At the end of January, over 1,000 students, parents, teachers, and advocates rallied at the Capitol in Madison to celebrate National School Choice Week and to show their appreciation for school choice opportunities in Wisconsin. Since our statewide voucher program began in 2013, thousands of families have taken advantage of a wide range of school choice options. This school year alone, nearly 61,000 students are enjoying the school choice benefits provided by over four hundred participating schools.
School Choice Under Attack
Although Wisconsin’s voucher program has helped thousands of students receive quality education and grown in popularity among parents, it has received constant fire from public school advocates. Last month, Wisconsin’s school choice program received another threat. Anti-school-choice forces—including the Wisconsin PTA, several teachers’ unions, and five school districts, among others—filed a lawsuit against the state legislature, claiming that the voucher program robs public school students of an adequate education by funneling funds to choice students. The lawsuit claims, “At a time when public schools are making significant cuts to educational programming and services, private school vouchers are costing State taxpayers nearly $700 million in the 2025–26 school year alone. This violates the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling that private school vouchers are constitutionally permitted, so long as the State is already meeting its obligations to provide for public schools.”
But the claims of this lawsuit don’t line up with reality. While the lawsuit claims that Wisconsin public school students are struggling due to lack of funding, research conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found that funding for state education has increased in the past decade. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the amount of state spending per student has increased from $7,693 in 2014 to $8,361 now. Approximately one third of the state’s general fund budget goes to public schools, and this doesn’t even account for the money school districts collect through property taxes! Yet, despite rising funding, public schools on average are underperforming.
In addition, despite public schools’ pleas for higher funding, Wisconsin public schools’ teacher to student ratio has risen in recent years. In the last decade, the number of students in Wisconsin public schools has dropped by tens of thousands, largely due to falling birthrates. But the number of teachers has stayed relatively even.
Wisconsin has poured massive amounts of money into public education attempting to improve student outcomes. It’s clear that more money has not solved Wisconsin’s educational performance problems in the past, and it will not solve them in the future either.
School Choice: Healthy Competition
Rather than harming public school outcomes, in some cases, school choice brings valuable competition to public schools encouraging them to improve. One study examined the impact of the voucher program on public schools in Milwaukee. The authors of the study concluded, “We find that students in Milwaukee fare better academically when they have more free private options through the voucher program. It appears that Milwaukee public schools are more attentive to the academic needs of students when those students have more opportunities to leave those schools. This finding is robust across several different specifications of the model.” Once again, the claim that voucher schools harm public schools cannot be backed.
Despite receiving less funding, schools participating in Wisconsin’s voucher program continue to outperform state schools. One recent study found that choice students score 4.1% higher in English Language Arts and 7.7% higher in math than public schoolers. Meanwhile, choice schools receive at most 82% of funding of the average traditional public school. These findings point to a clear consensus: higher funding does not equal better student performance. This lawsuit blames successful voucher schools that give thousands of Wisconsin students the opportunity to thrive for failures in the public education system.
An Attempt at Judicial Activism
Additionally, this lawsuit clearly seeks to upend our constitutional order of three separate branches of government. Rick Esenberg, The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty President and General Counsel, contends:
The lawsuit is an assault on democracy, seeking to install rule by judges rather than by the governor and legislature. The plaintiffs ignore basic facts about public education in Wisconsin and blame Wisconsin’s parental choice programs and charter schools for their own failures. Parental choice has been instrumental in providing better academic outcomes to tens of thousands of Wisconsin families. It has survived legal challenges before and will do so again. The plaintiffs would do better to solve their own problems rather than seek scapegoats and a work around our Constitution and democratic republic.
Rather than seeking legitimate means to improve public school performance, these anti-school-choice entities are pursuing judicial activism to further their own agendas.
Wisconsin’s Changing Educational Landscape
While Wisconsin’s schools face serious concerns with lowering enrollment due to plummeting birthrates, Wisconsin can still provide families and students the educational freedom to choose what works best whether that is a public school, charter school, voucher school, private school, microschool, or homeschool. Wisconsin students deserve the best educational options available. Rather than blaming the voucher program, Wisconsin public schools should rise to the competition and seek to provide solid academic training.
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