Educational Vouchers: A Review of the Research

 

by
Alex Molnar

 

Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
School of Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PO Box 413
Milwaukee WI 53201
414-229-2716

 

October, 1999

 

 

CERAI-99-21

*Calculated as theaverage of September and January memberships, plus summer school membership.
**Estimate.
‡There are three schoolswithin one organization: Seeds of Health.

Sources: State ofWisconsin 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 FolletteInstitute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, December 1995).

 

In1993, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was modified to raise (effective1994-95) the number of students who could participate from 1 percent to 1.5percent of the Milwaukee Public School population (i.e., to about 1,500students). A 1995 change allowed religious schools to participate in the MPCPand raised the eligibility ceiling to 7 percent of the Milwaukee Public Schoolenrollment in 1995-96 and 15 percent in 1996-97.

The 1995 revision of the MPCP, deemedconstitutional by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on June 10, 1998, does notrequire that the schools participating in the program gather the achievementdata necessary for a comprehensive evaluation. Because the necessary data areunavailable, no evaluation of the achievement impact of the program since 1995has been conducted. Although the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau issued anupdate report in February 2000, the bureau was unable to address the issue ofstudent achievement in a meaningful way because voucher schools are not obligedto provide the data.

Continue with the Next Section The Achievement Effects of theMilwaukee 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**

 

 

The Argument Over Vouchers

Proponents of vouchers tend to basetheir position on three widely held beliefs about public education: 

·        that educationaloutcomes have deteriorated,

·        that Americanpublic education costs have accelerated unreasonably, and

·        that the publicschools cannot reform themselves because of bureaucratic and politicalconstraints.

Eachof these beliefs is subject to serious challenge. There is considerable evidencethat educational outcomes have actually improved over the last 20 years. A 1993report written by scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories found thatU.S. public education performance was improving.2 Between the 1970sand 1990, according to a 1994 RAND study, reading and math scores rosesignificantly for Hispanics and African-Americans.3 In a March 1998article, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger reported that NationalAssessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams reveal rising American publicschool performance over the past 20 years.4 For example, a studentscoring in the 50th percentile today performs as well as the 56th-percentilestudent 25 years ago.5 The most disadvantaged students have made thegreatest gains. Moreover, between the early 1970s and 1990, the black-whiteNAEP test-score gap for 17-year-olds decreased by almost half (beforeincreasing slightly in the 1990s).6

Contrary to the second widely heldperception driving support for vouchers, Richard Rothstein found that resourcesfor regular classrooms at public schools have increased only modestly over thelast several decades.7 Rothstein reached this conclusion byidentifying expenditures on special education, transportation, and otheractivities outside the regular classroom. In a survey of nine school districts,he found that inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending for regular education roseby 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 sameperiod. If this decline in spending for regular education typifies developmentsin urban areas, it may help explain worsening relative academic outcomes insome urban public schools. Rothstein’s research also suggests that carefullytargeted increases in spending on regular classroom instruction in urban areasmay increase both parental satisfaction and student achievement.

Of course, national statistics aboutgradually improving performance and the stagnation of funds flowing to regularclassrooms in urban school districts are of little comfort to parents convincedthat their own children will not get the lift they need from the local publicschool.

Parents who want better schools fortheir kids now have been a receptive audience for the third widely held beliefthat underlies support for vouchers today: that public schools are incapable ofreforming themselves because of bureaucratic and political constraints. Thisargument gained intellectual legitimacy with the 1990 publication of Politics,Markets, and America’s Schools by John Chubb and Terry Moe.8In their book, Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers are neededbecause private schools exhibit superior academic performance and becausepublic school performance has not improved despite reforms instituted duringthe 1980’s.9

Chubb and Moe’s claimsnotwithstanding, the research literature contains no clear evidence thatprivate schools are better than public schools. Moreover, since most of thestudies in the literature on public versus private schools use data forsecondary schools, they are of limited value in predicting the impact ofvoucher programs that, for the most part, involve private elementary schools.10

Many proponents of private schoolvouchers, such as Wisconsin Assembly member Annette "Polly" Williams,author of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program legislation, link vouchers totheir desire to empower poor families and raise the academic achievement ofpoor children. They argue that vouchers may improve achievement by forcing thepublic schools to compete in an educational marketplace in which poor parentshold the power of the purse. What does the research evidence show?

 

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Program

Private school vouchers have beendebated at the state level for over 20 years. However, voucher legislation hasbecome law in only three states, Wisconsin (1990), Ohio (1995), and now Florida(1999).

Wisconsin established thecountry’s first publicly funded private school voucher program inMilwaukee. Today, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the voucherprogram for which the greatest volume of systematic data is available.

The MPCP initially allowed up to 1percent of low-income Milwaukee Public School students (about 1,000 students)to attend participating private, non-sectarian schools within the city (Table1). The program defined "low-income" as below 175 percent of theofficial U.S. poverty line. Each child attending a private school in the programreceives a voucher worth the per-pupil equalized state aid to the MilwaukeePublic Schools, originally set at $2,446 and currently $4,894 (in 1998-99). TheWisconsin legislation that created Milwaukee’s Choice program providedfor yearly evaluations of the academic achievement of students attending Choiceschools.

Table 1: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Profile1990-1999

Table of Contents - Exercept 1
Historical Background
Educational Choice Enters theMainstream
The Battle Over Vouchers Today
The Milwaukee Parental ChoiceVoucher Program
The Debate Over the AchievementEffect of the Milwaukee Voucher Program
Box 3: Public vs. Private Schools
Why Different Researchers ReachDifferent Conclusions
The Witte Evaluations
Box 4: Sorting through the ConflictingVoucher Results
The Greene, Peterson, and DuEvaluation
Box 5: When are Significant ResultsNot So Significant?
The Rouse Evaluation
Milwaukee’s Private VoucherProgram -- PAVE
Box 6 - A Case Example of the RelativeCost and Performance of Public and Private Schools
TheCleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP)
Vouchers,Values, and Educational Equity
Box7: Does Money Matter? School Spending and School Outcomes
References

Tableof Contents - Exercept 2
The ArgumentOver Vouchers
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Voucher Program
The Achievement Effects of the Milwaukee Voucher Program
The Cleveland Scholarship andTutoring Program (CSTP)
Official Evaluation Results forCSTP
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

AlexMolnar
Professor, Department of Curriculum andInstruction University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

This document combines excerpts from tworeports: "Smaller Classes -- Not Vouchers -- Increase StudentAchievement" (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 areavailable on the website of the Center for Education Research, Analysis, andInnovation at http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CERAI