Milwaukee Longitudinal School Choice Evaluation: Annual School Testing Summary Report 2010-11. SCDP Milwaukee Evaluation Report #32

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the nation's oldest and largest urban school choice program, offering private-school scholarships to low-income students in the city of Milwaukee since 1990. In the early years of the program, voucher schools were not required to test their students, though many of them did so using nationally normed standardized tests. That changed on March 10, 2006, when Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed Wisconsin Act 125 into law. The Act required participating private schools to administer either the state test, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), or a nationally normed test annually in reading, mathematics and science to MPCP (aka "Choice") students enrolled in 4th, 8th, and 10th grades. Beginning in 2006 and extending through 2011, the law required that the individual student results of the tests be provided to the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP), an independent research organization. This report describes the results of student testing conducted by MPCP schools during the 2010-11 academic year. Participating MPCP schools sent the WKCE scores from their test administration to the Department of Public Instruction, which shared the resulting scores with the School Choice Demonstration Project in the spring of 2011. Participating schools that opted to continue administering additional nationally normed tests reported those results directly to the SCDP, with most of them arriving in the summer of 2011. The SCDP staff carefully entered these scores into a single database and delivered the data to the Legislative Audit Bureau on December 16, 2011. Appended are: (1) Schools with MPCP students in tested grades in operation through May 2011 (N= 102); (2) Correspondence with Schools; and (3) DPI News Release--March 2011. (Contains 8 tables, 22 figures and 11 footnotes.) [For the "Milwaukee Longitudinal School Choice Evaluation: Annual School Testing Summary Report 2009-10. SCDP Milwaukee Evaluation. Report # 26", see ED518592. Additional support for this report was provided by the Robertson Foundation.]