Sometimes, all you have to do is wait for the emperor to drive a school bus down the street butt naked. The emperor in this case is the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which went crashing into a fire truck Wednesday morning, injuring 16 children.

Lawyers with the state Department of Transportation had never before heard of an instance in which a school bus driver was ticketed for driving a bus without a valid drivers’ license – until the Elijah's Brook God's Nation Children School bus slammed into a fire truck early Wednesday as the fire truck was parking.  God's Nation driver Carlos Mayes did not have the required commercial license for bus drivers – and no drivers’ license on record at all.

God’s Nation, a pre-Kindergarten to 12th Grade school at 75th and Bradley on the far northwest side, is in its first year participating in the state’s private school voucher program.  According to Journal Sentinel reports, the school has 50 voucher kids on its rolls –- and was set to receive a $125,000 payment from the state this week, but those funds were being withheld because the school still has not paid back $3,200 received earlier this year for voucher-enrolled students who never attended the school.

If God's Nation manages to somehow stay in the voucher program, it could receive as much as $325,000 in state taxpayer school funds this year.

God’s Nation, the daily notes, did not yet have its required teaching accreditation, but that’s okay – the program allows the school to work on that in the first year.  It’s like having a temporary drivers’ license – only there are no required "temp” certifications or reviews for teachers in the school, just a required business management class for school administrators.  It’s more like a temp bartenders’ license – the school gets to continue receiving state funding just as long as there is some responsible person on school grounds with education credentials.

The fact that driving down the street is more regulated than the private school voucher program was apparently lost on the administrators of God’s Nation.  They didn’t seem to think it was important to check whether or not Carlos Mayes had the required drivers’ and CDL licenses before they hired him to drive their bus – if they “hired” him for that job at all.

God’s Nation is one of the new schools that forced the expansion of the school choice voucher program a year ago.  It’s not that the voucher enrollment cap was raised to make room for Gods Nation, per se — it was raised because the rules would have forced successful, in-demand schools such as Messmer, a Catholic school, to cancel student seats to make room in the program for new schools like God's Nation.  This would have been extremely unfair to Messmer kids, parents and the school, which graduates 96 percent or more of its students — the type of success matched or bettered in MPS at Rufus King and Riverside High Schools.

The cap was raised, however, and Messmer retained its students.  God's Nation was allowed to open, even as Messmer turned new students away.  As illogical as this sounds, it works much the same in MPS, minus the expansion.  More resources could go to fund successful schools such as Riverside or King, but those schools receive less so that the doors of failing schools such as North Division can stay open.  King turns students away every year, but can't expand.  Now that God’s Nation, a K-12 school, is in the mix, the pool of resources available for King, Riverside and all successful MPS constricts first.  Then the resource drain hurts Messmer and successful voucher schools.

It’s madness.  In the case of God's Nation, the voucher program put kids at risk, and paved the road for a bus crash in the making.  "But parents chose the school," the voucher rhetoric goes, so the program's free market principles say it is the parents and not the program's school bearing the responsibility.

Of course, the free market consumer approach to education is incredibly flawed, as we were discussing at Watchdog a day or two before the God’s Nation bus crash.  Consumers can easily find out more about a brand of automobile than they can about a school, and are assured some basic standards in most product markets. Not so with voucher schools. In the wake of the God's Nation wreck, the public is learning that driving down the street is more regulated than teaching children in the choice program.

What is occurring in Milwaukee education, with more than a few exceptions — most of those being in MPS — is that very low income people are stuck with some very bad educational choices, just as they’re stuck with bad choices in the consumer economy. The injustice is that Milwaukee's controlled education market continually limits the good choices.

The lot for kids on the North Side of Milwaukee — the kids that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was designed to help — has not improved since the inception of the program in the early 1990s.  It’s time to stop pretending that private school vouchers are the solution and begin to critically examine the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program as part of the problem.