Want more?  Pay more.  A simple philosophy of allowing those who want more from government to pay more...read on.

major capitalization, audit and compliance function, a reporting function, and contingency funds). The district had to improve its services to focus on what it can do well; it can't manage schools well but now the district can do payroll checks for 1.4¢, and it can respond in 7 minutes. The district also had to produce honest budget figures. Milwaukee is unique in the way it makes visible the cost allocation to schools. As a result, the huge disparities, from $5,000 to $16,000 per student, have disappeared. Many people didn't want it revealed where the money was spent. So the district can do payroll, insurance, some other things well but the schools are the site of knowledge and expertise about educating its kids. The district writes the checks but the school decides where to spend the money. In the first year only 3 schools accepted the responsibility to cut loose and become autonomous. The next year 7 voted for site-based assignment. Then the third year 156 schools bought in to become site managed.

These site managed schools plan their own programs and usually have a very strong school governance council with their own governance plan. The old centralized bureaucracy couldn't distinguish between what was cost effect and not. It would get in the way of communication, have meetings, and subvert the function. Now teachers run the schools; principals support the teachers; superintendents support the schools. And there is radically more parent involvement. These are district owned schools that don't want to lose enrollment, who want to upgrade staff, who want to replicate popular magnet programs to attract families, and some want to invest in long range capital improvements that are possible with the sites making the decisions about long range budgeting and resource allocation.

Unresponsible people don't want options. They want to complain about their one option. Without the external stuff (the vouchers, open chartering by the city and others), you probably can't do the internal piece (of a board putting reforms in place to move schools toward autonomy and accountability). Show me where it has happened without the external piece. And the schools have to respond. For example, teachers don't like K-8 schools, and the union almost fought a neighborhood school initiative. But now if parents want something, the schools step forward and offer it

Accountability now take's a new form—accountability to the receiving institution. The test for K-5 programs is how well their kids do in middle school. The accountability for 6-8^th grade schools is how well their kids do in high school, and the performance test for the high schools is how well their kids do
after leaving school in their jobs, in their incarceration rate, in their post graduate institution. High schools, said John, are not well designed for 80% of the kids. Why are we making kids sit in a chair listening to something they're not interested in?

Opponents try to mislead the public. They say vouchers are draining resources and kids from the district but in fact after 11 years of putting the reforms in place, the result is that we have enrollment growth, better fiscal condition with no backlog of deferred maintenance, increased achievement, and much higher funding levels for Milwaukee public education. And Milwaukee is suddenly bringing in capital from foundations and other sources to build schools. Old buildings, churches, once useless suddenly have become hot property.

We have to get beyond the issue of what's public, what's private. Public education is what happens when kids get educated. Making sure all kids get educated is the moral thing to do. If a kid is failing in one school but then another non-district school takes him and succeeds with him, who is doing public education? By asking for more time and more money we can hang on to the existing system or we can begin now to draw in everyone who is willing to educate kids and create opportunities for every kid.