School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [52]
The largest voucher program in the United States, Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program, is for special needs children with a variety of educational disabilities including blindness and mental retardation. Though no analyses have been made of its possible achievement effects, it is much more highly regarded by parents than are traditional, nonchosen public schools.
Studies of voucher programs in Washington, DC, Cleveland, and Milwaukee show that they have reduced racial segregation by allowing students in segregated neighborhoods to cross public school boundaries to attend less-segregated schools of their choice. Surveys regularly show high levels of satisfaction among parents who participate in public and private voucher programs.
Public voucher programs in the United States exist only in a few large cities and generally are small in scope. Consequently, their success or failure does not constitute a good test of school vouchers. Programs in other countries are much larger and provide a better test of vouchers. The large majority of studies of these programs have found positive effects on student academic achievement.
Chapter 4 surveyed research on the effects of private schools. Since millions of parents voluntarily choose to enroll their children in them, private schools provide larger samples than charter and voucher schools. Offsetting this advantage, however, is the fact that random-assignment studies are nearly impossible, and controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounders is difficult and often controversial. In addition, grouping private schools, including independent and various kinds of parochial schools, together may hide important differences among them, and existing samples of private school subgroups may be too small to reveal statistically significant differences.
Most point-in-time studies show superior achievement of private schools, and all the well-designed studies in this field find positive effects after controlling for student socioeconomic status and other factors. Studies of achievement gains over time (value-added analyses) for students attending private schools tend to find a positive private school effect.
Catholic schools are the largest category of U.S. private schools, and their numbers allow the largest and longest-running studies. The most sophisticated achievement study showed superior Catholic school achievement, but a review of smaller studies showed mixed effects, with positive effects concentrated among African-American students. All studies, however, show that Catholic school graduation rates (with and without statistical regression controls) are higher than those of public schools.
Private schools appear to perform better, on average, than public schools at substantially less cost, even when the extra administrative and other costs borne by public schools are taken into account. Private schools are also more likely than public schools to have racial compositions resembling the population in their areas, and private school students are more likely to report greater levels of cross-racial friendship and fewer instances of racial fighting than public school students. Private schools also do better than public schools at fostering tolerance, civic participation, and social integration.
Chapter 5 examined research on the possible competitive effects on achievement in geopolitical regions such as states and metropolitan areas with differing degrees of school choice and local control of schools. Two literature reviews of some 140 studies showed that most studies show positive effects of increases in school choice opportunities on overall student achievement. The most rigorous 50-state study found strong positive effects. The largest international study of school choice effects, as indexed by the percentage of private