Educational Vouchers: A Review of the Research
by
Center for Education Research,
Analysis, and Innovation
October, 1999
CERAI-99-21 |
*Calculated as the average of September and January
memberships, plus summer school membership.
**Estimate.
‡There are three schools within
one organization: Seeds of Health.
Sources: State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction web page, http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dfm/sms/histmem.html; and John F. Witte, Troy D. Sterr, and Christopher A. Thorn, Fifth-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, WI: The Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, December 1995).
In 1993, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was modified to raise (effective 1994-95) the number of students who could participate from 1 percent to 1.5 percent of the Milwaukee Public School population (i.e., to about 1,500 students). A 1995 change allowed religious schools to participate in the MPCP and raised the eligibility ceiling to 7 percent of the Milwaukee Public School enrollment in 1995-96 and 15 percent in 1996-97.
The 1995 revision of the MPCP, deemed constitutional by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on June 10, 1998, does not require that the schools participating in the program gather the achievement data necessary for a comprehensive evaluation. Because the necessary data are unavailable, no evaluation of the achievement impact of the program since 1995 has been conducted. Although the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau issued an update report in February 2000, the bureau was unable to address the issue of student achievement in a meaningful way because voucher schools are not obliged to provide the data.
Continue with the Next Section The
Achievement Effects of the Milwaukee Voucher Program
Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Profile
1990-1999
| School Year | Number of Schools | Number of Applications | Average # of Voucher Students | Voucher Amount | Total Cost of Vouchers (millions) | Annual Attrition Rate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990-91 | 7 | 577 | 300 | $2,446 | $0.73 | 0.46 | |
| 1991-92 | 6 | 689 | 512 | $2,643 | $1.35 | 0.35 | |
| 1992-93 | 11 | 998 | 594 | $2,745 | $1.63 | 0.31 | |
| 1993-94 | 12 | 1049 | 704 | $2,985 | $2.10 | 0.27 | |
| 1994-95 | 12 | 1046 | 771 | $3,209 | $2.47 | 0.28 | |
| 1995-96 | 17 | 1288 | $3,667 | $4.61 | |||
| 1996-97 | 20 | 1616 | $4,373 | $7.07 | |||
| 1997-98 | 23 | 1497 | $4,696 | $7.03 | |||
| 1998-99 | 88++ | 5809** | $4,894 | $28.41** |
Proponents of vouchers tend to base their position on three widely held beliefs about public education:
· that educational outcomes have deteriorated,
· that American public education costs have accelerated unreasonably, and
· that the public schools cannot reform themselves because of bureaucratic and political constraints.
Each of these beliefs is subject to serious challenge. There is considerable evidence that educational outcomes have actually improved over the last 20 years. A 1993 report written by scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories found that U.S. public education performance was improving.2 Between the 1970s and 1990, according to a 1994 RAND study, reading and math scores rose significantly for Hispanics and African-Americans.3 In a March 1998 article, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger reported that National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams reveal rising American public school performance over the past 20 years.4 For example, a student scoring in the 50th percentile today performs as well as the 56th-percentile student 25 years ago.5 The most disadvantaged students have made the greatest gains. Moreover, between the early 1970s and 1990, the black-white NAEP test-score gap for 17-year-olds decreased by almost half (before increasing slightly in the 1990s).6
Contrary to the second widely held perception driving support for vouchers, Richard Rothstein found that resources for regular classrooms at public schools have increased only modestly over the last several decades.7 Rothstein reached this conclusion by identifying expenditures on special education, transportation, and other activities outside the regular classroom. In a survey of nine school districts, he found that inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending for regular education rose by only 28 percent from 1967 to 1991. In Los Angeles, inflation-adjusted per- pupil spending on regular education declined by 3.5 percent over the same period. If this decline in spending for regular education typifies developments in urban areas, it may help explain worsening relative academic outcomes in some urban public schools. Rothstein’s research also suggests that carefully targeted increases in spending on regular classroom instruction in urban areas may increase both parental satisfaction and student achievement.
Of course, national statistics about gradually improving performance and the stagnation of funds flowing to regular classrooms in urban school districts are of little comfort to parents convinced that their own children will not get the lift they need from the local public school.
Parents who want better schools for their kids now have been a receptive audience for the third widely held belief that underlies support for vouchers today: that public schools are incapable of reforming themselves because of bureaucratic and political constraints. This argument gained intellectual legitimacy with the 1990 publication of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John Chubb and Terry Moe.8 In their book, Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers are needed because private schools exhibit superior academic performance and because public school performance has not improved despite reforms instituted during the 1980’s.9
Chubb and Moe’s claims notwithstanding, the research literature contains no clear evidence that private schools are better than public schools. Moreover, since most of the studies in the literature on public versus private schools use data for secondary schools, they are of limited value in predicting the impact of voucher programs that, for the most part, involve private elementary schools.10
Many proponents of private school vouchers, such as Wisconsin Assembly member Annette "Polly" Williams, author of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program legislation, link vouchers to their desire to empower poor families and raise the academic achievement of poor children. They argue that vouchers may improve achievement by forcing the public schools to compete in an educational marketplace in which poor parents hold the power of the purse. What does the research evidence show?
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Program
Private school vouchers have been debated at the state level for over 20 years. However, voucher legislation has become law in only three states, Wisconsin (1990), Ohio (1995), and now Florida (1999).
Wisconsin established the country’s first publicly funded private school voucher program in Milwaukee. Today, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the voucher program for which the greatest volume of systematic data is available.
The MPCP initially allowed up to 1 percent of low-income Milwaukee Public School students (about 1,000 students) to attend participating private, non-sectarian schools within the city (Table 1). The program defined "low-income" as below 175 percent of the official U.S. poverty line. Each child attending a private school in the program receives a voucher worth the per-pupil equalized state aid to the Milwaukee Public Schools, originally set at $2,446 and currently $4,894 (in 1998-99). The Wisconsin legislation that created Milwaukee’s Choice program provided for yearly evaluations of the academic achievement of students attending Choice schools.
Table 1: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Profile 1990-1999
Table of Contents - Exercept 1
Historical
Background
Educational
Choice Enters the Mainstream
The
Battle Over Vouchers Today
The
Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Program
The
Debate Over the Achievement Effect of the Milwaukee Voucher Program
Box
3: Public vs. Private Schools
Why
Different Researchers Reach Different Conclusions
The
Witte Evaluations
Box
4: Sorting through the Conflicting Voucher Results
The
Greene, Peterson, and Du Evaluation
Box
5: When are Significant Results Not So Significant?
The
Rouse Evaluation
Milwaukee’s
Private Voucher Program -- PAVE
Box
6 - A Case Example of the Relative Cost and Performance of Public and Private
Schools
The
Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP)
Vouchers,
Values, and Educational Equity
Box
7: Does Money Matter? School Spending and School Outcomes
References
Table
of Contents - Exercept 2
The Argument
Over Vouchers
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Program
The Achievement Effects of the Milwaukee Voucher Program
The
Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP)
Official
Evaluation Results for CSTP
Private
Voucher Programs
Private
School Vouchers (Con't)
Vouchers
and Educational Equity
References
Educational Vouchers: A Review of the Research
October 1999
CERAI-99-21
Alex Molnar
Professor, Department of Curriculum and
Instruction University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This document combines excerpts from two reports: "Smaller Classes -- Not Vouchers -- Increase Student Achievement" (Harrisburg, Pa.: Keystone Research Center, March 1998); and "Smaller Classes and Educational Vouchers: A Research Update" (Harrisburg, Pa.: Keystone Research Center, June 1999). Both documents are available on the website of the Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation at http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CERAI