Early Childhood Education And Care (Ecec) In Ireland, Bernie O'Donoghue Hynes, Noirin Hayes

Conference Papers

This paper looks at the range of policy tools selected by the Irish State to fund and develop Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The choice is influenced by cultural norms and ideological predisposition with Ireland demonstrating a pro-market bias and relying on a range of interdependencies and third parties for delivery of services. The tools selected by the Irish State are typically those associated with States that promote a liberal agenda, sometimes referred to as the Anglo/American model (Salamon 2002). However, a closer review of the tools characteristics in Ireland reveal a tendency to adopt a conservative corporatist (Dean …

Educational Vouchers And Academic Performance, Nicole Kvidera

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Every time our elected representatives are looking at budget, or election time rolls around, or a family is considering moving, the topic of education is in the thoughts and on the minds of many. Over the years there have been many different education reforms and proposed ideas. This presentation will go in-depth into one such educational reform idea. Educational vouchers have been studied in various ways over the years; the data for this study comes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and gathered over the course of years. The data gathered allows one to compare students in Milwaukee Public Schools and students that …

The Effect Of Milwaukee’S Parental Choice Program On Student Achievement In Milwaukee Public Schools, Jay P. Greene, Ryan H. Marsh

School Choice Demonstration Project

This paper examines evidence on the “systemic effects” of expanding school choice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is home to one of the nation’s largest and longest-running school choice programs. If there are systemic effects from expanding school choice we should be able to see them in Milwaukee. This paper also introduces a novel method for analyzing systemic effects. Taking full advantage of student-level data, we develop a new measure of those effects based on the extent of voucher options that each student has each year. The idea behind this measure is that school systems face greater competitive pressure to serve …

School Choice And Home Prices: Evidence From Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Marcus A. Winters

School Choice Demonstration Project

Researchers have paid a great deal of attention to the impact of school choice policies on student educational outcomes. The emphasis on evaluating the impact of school choice policies on student academic proficiency is certainly justified in that the explicit goal of such policies is to improve educational productivity. However, the effects of school choice policies may not end at the schoolhouse door. As with any other large public policy, as they grow in size school choice has the potential for externalities -- either positive or negative -- that could have an impact on the overall community.

Parent And Student Experiences With Choice In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Thomas Stewart, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Scholars, advocates of various positions, and policymakers have fiercely debated whether the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), also known as the voucher or “Choice” program, has been a godsend or a scourge for the city’s children. Wisconsin policymakers, concerned about that question, identified the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) as the organization to help provide the answers.1 The SCDP is a national research organization, based in the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, dedicated to the comprehensive, objective, and nonpartisan evaluation of school choice programs. We are drawn together for this project by the opportunity to examine what effects …

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Descriptive Report On Participating Schools, Brian Kisida, Laura I. Jensen, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

This report is the second in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) that will provide descriptive information about the private schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the oldest and largest urban school voucher program in the U. S. The MPCP was launched in the fall of 1990 with seven participating schools enrolling 341 students.

The Fiscal Impact Of The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: 2009 Update, Robert M. Costrell

School Choice Demonstration Project

In February 2008, the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) issued its first report on the fiscal impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) on taxpayers in Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin.

The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation Of The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary Of Second Year Reports, Patrick J. Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

The city of Milwaukee is often called a laboratory for experimentation with parental school choice. Milwaukee is home to the first urban school voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), which has grown over the past 18 years to enroll 19,069 students in 124 different private schools 2007-08. A total of 58 public charter schools operate within the city’s boundaries, enrolling 17,549 students last year. Even students in the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system have a variety of magnet, community, open enrollment, and even inter-district school choice options available to them, so long as transportation funding holds out. When …