Two Democratic candidates for governor of Wisconsin have pledged to abolish the state's school choice program, and a progressive legal group has filed a lawsuit that could finish the job in court. Together, the political and legal offensives threaten to upend a 35-year-old voucher system that currently serves 60,000 students, most of them in Milwaukee, the city where the modern school choice movement began.
State Rep. Francesca Hong and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes each made the pledge at a recent town hall, as detailed by Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The promises arrive alongside a lawsuit filed by Law Forward, a progressive legal organization, alleging that Wisconsin's choice programs violate the state constitution.
The timing is no accident. Wisconsin's Supreme Court flipped to a progressive majority in 2023, and Law Forward appears to be betting the new court will be receptive to arguments the old one rejected.
Wisconsin's voucher program has deep roots. In 1990, Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson partnered with local civil rights groups to pass the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the nation's first publicly funded voucher initiative. The program gave low-income families, overwhelmingly Black, a way out of failing public schools.
Attorney Clint Bolick, who chronicled the legal battles over the program in his book "Voucher Wars," described how African-American parents showed up for every court hearing to defend the voucher. He wrote that the Wall Street Journal's three op-eds in support of Milwaukee's initiative marked a turning point:
"For the first time in a major national media outlet, the civil rights banner was unfurled over the school choice movement."
That history makes the current Democratic assault especially striking. The families who rely on these programs are not wealthy suburbanites. They are working-class parents who chose alternatives to a traditional public school system that, by the state's own numbers, receives $25,000 per student in Milwaukee, and still fails to deliver results that satisfy those parents.
Law Forward's lawsuit hinges on a 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that permitted vouchers on one condition: the state legislature had to provide "sufficient resources" to traditional public schools. At the time, the court found that condition met. Two decades later, Law Forward now argues it is not, even with Milwaukee Public Schools receiving $25,000 per pupil.
The argument is remarkable on its face. Law Forward is not claiming the state cut funding. It is claiming that $25,000 per student is not enough, and that the existence of school choice itself drains resources from the traditional system.
With the Wisconsin Supreme Court now holding a progressive 5-2 majority after a low-turnout election, the lawsuit has a friendlier audience than it would have found even two years ago. The court's ideological shift is the single biggest variable in whether 60,000 students keep their current schools.
The push to end school choice runs headlong into the evidence about what these programs actually do. Researcher Patrick Graff found in a recent Education Next report that Florida's choice programs delivered better academic outcomes than equivalent spending funneled directly through public schools. Graff's conclusion was pointed: expenditures on Florida's choice programs:
"Improved public school student achievement" far more than "had the same amount of new funding instead been spent directly through the public school system."
That finding matters beyond Florida. Buck notes that researchers found similar competitive effects in Milwaukee, the very city where Democrats now want to end choice. The competitive pressure from voucher programs pushed traditional public schools to improve, benefiting even students who stayed in the public system.
Buck also cites evidence that students in participating schools are more likely to attend college, persist through college, and avoid criminal activity into adulthood. If those outcomes are even partially accurate, dismantling the programs does not just hurt the 60,000 students enrolled today. It removes a competitive incentive that lifts the entire system.
Wisconsin is not an isolated case. Illinois ended a similar school choice program in 2023. Arizona Democrats have launched several referenda aimed at ending or limiting choice policies in that state. The pattern is consistent: wherever Democrats consolidate power, school choice lands on the chopping block.
The dynamic mirrors a broader trend in which Democratic lawmakers vote in lockstep to block initiatives that threaten their institutional allies, regardless of the policy merits. Teachers unions remain among the Democratic Party's largest donors and most reliable organizing forces. When union leaders say school choice must go, elected Democrats fall in line.
Buck frames the candidates' pledges as capitulation to that pressure, arguing Hong and Barnes are "caving to pressure from teachers unions and progressives" rather than serving the students who depend on choice programs.
Florida offers a counter-example. When Ron DeSantis ran for governor against Democrat Andrew Gillum, his campaign pressed Gillum's opposition to school choice through a targeted social media effort. DeSantis won, and Buck notes that "school choice moms", including a significant share of African-American women, were part of the coalition that carried him to victory. The lesson: school choice is not just a policy debate. It is a political fault line that cuts across racial and demographic lines in ways that should alarm any Democrat paying attention.
The people who will bear the consequences of these decisions are not the candidates, the lawyers at Law Forward, or the union officials who lobbied for this fight. They are the 60,000 families who chose a different path for their children and now face the prospect of being forced back into a system they already tried to leave.
Many of those families are in Milwaukee, a city where the public school system absorbs $25,000 per student and still produces outcomes that drive parents to seek alternatives. Telling those parents that the real problem is insufficient funding, not insufficient performance, is a hard sell when the numbers are already that high.
The broader question is whether courts and legislatures will allow families to keep making their own educational decisions, or whether the institutional interests of the public school monopoly will override parental choice. In Wisconsin, that question may be decided by a court whose ideological composition changed in a single election cycle.
It is worth noting that the reflexive opposition to school choice fits a wider pattern among Democratic leaders. Even some Democrats have begun to criticize their own party's habit of opposing conservative priorities on instinct rather than substance. School choice should be the easiest case for bipartisan agreement: it started as a civil rights initiative, it serves low-income families, and the research supports its effectiveness. That Democrats are moving to kill it anyway tells you everything about whose interests drive the party's education agenda.
Meanwhile, the willingness to override parental preferences extends beyond vouchers. In New York City, progressive leaders have proposed cutting school safety agents even as assaults climb, another case where institutional ideology trumps the safety and wellbeing of the students and families who have no choice but to live with the results.
The Law Forward lawsuit has no publicly reported procedural timeline, and neither Hong nor Barnes has won the governor's race. But the intent is plain: end school choice in the state that invented it, and use that precedent to justify similar efforts elsewhere.
If the Wisconsin Supreme Court sides with Law Forward, the ripple effects will extend far beyond Milwaukee. Every state with a voucher program conditioned on legislative funding will face the same argument: no amount of per-pupil spending is ever "sufficient," and therefore the choice program must die.
That is not a legal argument about constitutional compliance. It is a political strategy dressed in legal language, aimed at restoring a public school monopoly that 60,000 Wisconsin families have already voted against with their feet.
When the people who claim to fight for the disadvantaged work this hard to take options away from low-income parents, the question answers itself: whose side are they really on?
