Determinants of School Failure in the Milwaukee Voucher Program

Presenters: Michael Ford, UW-Oshkosh, and Fredrik O. Andersson, Helen Bader Institute for Nonprofit Management, UW-Milwaukee

Originally Presented: October 14, 2015 – 5.00–6:00pm, UW-Milwaukee, Lubar School of Business, Room S165

In this presentation we use 25-years of data to map out instances of nonprofit school failure in Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher school program. The study builds on previous work by Andersson and Ford (2015) connecting the Milwaukee voucher experience to literature on social entrepreneurship. Specifically, we argue that the Milwaukee voucher program is a policy designed to foster social entrepreneurship, and that both organization- and environmental-level factors influence the lifecycle of these schools. Specifically, we use quantitative techniques to explore the determinants of school failure, a common occurrence throughout the Milwaukee voucher program’s history.

View the Lecture on the Lubar School of Business, UW-Milwaukee mediasite.