Delivering the Promise of Quality Education by Introducing School Choice
By Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Last week, I invited members of the City Council and Board of Education on a trip to Milwaukee to learn about that city's successful Parental Choice Program, the oldest publicly-funded school voucher program in the United States.

The trip was something of a role reversal for us. As is more often the case, representatives from around the world come to New York City to study our many successful initiatives - how we moved more than 500,000 people from welfare to work; how we lowered violence in our prisons by 93 percent; how we transformed New York into the safest large city in America for the past five years.

But as public officials, it is our responsibility to help the public understand the most promising school reforms at work around the country. So, we went to Milwaukee to learn about school choice -- from parents, teachers, and children -- and apply what we learned to our own city.

Everyone wants the best for their child, and it should come as no surprise that poor parents want the same opportunity that wealthier families sometimes take for granted - the ability to send their child to the school of their choice, be it public, private, or parochial.

New York City has some of the best public schools in the world, but unfortunately, too many of our public schools are simply failing to do the job. New York City has the largest public school system in the nation, serving over 1.1 million students. Public education is the City's largest single budgetary expenditure, and my administration has allocated a record $12 billion to our public schools in this year's budget.

Too much of the money allocated for public education does not reach the students and teachers in the classroom.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation's first model of school choice, is available to low-and-moderate-income families. About 15,000 students in Milwaukee's public school system are eligible to participate. Those students receive vouchers for the cost of the private/parochial school tuition, whichever is less.

Under the program, those students electing to enroll at a parochial school, about 68 percent, are not required to participate in any religious activity. Over a decade, the program has grown from 341 students in seven parochial schools to 9,638 students in 103 private and parochial schools. Eighty-four percent of these students go on to pursue higher education.

Milwaukee has shown the rest of the country that school choice can improve the quality of education for students who need it the most, and inject competition into the public school bureaucracy, spurring it to reform itself.

A recent study from Harvard University shows that the quality of education has improved for both students with vouchers and for those who attend Milwaukee public schools. But researchers aren't the most important voice in this debate. Parents are.

I'll give you one powerful example from our own city. In 1997, the privately funded Children's Scholarship Fund offered 2,500 school choice scholarships to children in New York City. They received an astounding 168,000 applications from local parents. That is not the action of parents who are satisfied with the status quo. That's a cry for help and a call for change. And we'd better listen.

I believe we can learn from the tremendous success of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and begin to develop a modest pilot school choice program of our own. What our fact-finding delegation has seen can help us craft and implement a pilot program in our own city that would provide thousands of low-income parents in one or two of our city's 32 school districts with the opportunity to send their children to the school of their choice.

School choice will not solve all the problems facing our school system, but there are strong signs that it is helping to reinvigorate public education in America. I believe that it can help us deliver the promise of a quality education to thousands of parents and children in New York City.