In light of the prodigious amounts of smoke produced lately on the subject of vouchers by Jay Greene and his comrades in the United Cherry Pickers [see here and here], it is perhaps a sign of the “mandate of heaven” that Henry Levin’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University today published a paper by Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrows, Do Education Vouchers Improve Student Learning and Public School Achievement? It will be published in the Annual Review of Economics in January 2009.
Here is the NCSPE description of the paper:
In academia and in the popular press, education voucher programs, in which families are allocated public dollars to spend on an approved public or private school of their choosing, are one of the most radical and controversial school reforms to date. Some of the key claims made by voucher advocates are that vouchers will improve student achievement, and that the threat of students using vouchers to attend private schools will spur improvement in traditional public schools. Empirical evidence validating or refuting these claims varies by the voucher program analyzed and the methods used in such analyses. Given the large body of literature on this topic, a reasonable question to ask is what general conclusions can be drawn from a thorough review of evidence about the impact of vouchers on student achievement and system-wide performance?
Cecelia Elana Rouse and Lisa Barrow answer this question in a comprehensive review of all the evaluations done on education voucher schemes in the United States. Their meta-analysis arrives at the following major conclusions. First, the achievement gains of voucher recipients tend to be small and many of these reported gains are not statistically significant. African American students appear to benefit from vouchers in some studies, but not in others using different methods of analysis. Second, achievement in traditional public schools does appear to improve as a result of the competitive pressure exerted by vouchers, but again the gains are small and difficult to compare due to widely varying methodologies. Third, the authors’ review of some of the more prominent evaluations of other types of school choice, most notably charter schools, reveals similar conclusions. While it is certainly worth investigating the long-term voucher effects on outcomes — such as future earnings, graduations rates and college enrollment — this paper illustrates that while vouchers show slight evidence of positive impact on student achievement and public school performance, the magnitude of these effects is considerably less substantial and consistent than proponents had anticipated.
