In the Fight from the Beginning, Alberta Darling Talks School Choice
By: Cori Petersen
This week has marked the tenth annual National School Choice Week, a celebration of educational options all over the country, but in Wisconsin, school choice is a much older tradition. Here, 2020 marks the thirty-year anniversary of school vouchers aka the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). As we celebrate this legacy, I sat down with State Senator Alberta Darling, an education reform champion who has been in the fight from the beginning, to talk about her battles in the legislature to expand school choice, what she would do if she were governor for a day, and why school choice is no longer a bipartisan issue.
Darling entered the Wisconsin assembly in a 1990 special election. In 1992 she was elected into the Senate representing the eighth district, which includes part of Milwaukee county and areas to the north and west. Before long, she found herself deep in the weeds of the controversial fight for school vouchers.
“As a parent I could send my children to any schools because I had the resources to do it. And I had a lot of different choices in the Milwaukee area where I lived,” said Darling. “And I thought why shouldn’t other parents have that choice? Even if you’re low income, why should you be trapped in your school?”
Although the MPCP began in 1990, it didn’t begin growing rapidly until parochial and sectarian schools were allowed to participate. This process started with a bill in 1995 and went all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court where it was ruled constitutional in 1998. Darling was a key player, although she’s insistent on giving credit where credit is due. “Polly Williams [Democrat state Representative] was really the founder of school choice. And Gov. Thompson was right behind her and so was I and Scott Jenson [former Speaker of the Assembly and current Senior Government Affairs Advisor at American Federation for Children.]”
Darling considers the effort to expand the MPCP to religious schools to be her most difficult school choice battle. “Even a lot of our Republican colleagues would say you can’t do school choice or vouchers because it will hurt the public education system,” said Darling. “Polly Williams would say it’s not fair for children to be trapped in schools because their parents don’t have the money to do anything about it.”
In the school year following the ruling, the MPCP grew from about 1500 students, to 5,700. By 2002, there were over 11,000 students in the program. Now over 28,000 students participate in Milwaukee. Darling began serving on the joint finance committee, which is in charge of writing the budget, in 2000. From there, she worked with Republican lawmakers and Governor Scott Walker to expand the school voucher program to Racine (2011) and statewide (2013). As a result of these efforts, today, about 40,000 children participate in the school voucher programs in Wisconsin.
But according to Darling, there’s more to be done. She laments the big achievement gap between white and minority kids in the state, especially Madison. I asked her to give me some examples of what she would do to improve K-12 education if she were governor for a day.
She explains the importance of investing in daycare and early childhood education. “I think one of the biggest things we can do is to strengthen daycare not just to be stakeholders that are caregivers but to begin getting kids ready for school. So we have a couple of high-performing daycares and we have to keep replicating that. High-performing daycares because that’s where kids of low-income backgrounds can get ready for school.”
In addition, she would expand choice and charter options. According to Darling, although school choice is working, options are limited. Since it does take time to begin achieving quality outcomes, she thinks the more choice and charter schools we get off the ground now, the sooner more kids will have access to a good education. “It probably takes five years to get the outcomes that you want. You have to build your staff, you have to build your curriculum. You have to build the climate. So I would increase options for choice and charter.”
Darling would have more opportunities for facilities for charter schools. “Because right now one of the biggest obstacles to charter schools would be the lack of money and resources for facilities.”
Of course, this is something she is very familiar with, having fought for years to force the City of Milwaukee to sell vacant and under-utilized Milwaukee Public School buildings to charter and private schools.
“We couldn’t get the district, we couldn’t get the mayor, we couldn’t get the school board to agree to it,” she said. “They kept their clamps on them and wouldn’t release them to us. The city had the same lawyer as the school district. We did another bill and it didn’t work.”
Sadly, for education reformers, Darling is not governor. That office is held by Democrat Gov. Tony Evers. Darling has been an outspoken force against him, especially when he proposed a budget that would freeze vouchers and put a moratorium on charters.
“He put that in the budget, to hold down choice and charters by withholding money,” she said. “It was awful for a superintendent who had been responsible for education in the state. It shows that he is beholden to the unions.”
She extends that critique to the Democrats in the legislature, which is a stark contrast from the bipartisan times of working with Rep. Polly Williams. The problem, she explains, is elections. “Right now, because the union is so powerful they think they can only win with the union.” Jason Fields, she mentions, is an example of a Milwaukee Democrat who can win without having the union’s endorsement.
“Unions are weaker in Wisconsin except for the teachers union in Milwaukee,” she said. “In Milwaukee the union runs the show. All of these good leaders [superintendents] have left because they feel they can’t get anything done. And it breaks their hearts. They waste a lot of their time, money, blood and they put their name out there and they just leave because they don’t think they can get anywhere.”
Education reformers and school choice advocates have a champion in Alberta Darling and, during National School Choice Week, we thank her for her long-time, steadfast commitment to giving all children access to a high quality education.
