School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [22]
Jay Greene, Paul Peterson, and Jiangtao Du6 studied Milwaukee’s public voucher program in 1998, once again using random-assignment data, and found that lottery winners scored 6 percentile points higher on reading tests and 11 percentile points higher on math tests than did lottery losers. Cecelia Rouse7 also analyzed data from Milwaukee’s public voucher program in the same year and found that scholarship students scored 1.5 to 2.3 percentile points higher per year in math than did students in the control group.
Three Non-Random-Assignment Studies of Academic Achievement Effects
Metcalf8 studied the academic effects of Cleveland’s public voucher program, though without random-assignment data and with insufficient data to adequately control for differences in student backgrounds among choice school and traditional public school families. Despite these data limitations, he found that scholarship students had “significantly higher test scores than public school students in reading and writing (45.0 versus 40.0) and science (40.0 versus 36.0). However, there were no statistically significant differences between these groups on any of the other scores.
Paul Peterson, William Howell, and Jay Greene9 studied two schools participating in the Cleveland choice program and found that voucher students “had gains of 7.5 national percentile points in reading and 15.6 NPR in math. These gains were achieved even though the students at these two schools were among the most disadvantaged students in Cleveland.” The two schools enrolled only 15 percent of all choice students and 25 percent of all voucher students who transferred from public schools.
Greene summarized the state of empirical research on voucher programs in 2001 as follows:
There have been seven random-assignment and three non-random-assignment studies of school choice programs in the last few years. The authors of all ten studies find at least some benefits from the programs and recommend their continuation if not expansion. No study finds a significant harm to student achievement from the school choice programs.10
Other more recent analytic summaries of voucher evaluations come to similar conclusions.11 This research appears to validate one of the predictions of proponents of vouchers: students attending schools of choice are likely to experience higher levels of academic achievement. Although the voucher programs studied were too small to prove or disprove predictions about the magnitude of the effects that would result from universal voucher programs, they nevertheless demonstrate that even small steps to make schools more competitive have produced measurable positive effects on student achievement.
Education Voucher Effects on Black Student Achievement
A puzzle in voucher research is that African-American students show significant achievement gains while other racial-ethnic groups do not, an important anomaly since African Americans typically lag substantially (about one standard deviation) behind whites. From his evaluations of private voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, New York, and Washington, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson concluded:
According to the test score results, African American students from low-income families who switch from a public to a private school do considerably better after two years than students who do not receive a voucher opportunity. However, students from other ethnic backgrounds seem to learn after two years as much but no more in private schools than their public school counterparts.12
A RAND Corporation summary evaluation similarly concluded that “[s]mall-scale, experimental privately funded voucher programs targeted to low-income students suggest a possible (but as yet uncertain) modest achievement benefit for African-American students after one to two years in voucher schools (as compared with local public schools).