Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Creates First Publicly-Funded Private School Vouchers

On March 27, 1990, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson signed legislation creating the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), the nation’s first publicly-funded voucher program allowing public tax dollars to pay private school tuition. The program, initially limited to 1,000 low-income students attending secular private schools, established a template for voucher expansion that would spread nationwide over the following three decades.

The Milwaukee voucher program emerged from an unusual coalition. State Representative Polly Williams, a Black Democrat frustrated with Milwaukee Public Schools’ failure to serve African American students, partnered with Republican Governor Thompson and the Bradley Foundation, a conservative Milwaukee-based philanthropy that would become one of the nation’s leading funders of school privatization. This alliance—civil rights rhetoric from the left married to privatization ideology from the right—became a model for selling voucher programs nationally.

The Bradley Foundation’s role was pivotal. The foundation funded research, advocacy, and litigation supporting the program while providing grants to private schools participating in the voucher system. This established a pattern of conservative foundations simultaneously promoting voucher policies, funding implementation, and producing supportive research—a closed loop that manufactured evidence for predetermined conclusions. Bradley would go on to fund ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and other organizations promoting voucher expansion nationally.

Early evaluations of Milwaukee’s voucher program produced mixed or negative results. A 1998 study by Harvard researcher Paul Peterson claimed positive effects but was criticized for methodological flaws and Peterson’s ideological commitments to school choice. Studies by the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau and University of Wisconsin researchers found no significant difference in achievement between voucher students and comparable public school students. The lack of consistent positive evidence did not slow voucher expansion.

In 1995, the program expanded to include religious schools after a state constitutional amendment, and income limits were raised in subsequent years. By 2020, over 29,000 students participated at a cost exceeding $300 million annually—funds diverted directly from Milwaukee Public Schools. Research showed the majority of voucher recipients had never attended public schools, meaning the program subsidized existing private school families rather than rescuing students from “failing” public schools as proponents claimed. Milwaukee established the voucher movement’s central pattern: conservative foundation funding, manufactured crisis narrative, bipartisan cover through Black legislative allies, judicial victories expanding religious school eligibility, and gradual removal of income limits to benefit middle-class families already choosing private schools.