BOULDER, CO (June 10, 2025)—A recent report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) examines publicly available test score data from Spring 2024 in Wisconsin to investigate the relative effectiveness and cost of school choice programs.
The report claims to provide evidence that private schools participating in the state’s voucher programs and charter schools yield better academic results as compared with traditional public schools, but Benjamin Shear of the University of Colorado Boulder identifies several critical limitations in the data and analyses behind those claims. NEPC today published Professor Shear’s review of WILL’s Apples to Apples: The Definitive Look at School Test Scores in Milwaukee and Wisconsin for 2024.
The report uses statistical adjustments to compare test scores across Wisconsin public schools, private “choice” (voucher-receiving) schools, and charter schools. Based on these analyses and the per-pupil funding amounts for each program, the report concludes that private and charter schools perform as well or better than traditional public schools—while receiving less public funding—ultimately claiming these schools offer “more bang for the buck.”
Professor Shear argues, however, that the statistical methods used cannot overcome the substantial underlying constraints of the data. Additionally, the report lacks transparency around key methodological decisions and fails to include a systematic fiscal analysis—undermining its conclusions about both the “bang” and the “buck” elements of cost-effectiveness.
As a result, the report offers policymakers little to no practical guidance. If school choice policies are to be guided by cost-benefit analyses, those analyses should be comprehensive and should incorporate empirical evidence about how well the different schooling models are working. While the report does provide a helpful overview of the range of school choice options available in Wisconsin and raises important questions about their efficacy, its descriptive findings are of minimal use without greater transparency and rigor in its data and methods.
Find the review, by Benjamin Shear, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/apples
Find Apples to Apples: The Definitive Look at School Test Scores in Milwaukee and Wisconsin for 2024, written by Will Flanders and published by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, at https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ApplestoApples202553.pdf