School Vouchers Research Articles

How Within-Study Comparisons can Inform Research and Evaluation Design for the Third Sector

Within-study comparisons (WSCs) compare quasi-experimental results to an experimental benchmark and assess the extent to which quasi-experiments (QEs) sacrifice internal validity for external validity. WSCs inform decisions about when to use experiments or QEs, as well as methodological decisions (e.g., covariate selection) about how to implement QEs when they are necessary or preferred. We review the methodological literature on WSCs and present the findings from a WSC of a school voucher program as an example of the use of WSCs to inform policy debates involving the third sector. Prior literature and our results suggest that QE evaluations of third-sector institutions can produce low levels of bias, but only if analytic models include key proxy variables for voluntary self-selection into programs.

U.S. School Voucher Programs and their Impact on Performance, Choice, Efficiency, and Equity（ 2）

U.S. School Voucher Programs and their Impact on Performance, Choice, Efficiency, and Equity（ 2）

The main parameters of and mechanisms for the development of lifelong education of the adult population in the economically developed countries

Lifelong education is gradually becoming the main challenge for the education system and for a significant part of the working population. The demand for it is influenced by the growth of interest in further education in a variety of forms, content and duration among the highly educated adult population; by the growth in the number of people who lack skills and qualifications to perform current work assignments, and by the increasing needs of employers operating in conditions of frequently changing requirements for the competence of employees due to technical and organizational changes. The author considers the indicators of the involvement of the adult population of economically developed countries in various forms of lifelong education, as well as incentives and barriers to such activities. It may be especially useful for the Russian public to learn about collective funds of professional training, and the use of instruments of state subsidization and reimbursement of expenses: educational loans and vouchers; individual and saving accounts which can become promising means to expand participation in lifelong education, including for a growing number of non-standard workers.

ІННОВАЦІЯ ЯК ТРЕНД РОЗВИТКУ ЗАГАЛЬНОЇ СЕРЕДНЬОЇ ОСВІТИ: ДОСВІД США

The aim of the study was to analyze some educational innovations in secondary education in the United States with a projection on the Ukrainian education system in terms of its reform and integration into the world educational space. Based on scientific analysis, the concept of educational innovation is specified. It is stated that innovation is not only an innovation but also the ability to think anew, to rethink existing theories and rules. The issue of financing educational innovations has been updated. The results of the introduction of an educational voucher in the US secondary education system on the example of individual states and the impact of the voucher system on the formation of the competitiveness of secondary education and improving the quality of educational services are studied. The results of Indiana’s largest school voucher program, Indiana’s Indiana Choice Scholarships program, are reviewed. The concept of the «digital divide» in the context of the transition to distance learning is studied. It is substantiated that for modern Ukrainian society the most important task is to develop promising guidelines for development and effective practices of educational innovations, reforming the educational system by transforming it into an effective model of education that would meet international standards. It is concluded that the digitalization of education requires appropriate technical and information support, including the development and implementation of a national IT strategy, ensuring equal access to e-learning resources, the formation of digital competence in students and teachers. Recommendations are offered that may be a prospect for the development of general secondary education in Ukraine based on the positive experience of the United States

Wandering astray: Teenagers' choices of schooling and crime

We build and estimate a dynamic model of teenagers' choices of schooling and crime, incorporating four factors that may contribute to the different paths taken by different teenagers: heterogeneous endowments, unequal opportunities, uncertainties about one's own ability, and contemporaneous shocks. We estimate the model using administrative panel data from Chile that link school records with juvenile criminal records. Counterfactual policy experiments suggest that, for teenagers with disadvantaged backgrounds, interventions that combine mild improvement in their schooling opportunities with free tuition (by adding 157 USD per teenager‐year to the existing high school voucher) would lead to an 11% decrease in the fraction of those ever arrested by age 18 and a 13% increase in the fraction of those consistently enrolled throughout primary and secondary education.

The effect of voucher and public school education on Chilean students’ mathematics and reading test score trajectories

ABSTRACT This article aims to measure and compare the effectiveness of voucher schools and public schools on mathematics and reading test score trajectories from Grade 4 to Grade 10 in Chile. We analysed a national database that includes measures taken in 2007, 2011, and 2013 from a same sample of over 140,000 students. Multilevel-growth models were used to analyse the trajectories, and linear adjustment with propensity score matching was used to control for confounding variables. We found positive effects of voucher education on intercepts which, after controlling for schools’ socioeconomic composition and selection policies, became irrelevant in terms of effect sizes. Regarding slopes, voucher schools have a significant positive effect, which is irrelevant in terms of effect sizes if 1 year is considered, but relevant for a 12-year school trajectory. The results illustrate a stratification between the public and voucher systems during a period when intense neoliberal policies were enforced.

The opportunity structure of segregation: School choice and school segregation in Sweden

It is a matter of debate whether free school choice should lead to higher or lower levels of school segregation. We investigate how school choice opportunities affect school segregation utilizing geocoded Swedish population register data with information on 13 cohorts of ninth graders. We find that local school choice opportunities strongly affect the sorting of students across schools based on the parents’ country of birth and level of education. An increase in the number of local schools leads to higher levels of local segregation net of stable area characteristics, and time-varying controls for population structure and local residential segregation. In particular, the local presence of private voucher schools pushes school segregation upwards. The segregating impact of school choice opportunities is notably stronger in ‘native’ areas with high portions of highly educated parents, and in areas with low residential segregation. Our results point to the importance of embedding individual actors in relevant opportunity structures for understanding segregation processes.

Historical Analysis of School Choice in Ontario: Freedom and Inequality

The article analyzes the contemporary school choice debate in Ontario in relation to the neoliberal models of education instituted by other provinces, and places key issues of the debate within Canada’s historical context. In the first section, this paper focuses on tracing out the push for neoliberal school choice in Ontario within the broader history of its development in Canada, with particular attention to Alberta and British Columbia. The second section examines two aspects of the school choice debate: the issues of freedom of choice, as well as racial and social inequality. Finally, these aspects of school choice are placed alongside Milton Friedman’s voucher school model and the history of education in Ontario. This juxtaposition reveals some of the regulations needed to mitigate the harmful effects of school choice in Ontario.

Effects of spatial competition on public educational efficiency: an analysis for the Chilean Metropolitan Region

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the effect of spatial competition on public schools’ efficiency in Chile, an extreme case of market-oriented reforms in the educational sector. To address this issue, we use a measure of competition that captures three major characteristics of market competition in a spatial context: the number of competitors, based on distance buffers; the size of competitors, measured by the enrollment of voucher schools; and the geographical distance among public schools and their competitors. To control for the potential endogeneity of our measure of spatial competition on public schools’ efficiency, we use an instrumental variable based on the discontinuites generated by admissions municipality boundaries . We do not find evidence that public schools’ efficiency increases or decreases as the result of the increment of voucher schools located near to public schools, an increase in the enrollment of existing voucher schools, or both factors simultaneously. This result is robust to: (1) the limit of education market or other measures of spatial competition; (2) the methodology used to compute the efficiency measures; and (3) whether we explain efficiency or educational performance.

The long-term effect of competition on public school achievement: Evidence from the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program

Despite a vast literature on school vouchers, less is known about their long-term competitive effects on public schools. The current paper examines the competitive effect of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, the largest single voucher program in the US, on math and ELA proficiency rates in public schools in the last eight years. Exploiting school vouchers' market share as the primary measure of competition, I use two-way fixed effects regression and event study framework to examine the competitive effect. Results indicate that, although competition has a positive effect in the earlier years, it is detrimental in the long term, suggesting that the program created a “voucher shock” that led to an improvement in the short term. However, in the long term, the proficiency rates in public schools that faced higher competition fell and never increased again. The trend of voucher recipients who have prior public-school attendance revealed that the worsening proficiency rates in the public schools that face higher competition were driven by the departure of relatively high achieving students, suggesting that school vouchers inspire sorting. The results are robust to alternative specifications that use the variation in the interaction between the market share of vouchers and geospatial measures of private school density.

Localized ideographs in education rhetoric: Polly Williams and a justice-driven ideology of choice

ABSTRACT The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is considered the nation’s first private school voucher program and a landmark policy for the contemporary school choice movement. Less well-known is the policy actor responsible for its inception and her view of the policy as a means toward justice for a historically oppressed community. I analyze the discourse of Wisconsin State Representative Polly Williams within the historical context surrounding the MPCP’s 1989 passage, arguing that Williams employs the ideograph “choice” to represent a justice-driven ideology distinct from the “choice” consumer logics of neoliberalism. To attend to the non-dominant ideologies associated with ideographs, this essay suggests that we more fully consider contestation, local geographies, rhetor positionality, and community resources in our ideographic analysis. This project recovers Williams’s “choice” discourse to demonstrate the ways that “choice” can take on an alternative meaning for local publics. In doing so, I consider how the unequal circulation of non-dominant ideologies risks co-optation by more dominant ideologies.

The participant effects of private school vouchers around the globe: a meta-analytic and systematic review

ABSTRACT School voucher programs are scholarship initiatives – frequently government funded or incentivized – that pay for students to attend private schools of their choice. This study is the first formal meta-analytic consolidation of the evidence from all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating the student-level math and reading test score effects of school vouchers internationally. Our search process turned up 9,443 potential studies, 21 of which were ultimately included. These 21 studies represent 11 different voucher programs. Utilizing a random effects and robust variance estimation framework, we find moderate evidence of positive achievement impacts of private school vouchers, with substantial effect heterogeneity across programs and outcome years. Suggestive evidence exists that voucher interventions may be cost effective even for null achievement impacts. Future experimental studies of long-term, scaled up voucher interventions could strengthen our understanding of achievement impacts.

Are Broad-Based Vouchers an Effective Way to Support Life-Long Learning? Evidence from an Australian Reform

Increasing mature-age access to education and training in a way that is responsive to changing labour market needs is a key policy challenge. In this paper we examine the impacts of a unique reform in the Australian state of Victoria that aimed to meet this challenge by introducing a broad-based voucher for those 25 and older. In effect, the reform uncapped public course-level funding and linked it to individual student choice instead of centralised funding allocations. Using national administrative enrolment data and difference-in-differences estimation, exploiting the continuation of existing centralised funding models in other states, we find that the voucher increased mature-age vocational education and training participation and improved the alignment of course enrolments with measures of prevailing skill needs, including enrolments of disadvantaged groups. Our study provides first evidence on the use of broad-based vouchers in vocational education and training to expand access to mature-age learning in a demand-responsive way. These results provide support for policies that put student choice at the centre of efforts to lift mature-age access to training, which is especially important for countries, such as the United States, that have traditionally funded vocational education and training through centralised allocations.

Back to School - and After

School closure has been damaging to the mental health of some children and to the educational progress of many. The long-term costs to individuals and the economy of this hiatus in schooling can be exaggerated, but are still likely to be substantial. The costs of the damage are likely to have fallen most heavily on poorer or otherwise disadvantaged children, and the government is understandably taking particular note of this in designing policies to assist educational recovery. As with the NHS, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed longstanding problems in the educational system, and there is a strong case for government policy to look beyond short-term recovery and temporary changes. Such policies as changing the structure of the school year and school day length, which have been advocated for years, could now be brought forward. The government could consider changing the ages, at which children enter and leave primary school, review teaching practices in light of new technologies and changes in how children learn. It should become easier for a wider range of people to become teachers, and the requirement for Qualified Teacher Status could be dropped. In the short run, some form of examination is needed for A-levels and other terminal qualifications, rather than reliance on teacher assessment. In the longer term, the National Curriculum could be decluttered, and there could be only a limited number of examinations at the age of sixteen. A-levels might usefully revert to a modular structure. The Pupil Premium could be given to parents to spend on tutorial support or other relevant educational provision. Experiments with education vouchers could also be encouraged, with the ultimate objective of making it possible for the distinction between state and independent schools to be broken down.

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.

Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Vouchers on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students

For decades, social theorists have posited—and descriptive accounts have shown—that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial for those who possess less of the economic, social, and cultural capital that play a critical role in improving educational outcomes. Yet evaluations of school choice and other educational interventions seldom estimate programmatic effects on severely disadvantaged students who are isolated by both ethnicity and social class. We experimentally estimate differential effects of a 1997 New York City school voucher intervention on college attainment for minority students by household income and mother’s education. Postsecondary outcomes as of 2017 come from the National Student Clearinghouse. The severely deprived did not benefit from the intervention despite substantial positive effects on college enrollments and degree attainment for the moderately disadvantaged. School choice programs and other interventions or public policies may need to pay greater attention to ensuring that families possess the requisite forms of capital—human, economic, social, and cultural—to realize their intended benefits.

Experimentally Validating Welfare Evaluation of School Vouchers: Part I

In this paper, we use a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to school vouchers across both markets and students in rural India to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. In the first step of the research design, we develop an empirical model of school choice subject to liquidity and credit constraints that is estimated using data from only the control markets. Based on this exercise, we estimate that the voucher generated welfare gains exceeding four times the average private school's annual tuition on average to the students induced into private schooling. The second step of the research design will validate the estimated welfare impacts by comparing model predictions for a simulated voucher program in control markets with the data from the treatment group. The results in this paper are based on the first step (using only control data) and this draft serves as a pre-commitment to the model estimates and predictions before examining the experimental data.

Teacher labor markets, school vouchers, and student cognitive achievement: Evidence from Chile

I use administrative and survey data from Chile and a structural model to evaluate teacher policies in a market‐based school system. The model accommodates equilibrium effects on parental sorting across school sectors (public or private), on the self‐selection of individuals into teaching and across school sectors, and on teacher wages in private schools. I use the estimated model to simulate a reform that is planned to be implemented in Chile in 2023. Tying public school teacher wages to teacher skills and introducing minimum competency requirements for teaching is predicted to increase student test scores by 0.30 standard deviations and decrease the achievement gap between the poorest and richest 25% of students by a third. These impacts are ten times as large as the impact of a flat wage increase in public schools, and over twice as large as the impact of only introducing minimum competency requirements. The key driver of policy outcomes is an improvement in the pool of teachers, amplified by equilibrium effects on teacher wages in private schools. The equilibrium effects are large, accounting for 70% of estimated policy impacts.

The Effect of School Voucher Spending on Initial Earnings

We quantify the effect of school voucher spending on initial earnings. We use administrative data on the monetary resources received by schools from a targeted voucher program implemented in Chile. We merge this dataset with education and labor market administrative records for the universe of students enrolled in the Chilean education system. We find that an increase of US$100 in the yearly expenditure of voucher resources per student raises initial earnings by 2.3%. However, we find that the positive effect of voucher spending only holds for private voucher schools that operate in local education markets with low enrollment concentration.

Deal or No Deal? The Effects of Deregulation on Public School Leaders’ Support for Private School Choice in California

Public school leaders might be more likely to support private school voucher programs if they are enacted alongside public school deregulations. We use a survey experiment to examine the effects of public school deregulations on actual public school leaders’ support for a hypothetical private school voucher program in California. We do not find evidence to suggest that public school deregulations affect public school leaders’ support for private school vouchers overall. However, we unexpectedly find that deregulations related to teacher certification and administration of standardized tests further decrease support for private school choice for leaders of large public schools. This unexpected result may be explained by expected adjustment costs or regulatory capture.