This week’s installment of “That’s Debatable,” is a debate over the recent study by the University of Minnesota’s John Robert Warren, PhD., which found that had MPS graduation rates equaled those for MPCP students in the classes of 2003 through 2008, the number of MPS graduates would have been about 18 percent higher. That higher rate would have resulted in 3,352 more MPS graduates during the 2003-2008 years.
Each week, the website WisOpinion.com asks two veterans of Wisconsin policy and politics, Scot Ross of One Wisconsin Now and our own Brian Fraley (a Director at the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy) to engage in exchanges on a topic of their choosing.
From Fraley’s entry, this week:
Scot, repeating your baseless accusations over and over again does not make them true. The study is sound and was done by a respected academic who has experience doing this kind of research. Look, Governor Doyle, Senator Taylor, Representative Colon, DPI Superintendent Evers and Mayor Barrett all agree that the Milwaukee Public Schools are failing the children of Milwaukee. School choice is one program that offers several thousand Milwaukee families a chance to escape that system. PARENTS are empowered to choose a better option for their children and over the years, tens of thousands of families have benefited…Scot, why don’t you venture off the Madison Isthmus and join me down here at St. Anthony’s or Messmer and tell the some of the kids who have thrived in good schools because of school choice that the program is a “failed experiment” and you believe they should have to go back to their awful MPS school down the block from where they live. I’ll pick you up, we can carpool.
You can read the entire exchange here.