The voucher crowd calls for reinforcements. The professional activists parachute into Utah

The message is carefully crafted.

The press releases are sent to all the right media types.

The professional activists are flown in from out of state. They're staying at The Ritz. Where else?

Everything’s ready for another attack on them flippin’ anti-voucher educrats, spoilers of Our Man Milton's party.

Then ... well, I guess the stars just didn't line up for the good folks at The Sutherland Institute, Salt Lake City’s Fort Apache of conservative activism. (We can only hope the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars because that's when peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.)

Rebeca Nieves Huffman (whose job is to travel the country persuading people vouchers and such are good for Hispanics), Rep. Jason “I’m a Democrat” Fields (whose job is to travel the country persuading people vouchers and such are good for African-Americans), and Clint Bolick (whose job is to sue NEAites if the likes of Nieves Huffman and Fields only persuade people vouchers and such are good for nothing) have parachuted into town at the invitation of Sutherland. However, the message meisters in Milwaukee have messed with their landing.

A study released Tuesday in Milwaukee suggests school choice isn’t such a powerful tool for driving educational improvement after all.

POW!

That’s gotta hurt.

WHAM!

It was produced by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades - when Milwaukee became the nation’s premier center for testing the experiment.

SAY IT AIN’T SO!

“We had expected to find a wellspring of hope that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools would be the key ingredient in improving student performance," wrote George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute. But “there are realistic limits on the degree to which parental involvement can drive market-based reform.”

ET TU HOWARD?

One of the most ardent supporters of school choice in Milwaukee has backed away from advocacy of the purest version of the idea – in which there is little government oversight of schools and parental decisions in a free market dictate which schools thrive, according to Alan J. Borsuk writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Howard Fuller, head of the school-choice apologist group Black Alliance for Educational Options housed at something called the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University in Milwaukee and an ally of Rep. Jason “I’m a Democrat” Fields, has changed his tune. He now believes that strong government oversight of voucher schools is needed, according to Borsuk’s report.

Asked whether the voucher program was leading to improvements in the achievement of students in Milwaukee, as was once expected, Fuller said: “I'm one of those people who believes that we may have oversold that point. . . . I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS (Milwaukee Public Schools) that we would have thought.”