One of several things Democrat John O. Norquist became famous for during his four terms as mayor of Milwaukee was his enthusiastic implementation of a school-voucher system for his city.

The popularity of the school-choice program, which started in 1991 with 1,500 students and now serves more than 12,000 of the city's roughly 110,000 students, has helped to reverse Milwaukee’s population decline, Norquist says. It has lured new residents to the city of 602,000 and it has kept many families from leaving for the suburbs when their kids hit school age.

Norquist is currently the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Chicago, where he was Thursday, Jan. 10, when I spoke with him by telephone.

Q: Most big-city mayors -- who are mostly Democrats -- want nothing to do with school choice. Why do you favor it?

A: I believe that it’s fundamentally good for cities. It reveals the advantages of cities that you can see with other goods and services. Big cities are the places where you are most likely to find the best choice of restaurants -- to get more mundane, legal services, banking services, universities. Pittsburgh’s a good example with Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and other universities and colleges that are concentrated in the city. Then you get to K-12 education.

If you go by the ACT scores, for example, North Dakota is the best place. If you were picking the best university, North Dakota State might have some appeal. But I think Harvard would probably edge them out. But somehow the natural economic advantage of the city to produce a variety of high-quality goods and services gets undermined when you have the system the U.S.  has with the government school monopoly over the K-12 money ... . It gets disabled in the K-12 situation. A lot of people want to be in New York City. Just look at the real estate prices and the hotel room rates. People want to be there. But when you come down to the New York public school system, people aren’t moving to New York for that.

Q: Do you like vouchers because the idea of choice and competition naturally appeals to you or because you’ve seen the program work in Milwaukee?

A: I was for vouchers before we established them in Milwaukee. The reason it appeals to me is that it’s good for the city, the parents and the kids to have more choices available. Under the old system, before the vouchers, people would shop for school districts. If they had resources, they would tend to move to the school district that was most likely to have the best situation for their kid, which unfortunately often meant moving away from people that were low income.

When I was mayor of Milwaukee, I wanted people to live in the city -- to want to be in the city -- so the city would be prosperous. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for Milwaukee or to look at it as some sort of pathological social problem. I wanted them to look at it as a place where they could get what they wanted in life. So changing the schools was really important and just trying harder under the monopoly system didn’t work.

Q: How does the voucher system in Milwaukee work?

A:  With school choice there are all kinds of options under Milwaukee’s system. You’ve got the public schools. Regardless of race, you can send your kids to schools in the suburbs and still live in the city. You can send your kids to a voucher-supported private school, to a chartered private school. There are all kinds of options. Milwaukee’s become a place with a variety of choices. The perception is that there are enough positive choices that you don’t automatically decide to leave the city when you have school-age kids.

Q: How much money do students get in their voucher?

A: They get about the same as the state school-aid amount -- roughly about $8,000.

Q: There are about 130,000 students in voucher programs in 13 states and Washington, D.C. Which ones work best?

A: The one in D.C. and the one in Milwaukee are the ones that are closest to the ones Milton Friedman was talking about. The ones in Florida are based on a school failing and then the students have choice. That’s better than not having choice, but I think it sort of makes choice like it’s a punishment for public schools. It’s not about the parents; it’s about punishing the public schools. That doesn’t work very well.

Under Friedman’s theories, which he promulgated in the early 1950s, you want the money to follow the preference of the parent -- all parents, regardless of income, ideally, to have their children have a shot at being in the school they think is best for them: private, public or parochial. Milwaukee and D.C. come closest to that. In Cleveland, the number of students is so limited in the choice program that it’s ended up being totally by lottery, so the choice mechanism gets disabled. That’s why it was so important for the cap to come off the program in Milwaukee. They were about to hit the 13,000 cap and now I think the cap is up to 19,000 students. Continued...