School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [27]
Research on Cleveland’s voucher program similarly indicates greater racial integration of voucher users. The Cleveland Scholarship Program began in the 1996-97 school year and provides up to $2,250 per student to attend 1 of 51 private schools. Greene30 found that nearly a fifth (19 percent) of voucher students attended a racially integrated school (within 10 percent of the average proportion of minorities in metropolitan Cleveland) compared with only 5.2 percent of Cleveland public school students. Greene’s research also showed “61 percent of public school students in the metropolitan area attended schools that were racially segregated (where more than 90 percent of students were of the same background) compared to 50 percent of the students attending private schools with voucher students.”31
Religious schools were initially ineligible to participate in Milwaukee’s voucher program. That prohibition was subsequently lifted, and an evaluation of the program showed that Milwaukee’s voucher-accepting religious schools are better integrated than the city’s public schools.32 In 1990-91, 341 students used vouchers to attend 7 schools, and by 2001-02, 10,882 students used vouchers to attend 106 different schools.33 While 54.4 percent of Milwaukee public school students attended racially isolated schools in 2001-02, only 41.8 percent attended similarly racially isolated private religious schools in the voucher program.34 The program allowed some students who would otherwise have been racially isolated to attend less-segregated private religious schools. In late 2006 Gregg Forster reviewed seven valid research studies of voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, and concluded that each one showed that voucher-participating private schools were less racially segregated than public schools.35
Parent Satisfaction
Studies of private scholarship programs in New York; Dayton, Ohio; and Washington, DC, find high degrees of satisfaction among voucher parents. According to a comprehensive Government Accountability Office review:
In all three cities in each year for which data are available, parents of voucher users were more likely than parents of control group students to give their child’s school an “A” on an A to F scale. These findings held true for all parents of voucher users, not only for African Americans.36
In all three cities, “parents of voucher users were more likely than the parents of control group students to report they were ‘very satisfied’ with school safety, teaching, and school curricula.”37 In all three years in New York, and in the second year in Dayton, parents of voucher users were more likely to report being very satisfied with the academic quality of their child’s school than were the parents of students who did not use vouchers.
Voucher parents expressed greater satisfaction with their school’s discipline, compared to parents who did not use a voucher, for all three years of the New York study and for the first year of the Dayton and Washington studies. Analysts of these results considered the estimates based on the New York study the most reliable because that study had the fewest problems with participants not returning for follow-up and families declining voucher offers.38
Parents who choose the schools their children attend report being satisfied with their choices, but are they making wise decisions? Survey data indicate that parents commonly choose schools for academic quality rather than other reasons such as convenience or sports opportunities. In a free society, of course, they should have the right to choose what they think is best for their children.
John Witte’s analysis of America’s first public voucher program showed that 88.6 percent of the