The Milwaukee Public To Help The Education Voucher Policy Case Studies

The Americans, dissatisfied with the quality of public schools, has witnessed a series of profound and radical reforms aiming at overthrowing the Berlin Wall of the public school system's monopoly in elementary education in the past two decades, and the school choice movement is one of them. The school choice movement has experienced the choice among public schools, the choice between public schools and private schools, the appearance of the school voucher. This thesis tries to obtain some valuable insights beneficial to the reform of School Voucher in certain provinces in China through analyzing the case of Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the most typical publicly funded school voucher policy in America.This whole thesis is organized into five chapters. The first chapter, an analysis of the context of MPCP, illustrates Milton Friedman's ideology of school vouchers, the relationship between school choice movement and school vouchers, the categories of school vouchers. MPCP, the case in this thesis, is a publicly funded and regulated school voucher in the elementary education. Chapter 2 mainly deals with the factors influencing the enactment of MPCP and the main content of the MPCP. In Chapter 3, the author illustrates the implementation of MPCP that is divided into three phases: from 1990-91 to 1994-95; from 1995-96 to 1997-98; from 1998-99 until nowadays. Chapter 4 mainly evaluates MPCP from three aspects that are the text, the implementation and the outcome of MPCP. This article adopts the framework of Henry Levin and evaluates the outcome of MPCP from the following four aspects: freedom to choose, efficiency, equity and school cohesion. Although it is not so notable that the test scores of students attending MPCP is much higher than those of students in MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools ) , the social effects of MPCP is undeniable and cannot be overlooked. The last chapter compares MPCP with the school voucher policy in Changxing County, Zhejiang Province that has being put in practice since the school year of 2001-2002.The following findings are concluded in the historical and comparative analysis: in order to improve the school voucher policy in Changing, complete laws, stable revenues, corresponding governmental administration and independent evaluations is indispensable. On the other hand, according to the particular context in China, maybe School Voucher can be one of the possible solution to the following problems: balanced development of elementary education, the expansion of vocational high schools and then leading to the appropriate proportion of vocational high schools and common high schools, the increase of investment in private schools, the improvement of in-service teacher education, the guaranteed enrollment of the floating population's children.