The voucher is to the new corporate cowboys what the Colt .45 was to the admirable Randolph Scott. Most often, vouchers are aimed at the public schools. Walmart is a huge backer of using school vouchers to knock down the public school system, perhaps figuring that with fewer public schools, there would be fewer of those informed consumers that corporations hate so. Walmart and the Walton family have spent millions on voucher programs and proposals. The Foundation is one of the biggest funders of the Milwaukee voucher plan, the longest-running in the nation.
And what has all this Walton money accomplished?
“Wisconsin’s voucher program has been repeatedly shown to be a failure,” the periodical Church & State, perhaps the country’s most serious studen of school vouchers, reports. “No objective study has shown that vouchers have boosted academic performance in Milwaukee or anywhere else.”