Francesca Hong now wants Wisconsin to believe she’s serious about public safety. She says she won’t defund the police, not anymore. She talks about alternative crime prevention: housing, mental health care, addiction treatment, and good jobs. Invest upstream, she says, and crime falls downstream.
Fine. Nobody disputes that stable communities produce fewer criminals. But Hong’s own platform torches the best piece of evidence Wisconsin has for that theory, and she’s doing it in the same breath she claims to want more of these investments.
Hong has pledged to end Wisconsin’s school choice program. She won’t commit to a firm end date, but the direction is clear: phase it out as soon as possible.
Here’s the problem with her stance. We don’t have to guess what happens to kids who use school choice.
We have the data.
The School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas tracked more than 2,000 Milwaukee Parental Choice Program students into their mid-to-late twenties and matched them against public school peers with similar backgrounds. The results: students who stayed in the choice program through 12th grade were 13 percent less likely to be accused of any crime as young adults. They committed 60 percent fewer property damage crimes, 41 percent fewer drug offenses, and had 31 percent fewer paternity suits. Felony rates dropped. Theft convictions dropped.
Francesca Hong wants to end the School Choice Program even though the evidence proves School Choice LOWERS crime. What Hong refuses to talk about is that kids who stay in the SC Program:
- Are 13% less likely to be accused of any crime
- Committed 60% fewer property damage crimes
- Committed 41% fewer drug offenses
That’s not a talking point from a think tank press release. That’s a peer-reviewed, university-conducted longitudinal study that follows real kids into adulthood. It is one of the more rigorous pieces of evidence in the entire school choice literature, precisely because it measures the thing everyone claims to care about: what happens to kids after graduation, not just their test scores.
Hong claims she wants to invest in what “the evidence shows prevents crime.” If that’s true, she should look at the evidence on the program she’s trying to eliminate. School choice isn’t competing with her public safety agenda. It’s part of it.
Instead, Hong treats school choice as a symbol of inequity to be phased out. But Milwaukee families who chose these schools for their kids did so for reasons that turn out to include better long-term life outcomes. Ending that choice doesn’t free up money for one of Hong’s various campaign promises. It takes away one of the only community programs with a track record.
This is the trouble with treating “invest in what works” as a slogan instead of a standard. If Hong genuinely wants fewer kids caught in the system, she must seriously reconsider her plan to end school choice. In fact, she needs to allow more families to enter the school choice program.
