A community inside a school brought it all back.

Jeffrey Robb, development director for Messmer Catholic Schools, home to Milwaukee’s famous school choice voucher program, said the story of Ayanna Murrell, a Messmer High junior, the fire that claimed her family’s home, and the way the private school community responded, is emblematic of the “Messmer way.”

The student and her family were burned out of their inner-city Milwaukee apartment. They leaped from their third-story apartment window to escape.

After the fire, the girl reached out to her theology teacher, Robb said.

“She thought it was an act of faith, leaping from this building,” he said. “It was not only remarkable that she had the courage to leap and to survive, but the response of our students and faculty here. They rallied together and literally found the family a new place to live, provided furnishings, food, books, clothing and enough money to get back on their feet.

“That speaks to our community.”

As Messmer President and CEO the Rev. Bob Smith often puts it, education isn’t a function of test scores and homework — it’s about making better human beings.

Still Messmer boasts some pretty impressive academic achievements by Milwaukee and national education standard, arguably making the nation’s oldest voucher program a shining example of school choice.

The voucher system, allocating public money to send students — generally poor, minority students  —  to private, often faith-based, schools, opened in Milwaukee in 1990 when the state, led by then Gov. Tommy Thompson, cleared the way for the Catholic school to accept voucher students.

Robb said the early years were a struggle, a time of anxiety, when faculty, parents and students wondered whether the whims of politics would change its voucher status.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided the constitutionality of the question early last decade, just as school choice programs continued to expand.

National School Choice Week, a nationwide series of events spotlighting the need for educational options for children, is from Jan. 22-28. (Click here to find events in your area. www.schoolchoiceweek.com/events)

No doubt some have been controversial, and some have failed during the past two decades, but there is no questioning the growth of school choice initiatives in Wisconsin and nationwide.

From 1993 to 2007, the percentage of children attending a “chosen” public school — a school other than their assigned institution  —  increased from 11 percent to 16 percent, while children attending assigned public schools declined from 80 percent to 73 percent, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences.

Some form of school choice  —  open enrollment, voucher systems, charter schools, both public and independent or other public and private partnership  —  was available to 46 percent of students, a high of 55 percent in the Midwest.

Wisconsin has helped lead the way, as parental interest has soared.

Milwaukee and Racine counties host the state’s only independent charter schools, where the number of students has soared in recent years.

In Milwaukee, 47 percent of students in the district attend a choice program outside traditional public programs, said Terry Brown, vice president of School Choice Wisconsin, which advocates for choice in education.

Some 6,400 students last year attended independent charter schools, funded by state education dollars but not affiliated with the public school system.

Another 23,198 attended Milwaukee Parental Choice Program schools, like Messmer.

The Catholic school itself has seen its voucher enrollment, which comprises about 90 percent of its student count, climb from dozens of students in 1990 to just under 1,700 students on three campuses, with waiting lists each of the past seven years, Robb said.

Meanwhile, open enrollment applications within the state’s public schools has climbed from 5,926 in 1998-99, when there were 2,464 transfer, to more than 36,000 applications this year, according to the state Department of Instruction, or DPI. Last year there were 34,498 transfers.

The taxpayer price tag has risen sharply, too, from $9.6 million in 1998-99, to $196.2 million in 2011-11.

Brown said state funding is about half of per pupil costs for students enrolled in the state’s public school system, between $7,200 and $7,500 at the grade school level, about $1,000 higher at the high school level. Any expenditure gaps are augmented by fundraising, he said.

But school choice critics, particularly those critical of voucher-based and charter schools, argue taxpayer dollars have no business funding private education concerns.

“If people want to operate private schools they should operate private schools. People are not paying property taxes to go to the private sector,” said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teacher’s Inc., the teachers union in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

For Matthews and other critics of school choice programs, the broader problem with independent charters is that they are not organized by the same organizational structures as public school systems, and that leads to a question of accountability.

There also have been concerns that privately run schools on the public dime have been allowed to “cherry pick” their students, selecting the best achievers, leaving behind special needs populations.

The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, along with groups like Disability Rights Wisconsin, last year filed a discrimination lawsuit against Messmer and other voucher schools, as well as DPI and the state, arguing the system “discriminated against students with disabilities”.

Nonsense, said Messmer’s Robb. He said there are too many misconceptions about choice schools at large, and the voucher system in particular.

Messmer’s enrollment includes about 150 students classified under special needs criteria, Robb said.

And, charter schools are bound to take in black and Hispanic students, among the poorest of the poor in Milwaukee. Messmer’s free-and-reduced lunch population has approached 90 percent.

The success of school choice programs, Brown said, boils down to consumer confidence.

“I think parents vote with their feet, not only when it comes to the academics of the school but the safety of the school and the character of the school,” he said.

Groups like School Choice Wisconsin say competition in America’s bruised education system is not only good for students and families, it’s good for public education. The more choice — the more success outside the traditional public school system — the greater the education success at large, they argue.

Brown and other choice proponents assert education unions have stymied success in a public school system that is stuck in 19th century state of mind. He said too many in public education want to “protect a monopoly.”

But why not fix the existing public education system, at the very least devoting the public money from choice programs into public schools? That’s a question choice critics have long asked.

“As a state we need to remind ourselves that while parents obviously support the roll of governmental funding in education, that doesn’t equal parental support of the government to run everything in schools,” Brown said.

In Milwaukee, where half of black males will not graduate from high school, Messmer is turning in some high marks.

Robb said 85 percent of students graduate and continue on to a four-year college, 14 percent go to a two-year school or into the military, and about 1 percent dropout.

Black males attending Messmer are two-and-half times more likely to go to college than their peers, and test scores in all core subjects compare with some of the top schools in the state, Robb said. 

The education official said there’s no “silver bullet” of success. Achievement, he said, is about working hard, staying late, starting early. Mostly, though, Robb said Messmer’s success lies in its community, in its core beliefs.

“Today you can do something to make place you live in a little bit better, to create positive environment and help them move forward,” he said.

Wisconsin Reporter’s Ryan Ekvall contributed to this story