School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [23]
The Urban Institute summarized quantitative evaluation data on the effects of vouchers for African-American students as follows:
The results of this research also showed that attending a private school was beneficial but only for African American students. On average African Americans who received vouchers scored .17 standard deviations higher on the combined test scores than African Americans in the control group [after one year in the program]. After two years they scored .33 standard deviations higher than their counterparts in the control group.14
Sustained annual gains of around .15 would eliminate the race gap in about seven years.
Two explanations for these findings seem plausible. First, African-American parents typically are more favorable toward voucher programs than are white parents. They may enter voucher programs with higher expectations than Asians, Hispanics, and whites and transfer their enthusiasm to their children and teachers.
Second, since African-American students are the largest group of students in most voucher programs, any effects on them are more likely to be statistically significant. Other things being equal, larger sample sizes are more likely to uncover effects. The smaller numbers of whites in voucher programs may make any effects for them undetectable just as a medical experiment with too few cases might not detect the effect of a superior treatment.
Patrick Wolf 15 studied school-level policies that could disproportionately affect African-American students in a randomized field trial study of the Washington, DC, private voucher program. This program, started in 1993, provides privately funded partial tuition scholarships of up to $2,200 to families in the District of Columbia with household income at or below 270 percent of the federal poverty line. Scholarships can be redeemed at more than 100 participating DC private schools. Some 1,325 elementary and secondary students used these vouchers in the year of study, 2002.16 Wolf’s analysis suggests that dedicated teachers, advantaged peers, and more demanding homework assignments are likely factors that increase academic achievement of inner-city, largely black voucher users, rather than other factors commonly found to positively affect learning such as greater school resources, smaller school communities, smaller class sizes, orderly and disciplined learning environments, and a stronger sense of community.
In conclusion, the fact that African-American students benefit disproportionately from education vouchers rebuts concerns that school choice would be injurious to minorities. That white students do not appear to benefit as much, or possibly at all, from current voucher programs seems more likely to be due to parental motivation, but too few whites may have been in these voucher programs to make any benefits for them detectable.
Parents’ Experiences with Vouchers
As Table 3-2 indicates, parents who have transferred their children from public to private schools through voucher programs report far fewer behavior and other social problems in private schools. 17
Parents also reported substantially more school outreach from private schools (see Table 3-3).18
Effects of Education Vouchers on Student Achievement in Public Schools
Education vouchers may improve the academic achievement of students who get to attend schools of choice, but what about the children who remain in public schools? To answer this question, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby compared the achievement gains of Milwaukee public schools facing voucher school competition with the gains of other public schools in Wisconsin that enrolled similar students but did not face competition from nearby voucher schools. She concluded:
In every subject, achievement grew most in the schools that faced the most voucher competition, a medium amount in the schools that faced less competition, and the least in the schools that faced no competition. . . . [The] evaluation of Milwaukee suggests that public schools made a strong push to improve achievement in the face of competition