School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [26]
McKay parents may choose schools that best meet their preferences for their children. This Florida program enrolls about 9,200 students with special learning needs in private schools chosen by their parents. The amount of their scholarship or voucher is equal to the tuition of the receiving school or the amount the state and district allocate to educate a student with the particular disability, whichever is lower. The scholarships range from $4,500 to $21,000 per student, with an average of $5,547.
Surveys analyzed by Greene and Forster26 showed that more than 90 percent of McKay voucher parents were satisfied with the schools they chose, compared to one-third of parents of special needs students in nonchosen schools. Voucher parents also reported that their children endured less harassment and fewer physical attacks than did parents of similar children attending nonchosen public schools. In public schools, nearly half (46.8 percent) of the students with special needs were harassed regularly, and nearly one-fourth (24.7 percent) suffered physical assaults. Only 5.3 percent of McKay voucher parents reported that their children were being harassed on a regular basis, and only 6.0 percent reported a physical assault.
The difference in students’ behavioral problems was also striking. Only 18.8 percent of parents reported that their children exhibited behavior problems in their chosen schools in the McKay program, compared to 40.3 percent of parents reporting such behavior by their children in traditional public schools.
Effects of Education Vouchers on Racial Integration
Many American public schools have historically been and still are racially segregated, with school racial concentrations often higher than 90 percent. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, federal courts have distinguished de facto segregation attributable to housing patterns from de jure segregation attributable to unconstitutional government acts, usually by state and local public school boards and staff. Many states and hundreds of northern, southern, and western public school districts, particularly in large cities, remain under federal court supervision as adjudicated constitutional violators. The Dallas public school system was only recently declared unitary (i.e., in compliance with the law against dual systems).
Subsequent to Brown, federal courts ordered mandatory bussing to achieve racial integration. This generally meant that African-American students were bussed, sometimes long distances, to schools in white neighborhoods and, to a lesser extent, vice versa. Since parents typically wanted their children to go to neighborhood schools close to home, middle-class African Americans and whites often moved to the suburbs or enrolled their children in private schools to avoid bussing, thereby concentrating the poor in city systems. Since whites are, on average, wealthier and therefore more mobile, they moved in greater numbers, which made many urban public schools even more de facto segregated.27
Just as charter schools enable families to send their children to schools outside their neighborhoods, vouchers make it far easier for poor and black families to send their children to private schools, if they so choose. Jay Greene and Marcus Winters’s evaluation of the first year of the Washington, DC, voucher program28 showed that voucher students, 94 percent of whom are black, attended private schools that are more racially integrated than Washington public schools. The evaluators point out that neither public nor participating private schools in Washington are racially integrated in proportion to the city’s population, but the voucher program did help create more opportunities for integration than would have otherwise existed.
Vouchers with higher dollar values offer students greater opportunity to attend less-segregated, more costly private schools. In 1999-2000, the average elementary school tuition in the United States was $3,267—$2,451 at Catholic schools, $3,503 at other religiously affiliated