Voucher opponents keep seeking ways to quash choice

If some lawmakers were as diligent in finding a solution to the state's fiscal woes as they are in trying out new excuses to kill the Milwaukee parental choice program the budget conference committee would have finished its work long ago.

Instead, like Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, voucher opponents have meandered about the legislative landscape suggesting one excuse after another for quashing the program.

First, opponents argued the voucher program would harm the diversity of Milwaukee's schools and steer children to schools that were not accredited. Then, the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau debunked those arguments in a study of the program.

Last year, legislators tried to kill the program on the grounds that it siphoned school aids dollars from rural districts to Milwaukee. That argument collapsed after another non-partisan agency, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that the Milwaukee school district would receive an even larger share of the school aid pie if the voucher program were terminated.

Undaunted, the anti-voucher forces are now attempting to use Wisconsin's revenue shortfall as yet another pretense for terminating the program. As they did last summer they have proposed reducing the voucher available to families to such a low level that none of them could afford to take advantage of the program.

They have offered up two excuses for this latest effort. One insults the intelligence of anyone who has observed the budget process to date. The other turns Wisconsin's progressive tradition of doing more for the needy on its head.

The first excuse for gutting the voucher program is that families who benefit from the vouchers must share in the sacrifices everyone else is making as Wisconsin repairs its broken budget. Of course the voucher opponents ignore the fact that most other programs that target aid to needy families have been spared the budget axe to this point.

They also fail to point out that no proposal to fix the budget shortfall cuts the planned increase in state aid to public schools. So rather than ask the needy children who benefit from the voucher program to share in the larger sacrifice, the program's opponents are really trying to impose a fiscal pain on them that no other K-12 student is asked to endure.

The second rationale for cutting the program is that the amount of the voucher in the Milwaukee program is greater than any of the other experiments across the nation. As they do so, they ignore and implicitly repudiate the Wisconsin legacy of doing more than other states.

In years gone by, Wisconsin's leaders were proud of the fact that we led the nation in things like unemployment insurance and worker's compensation or that our public assistance safety net provided more help to needy families.

More recently, we took pride in the fact that fewer of our citizens lack health insurance than is the case in other states. It is striking that the very people who defend other chords in Wisconsin's safety net should now take the position that going the extra mile for needy school children is an approach to be shunned.

It appears that the political descendants of people like Roosevelt, Truman and La Follette have traveled far indeed.

(Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the civil arm of the state's five diocesan bishops. Its website is www.wisconsincatholic.com.)