Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, shown here during a 2013 legislative session, said Thursday that a measure putting more oversight on brand-new private schools trying to receive taxpayer-funded vouchers will pass the Assembly on a voice vote. Credit: Associated Press

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Caving to pressure, Assembly Republicans agreed Thursday to pass a toned-down version of a school accountability bill without sanctions for failing schools.

The down-to-the-wire agreement passed on a voice vote Thursday night in the scramble of the Assembly's last day of regular session — where any pending legislation that wasn't passed on to the Senate for review on April 1 was likely dead for the year.

The bill now goes to Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who had hoped for a broader bill, but had also said he would rather lawmakers pass something than nothing.

Before the vote, key Assembly Republicans acknowledged to reporters the deal they had struck.

"We just kind of ran out of time, unfortunately," said Rep. Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna), who had wanted to pass a version of the Senate bill that included sanctions for failing schools.

Steineke said he thought it was important to have both sides of the equation — a way to measure schools and then sanctions for those that don't measure up.

But without broad agreement, such a push could have killed the effort entirely. Some lawmakers and educators said privately they feared that's what staunch voucher school proponents wanted all along.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Steineke signed a letter with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Sen. Paul Farrow (R-Pewaukee) to commit to work on a full accountability bill that can be introduced next January and quickly be passed into law.

The letter to Walker said the lawmakers intend to meet with people in K-12 education circles to propose a more comprehensive school report card, with sanctions for failing schools and incentives for highflying programs.

Oversight bill passes

Earlier in the day, the Assembly also passed a bipartisan bill that would put more oversight on new private schools trying to receive taxpayer-funded vouchers.

That bill already passed the Senate last month and now will head to the governor's desk.

The legislation would subject new private schools trying to join the Milwaukee and Racine school choice programs to more rigorous financial reviews.

It also would require them to be in operation for a year before they could start receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers to educate children.

For 24 years, state law has allowed private schools in Milwaukee to enter the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program with minimal paperwork.

That opened the door for many financially unstable and low-quality programs — such as the recently defunct LifeSkills Academy — to operate on the taxpayers' dime.

The same was true for the 3-year-old Racine voucher program.

The second step

The accountability bill would fold all taxpayer-funded schools — that means all traditional public, public charter, and for the first time, taxpayer-funded voucher schools — into the state's existing school report card system by the 2015-'16 school year.

The bill does not address the second step of accountability for schools: determining the consequences for ones that don't score well on the report cards.

The abandoned amendment to the Senate bill from Steineke would have added a council of political appointees to determine those penalties, and to revamp the existing school report cards.

The Steineke version called for the Legislature to take another vote at a later date for any of the provisions to take effect.

If the Assembly had passed that version, it likely would have killed school accountability for this session altogether because the Senate already demonstrated it did not have enough votes to pass such an aggressive version.

Walker weighed in this week, telling lawmakers it was better to agree to something rather than risk getting nothing to his desk before the session ends.

Some voucher school leaders made direct appeals to lawmakers.

Zeus Rodriguez, president of St. Anthony School of Milwaukee, the state's largest private school receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers, told Republican representatives in a letter this week that they should support the Senate version of the bill, without the sanctions.

Rodriguez feared that if the Assembly went for the sanctions at this late stage, it would kill the effort.

"The transparency bill that was passed by the Senate is the first step in helping both school administrators and parents finally see an apples-to-apples comparison," Rodriguez said. "We need to move closer to an acceptable accountability system that will punish low-performing schools and reward schools like ours."

Reporters Jason Stein, Lee Bergquist and Patrick Marley contributed to this report from Madison.