School Vouchers Research Articles

Racial Fractionalization and School Performance

I Introduction Parents and policymakers have long been concerned about racial diversity's affect on school performance. Racial diversity's impact on African-American students' academic achievement was at the heart of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (Armor 1995). White flight, where white families move to segregated communities or enroll their children in private schools, was another historical manifestation of this concern (Fairlie and Resch 2002). Most recently, policy debates surrounding ability tracking, charter schooling, open enrollment, and school vouchers have also reflected concern about how these policies will affect school racial composition and academic outcomes (Greene 1999; Renzulli and Evans 2005). In light of this concern a body of research examines the impact of racial on school performance. Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, early social science research focused on racial isolation's harmful effects on African-Americans' academic performance. Two influential reports were Coleman et al. (1966) and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1967), which found that African-American students' racial isolation in segregated schools lowered their academic achievement. Jencks et al. (1972) found that desegregation improved black children's school performance by 2 to 3 percent; and Guryan (2004) estimates that half of the decline in black dropout rates during the 1970s occurred because of desegregation. In a related line of research Hoxby (2000) finds that black third graders perform substantially worse when surrounded by other black students than when they are in classes that are primarily white. Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (2009) isolate the peer composition of racial diversity and find similar results, namely, that having a higher percentage of black classmates lowers black academic achievement. Positive racial peer effects are the conventional channel through which racial diversity is thought to affect school performance. However, recent research in economic development suggests that diversity might negatively affect education and education-related outcomes. Several papers in this literature find that greater diversity is associated with worse political-economic outcomes (see, for instance, Easterly and Levine 1997; La Porta et al. 1999; Zak and Knack 2001). (1) This includes those related to schooling. For example, Easterly and Levine (1997) find a negative relationship between the degree of ethnolinguistic fractionalization and the number of years of schooling in a country. Similarly, Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1999) examine U.S. school districts and find that racial diversity lowers school spending. This literature points to policy choices--in particular goods spending--as the channel through which diversity negatively affects education. According to this reasoning, diverse citizens have diverse and often inconsistent needs. They therefore find it more difficult to agree on the level and kinds of goods that government should provide. This disagreement in turn leads important goods, such as education, to be underprovided, if underprovided education means lower educational achievement, this work suggests a which we call the public goods channel, through which higher racial diversity could lead to lower school performance. This article empirically tests the goods channel using data on Ohio school districts. We find that moving from a completely homogenous school district to one in which two racial groups have equal population shares is associated with a 7-17.5 percentage point decline in the passage rate on the state math exam. While our results suggest that racial diversity is negatively associated with school performance, we find that that the goods channel is not the reason for this relationship. Compared to between countries, there is minimal institutional or policy variation between Ohio's school districts. …

Designing Targeted Educational Voucher Schemes for the Poor in Developing Countries

A targeted educational voucher scheme (TEVS) is often proposed for the poor in developing countries. Essentially, TEVS involves issuing vouchers to poor households, thus enabling them to pay tuition and fees for their children’s schooling at participating non-public schools. However, little is known about TEVS’ design in developing countries. This article provides the foundation for constructing a TEVS and conducting subsequent scientific evaluations to support, modify or oppose such a system. Specifically, this article uses three policy instruments to design a TEVS: regulation, support services and finance. Regulation here refers to the rules that must be adhered to by participating households, children and schools. Support services refer to services facilitating the participation of children, households, schools, and financial and political supporters. Finance refers to the value of each voucher, total TEVS costs and sources of finance.

Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions

1. INTRODUCTION Concerns that U.S. students are not performing as well as their counterparts in other developed countries on international math and science tests have led to widespread demands for the reform of K-12 education in the United States. Of the various reforms under consideration, school voucher reform is at the forefront. Vouchers are scholarships that make students eligible to transfer from public to private schools. A basic feature of all publicly funded voucher programs in the United States is the funding of vouchers by public school revenue, so that money always follows students. In other words, schools that lose students lose their corresponding funding. Schools therefore recognize the financial implications of vouchers and have an incentive to avoid being subject to voucher programs. This article investigates the role of program design in the context of two such educational interventions in the United States--the Milwaukee and Florida school voucher programs--and analyzes the effects of design on public school incentives and performance. (1) We demonstrate that variations in program design have markedly different outcomes for public schools affected by vouchers. The Milwaukee program, introduced in 1990, was the first voucher program in the country. Implemented in 1999, the Florida program was the nation's third, following Cleveland's. The Milwaukee and Florida voucher programs share the basic feature of funding by public school revenue. But there are crucial differences. Milwaukee's is a means-tested program targeting low-income students while Florida's embeds a voucher program in a full-fledged accountability system. Using test-score data from Milwaukee and Florida and implementing a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, our study estimates the impact of each program by comparing the post-program results of the affected schools with a comparable set of control schools. Controlling for potentially confounding pre-program time trends and post-program common shocks, we find that the performance effects of the Florida program far exceed those of Milwaukee's program. These results are quite robust in that they hold after controlling for other confounding factors, such as mean reversion and a possible stigma effect; they also withstand several sensitivity tests. Our findings have important policy implications, which we consider in the context of New York State's federal, state, and city accountability programs. These programs include New York City's accountability policy, known as the Progress Report policy, and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, as implemented by New York State. Our study is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the Milwaukee and Florida voucher programs. In Section 3, we discuss the incentives created by the programs and the corresponding responses that might be expected from the affected public schools. Our data and empirical strategy are reviewed in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. Section 6 presents our results, and Section 7 considers policy implications. 2. INSTITUTIONAL DETAILS The first publicly funded school voucher program in the United States was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program made the city's entire low-income public school population eligible for vouchers. Specifically, starting in the 1990-91 school year, the program made all Milwaukee public school students with family income at or below 175 percent of the poverty line eligible for vouchers to attend nonsectarian private schools. In contrast, the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program, introduced in 1999, can be looked upon as a threat-of-voucher program. Here, failing public schools were threatened with the imposition of vouchers, with vouchers implemented only if schools failed to meet a government-designated cutoff quality level. The institutional details of the Milwaukee and Florida programs are summarized in Table 1. …

Religion and the Secular State

The first amendment came into effect more than two hundred years ago. Changing emphases at different periods of time means that the flow of cases varies and the justices have different assumptions not only from each other but also from their predecessors. For a time, few cases were brought under either religion clause, making Reynolds (1878), a free exercise claim and Everson (1947), an establishment claim, stand out. Everson, however, ushered in a rich profusion of cases which has only recently exhausted itself with Zelman (2002) (the establishment clause does not prevent parents from using school vouchers at a religious school), and Locke v. Davey (2004) (the state constitution may deny religious claimants equal protection in apply ing for school funds). While the free exercise clause thus does not apply to the states, the establishment clause does! Nevertheless, it, along with the free exercise, offers many protections for religious denomina tions and governments, and not least to individuals making claims of conscience. Today we are in a secular age. Thus in 1990, Justice Scalia effectively de-constitutionalized claims under the free exercise clause of the first amendment in Smith. Recently, in his concurrence in Pleasant Grove, Justice Scalia urges the same treatment for claims under the establishment clause. De facto de-constitutionalization of both clauses perhaps can be read to suggest that religion is less rele vant to American society today. At first members of minority religions lose their protected status under the first amendment. As proportion ally fewer people are aligned with mainstream religions, more and more people will stand alone and unprotected by the first amendment.

Do Vouchers and Tax Credits Increase Private School Regulation?

School voucher and education tax credit programs have proliferated in the United States over the past two decades. Advocates have argued that they will enable families to become active consumers in a free and competitive education marketplace, but some fear that these programs may in fact bring with them a heavy regulatory burden that could stifle market forces. Until now, there has been no systematic, empirical investigation of that concern. The present paper aims to shed light on the issue by quantifying the regulations imposed on private schools both within and outside school choice programs, and then analyzing them with descriptive statistics and regression analyses. The results are tested for robustness to alternative ways of quantifying private school regulation, and to alternative regression models, and the question of causality is addressed. The study concludes that vouchers, but not tax credits, impose a substantial and statistically significant additional regulatory burden on participating private schools.

Effects of school reform on education and labor market performance: Evidence from Chile's universal voucher system

This paper studies the effects of school reform in Chile, which adopted a nationwide school voucher program along with school decentralization reforms in 1981. Since then, Chile has had a relatively unregulated, competitive market in primary and secondary education. It therefore provides a unique setting in which to study how these reforms affected school attainment and labor market outcomes. This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of school attendance and work decisions using panel data from the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Encuesta de Protección Social survey. Some individuals in the sample completed their schooling before the voucher reforms were introduced, while others had the option of using the vouchers over part or all of their schooling careers. The impacts of the voucher reform are identified from differences in the schooling and work choices made and earnings returns received by similar aged individuals who were differentially exposed to the voucher system. Simulations based on the estimated model show that the voucher reform significantly increased the demand for private subsidized schools and decreased the demand for both public and nonsubsidized private schools. It increased high school (grades 9-12) graduation rates by 3.6 percentage points and the percentage completing at least two years of college by 2.6 percentage points. Individuals from poor and non-poor backgrounds on average experienced similar schooling attainment gains. The reform also increased lifetime utility and modestly reduced earnings inequality.

The Introduction of Religious Charter Schools: A Cultural Movement in the Private School Sector

Charter schools are opening, and religious associations are also sponsoring these schools since religious groups find private school tuitions to be high and prohibitive. This study includes studies of Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, a Minnesota Arabic charter school (Blaine and Inver Grove Heights, MN); Ben Gamla Charter School, a Florida English-Hebrew Charter School (Hollywood, FL); the Hellenic Classical Charter School, a New York City Greek Orthodox parochial school (Brooklyn, NY); and Community of Peace Academy, a Minnesota Hmong cultural charter school (St. Paul, MN). These charter schools are exemplary educational programs around the school's mission, curriculum, language courses, and extracurricular activities that are all culturally relevant to their particular culture and religion while so-far remaining legal under the Zelman decision, legalizing funding for religious school vouchers.

Thoughts on Daniel Shapiro's “Is the welfare state justified?”

As is true of many books, the title suggests a topic that is a bit different from the one actually developed in the book. The welfare state is a productive state that provides services for people living in a polity. At the beginning of the modern era of political theory, Hobbes' suggested that the state should provide law and order in his Leviathan. To this, liberals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries added infrastructure and education. To these duties of governments, late nineteenth-century radical liberals and social democrats added services, such as housing, poor relief, old age pensions, and medical care. These normative theories were in turn supported by electoral majorities in most of the Western world from the early twentieth century. In most cases, the programs enacted to provide these services include the word “insurance,” doubtless because this is how many voters think of such programs. A majority of voters evidently desire a welfare state that provides a safety net to protect them and their families from the risks of ordinary life. The result has been called the welfare state, because such states are supposed to look after the welfare of “their” citizens. The merits and demerits of welfare states, however, are not analyzed in this book. Shapiro's book concerns not the level of the public safety net or its justification, as might have been expected from the title, but rather the best means for providing those services. He accepts the idea that a safety net should be funded with tax revenues (or tax credits), but suggests that market-based provision is better than direct state provision. His argument is similar in many respects to those economists use to support rent and educational voucher programs, rather than state-provided housing and schools. However, perhaps surprisingly as Shapiro is a philosopher rather than an economist, his analysis is less “utilitarian” than that which most economists would have developed. For example, rather than stressing the cost and innovative advantages of competition, he considers whether market-based systems of various kinds would undermine the moral intuitions that underpin most support for

Educational Vouchers in Italy: Theory, Design, Effects

In 2000, the Lombardy Regional government introduced, for the first time in Italy, a voucher plan to stimulate families to enroll their children to private schools. After this intervention, many other Regions launched similar policies. Despite the high political attention to this theme in Italy, there is almost no economic research on this theme. The voucher plan in Lombardy is now active since eight years, but there are not systematic attempts to evaluate its effects. This paper aims to contribute to fill this gap; more specifically, the objective of this study is twofold: [1] to describe and assess the characteristics of voucher plans in Italy, by means of an appropriate theoretical framework to identify the relationship between plans’ design and effects; and [2] to assess the effects of voucher plans in the Italian experience, by using the PISA dataset and other administrative data for this purpose. The main findings of this paper are that, even though many Italian regions have implemented vouchers plans, only one has the potential effects on influencing the educational market (namely, the program launched by the Lombardy Region). The theoretical framework, in fact, shows that the amount of resources devoted to the policy, as well as the number of students involved, is marginal in the other regional experiences. Nevertheless, the same theoretical framework provides suggestion that the Lombardy plan’s design is focused more on promoting freedom of choice than on improving efficiency in schooling provision. The empirical analysis confirms this prediction: while some indicators of school competition have been found significant in – positively – affecting schools’ performances (in terms of student achievement), there is not strong evidence that voucher policies improved school competition. All in all, however, the results cannot be interpreted as that the voucher plan developed in the Lombardy Region was useless. Since the original formulation by Friedman (1962), the primary purpose of vouchers is to protect the freedom of choice as a value; in this respect, the Lombardy Region voucher plan has been an effective intervention that also stimulated a wide political and cultural debate about this theme in Italy.

Affordability, accessibility, and accountability: Perceived impacts of the Pre-primary Education Vouchers in Hong Kong

Abstract Hong Kong launched the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS) in 2007 to promote the “3A's” of early childhood education (ECE): affordability, accessibility, and accountability. The PEVS has three unique features: discriminating against profit kindergartens, promoting teacher professional development, and limiting parents’ choice to only non-profit schools. To understand the voucher scheme's perceived impacts, this study conducted stratified random sampling to include 10% of Hong Kong kindergartens and surveyed their parents, principals, and teachers. A total of 380 completed questionnaires were collected and analyzed, and the results indicated that (1) the majority of the respondents perceived positive impacts on the 3A's of ECE; (2) significant effects of stakeholders (parents, teachers and principals), school types (profit or non-profit), eligibility, and familiarity were found in between- and within-group comparisons; (3) the parents and especially those from non-profit/eligible kindergartens tended to perceive more positive impacts than others; and (4) the principals and teachers reported some implementation difficulties. Implications for voucher reform in others countries are discussed.

Vouchers, Tests, Loans, Privatization: Will They Help (Fight) Higher Education Corruption in Russia?

Russian higher education is in the process of reforming. Introduction of the standardized computer-graded test and educational vouchers was intended to increase accessibility of higher education, make its funding more effective, and reduce corruption in admissions to public colleges. The idea of vouchers failed while the test faces furious opposition and crises. This paper considers vouchers, standardized tests, educational loans, and privatization as related to educational corruption. The test is criticized by many for being a cause of the further increase in educational corruption. However, the test is needed to replace the outdated admissions policy based on the entry examinations. This paper considers the growing de facto privatization of the nation’s higher education as a fundamental process that should be legalized and formalized. It suggests further restructuring of the higher education industry, its decentralization and privatization, and sees educational loans as a necessary part of the future system of educational funding.

Improving Education in the Developing World: What Have We Learned from Randomized Evaluations?

Across a range of contexts, reductions in education costs and provision of subsidies can boost school participation, often dramatically. Decisions to attend school seem subject to peer effects and time-inconsistent preferences. Merit scholarships, school health programs, and information about returns to education can all cost-effectively spur school participation. However, distortions in education systems, such as weak teacher incentives and elite-oriented curricula, undermine learning in school and much of the impact of increasing existing educational spending. Pedagogical innovations designed to address these distortions (such as technology-assisted instruction, remedial education, and tracking by achievement) can raise test scores at a low cost. Merely informing parents about school conditions seems insufficient to improve teacher incentives, and evidence on merit pay is mixed, but hiring teachers locally on short-term contracts can save money and improve educational outcomes. School vouchers can cost-effectively increase both school participation and learning.

Why Do Education Vouchers Fail?

We examine quantitatively why uniform vouchers have repeatedly suffered electoral defeats against the current system where public and private schools coexist. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not suficiently valuable for the poorer households to prefer the uniform vouchers to the current mix of public and private education. We then develop a model of publicly funded means-tested education vouchers where the voucher received by each household is a linearly decreasing function of income. Public policy, which is determined by majority voting, consists of two dimensions: the overall funding level (or the tax rate) and the slope of the means testing function. We solve the model when the political decisions are sequential-households vote first on the tax rate and then on the extent of means testing. We establish that a majority voting equilibrium exists. We show that the means-tested voucher regime is majority preferred to the status-quo. These results are robust to alternative preference parameters, income distribution parameters and voter turnout.

Who uses a means-tested scholarship, and what do they choose?

This paper provides detailed evidence regarding the nature of selection into a school voucher system. We use micro-data on scholarship applications matched with state student-level records on test scores, schools attended, and demographic background characteristics to describe the attributes of students who choose to participate in Florida's Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, a means-tested scholarship program that is the largest of its type in the United States. We find evidence that those who choose to participate in the program tend to be lower-performing students from poorly performing schools, and that students of different backgrounds tend to choose different types of private schools. Students participating in the program tend to select schools that have more white students and fewer minority students, regardless of student race.

Switching Social Contexts: The Effects of Housing Mobility and School Choice Programs on Youth Outcomes

Despite years of research, methodological and practical obstacles make it difficult to conclude whether policies aimed at improving schools and communities are effective for improving youth outcomes. To complement existing work, we assess research on the educational and social outcomes for comparable youth who change school and neighborhood settings through unique housing policy and school voucher programs. Research shows that housing programs have helped poor families move to much safer, less disadvantaged, and less segregated neighborhoods. Some housing programs have also provided early educational benefits for young people who relocated to less poor and less segregated neighborhoods, but these gains were not maintained in the long run. School voucher programs have helped disadvantaged youth attend higher-performing private schools in less segregated environments with more middle-class peers. Although some voucher programs have shown small positive effects, the results of others are less certain owing to methodological weaknesses. Future research should directly examine families’ selection processes and be cautious with quantitative research that uses naturally occurring variation to model the effects of potential social programs. Researchers should also recognize the family processes that interact with social policy to determine how youth development can be improved, alongside the structural and political processes that condition how programs work at a larger scale.

Do Vouchers Lead to Sorting Under Random Private-School Selection? Evidence from the Milwaukee Voucher Program

This paper analyzes the effect of school vouchers on student sorting — defined as a flight to private schools by high-income and committed public-school students — and whether vouchers can be designed to reduce or eliminate it. Much of the existing literature investigates sorting in cases where private schools can screen students. However, publicly funded U.S. voucher programs require a private school to accept all students unless it is oversubscribed and to pick students randomly if it is oversubscribed. This paper focuses on two crucial requirements of the Milwaukee voucher program: 1) private schools must select students randomly and 2) private schools must accept the voucher amount as full tuition payment (that is, 'topping up' of vouchers is not permitted). Using a theoretical model, this study argues that random selection alone cannot prevent student sorting. However, random selection together with the absence of topping up can preclude sorting by income, although there is still sorting by ability. Sorting by ability is not caused here by private-school selection, but rather by parental self-selection. Using a logit model and student-level data from the first five years of the Milwaukee voucher program, 1990-94, this study establishes that random selection has indeed taken place, providing an appropriate setting for testing the corresponding theoretical predictions in the data. Next, using several alternative logit specifications, it demonstrates that these predications are validated empirically. These findings appear to have important policy implications.

Vouchers, tests, loans, privatization: Will they help tackle corruption in Russian higher education?

Higher education in Russia is currently being reformed. A standardized computer-graded test and educational vouchers were introduced to make higher education more accessible, fund it more effectively, and reduce corruption in admissions to public colleges. The voucher project failed and the test faces furious opposition. This paper considers vouchers, standardized tests, educational loans, and privatization as related to educational corruption. Many criticize the test for increasing educational corruption, but it is needed to replace the outdated admissions policy based on entry examinations. This paper also considers the growing de facto privatization of the nation’s higher education system as a fundamental process that should be legalized and formalized. It suggests that the higher education industry should be further restructured, and decentralized and privatized, and sees educational loans as a necessary part of the future system of educational funding.

The Jurisprudence of the Christian Right: Teachings from Regent and Liberty University Law Schools

No issue is more hotly contested in the culture wars than the proper place of religion in public life. On the one side are those who insist that religion is a purely private matter with no place in government. In contrast are those who hold that government should adhere to religious principles and that certain religiously grounded imperatives are so necessary to the human condition that they should be binding on everyone. Prominent among the latter forces is the Christian right. Right wing Christian lawyers are deeply engaged in the most divisive church-state controversies and issues confronting American society today, including abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in the schools, vouchers for private schools, and religious displays in civic places. The legal branch of the religious right is an especially interesting expression because it labors under certain constraints that do not apply to the others. Because its schools seek to train lawyers for successful practice and seek accreditation from the American Bar Association, they must develop and present their views in carefully reasoned ways that meet the standards for legitimate legal training. Because its lawyers aim to prevail in negotiation and litigation, they must frame their arguments in ways that are persuasive in the highly structured and decidedly secular atmosphere of the courts. Hence if one wishes to find the most sober and rational positions emanating from the religious right on the issues that rend society today, one can do no better than to look to its legal wing.

Financing lifelong learning

This paper describes and analyzes different financial schemes to promote lifelong learning. Considered are financial instruments to stimulate successful early learning, financial aid schemes and subsidization mechanisms. Theoretical analyses about funding of early learning have mainly focused on vouchers. Yet, the available empirical evidence is more ambiguous about the effects of vouchers than about the effects of conditional cash transfers and financial incentives for pupils and teachers. Positive effects of financial incentives to pupils are not restricted to high ability pupils, as low ability students also seem to benefit. The evidence regarding the effects of subsidy forms is limited. The most prominent knowledge gaps regarding the effects of various financing schemes related to lifelong learning are the effects of vouchers in compulsory education; financial aid schemes for students; and entitlements and individual learning accounts.

Vouchers, Tests, Loans, Privatization: Will They Help (Fight) Higher Education Corruption in Russia?

Russian higher education is in the process of reforming. Introduction of the standardized computer-graded test and educational vouchers was intended to increase accessibility of higher education, make its funding more effective, and reduce corruption in admissions to public colleges. The idea of vouchers failed while the test faces furious opposition and crises. This paper considers vouchers, standardized tests, educational loans, and privatization as related to educational corruption. The test is criticized by many for being a cause of the further increase in educational corruption. However, the test is needed to replace the outdated admissions policy based on the entry examinations. This paper considers the growing de facto privatization of the nation’s higher education as a fundamental process that should be legalized and formalized. It suggests further restructuring of the higher education industry, its decentralization and privatization, and sees educational loans as a necessary part of the future system of educational funding.