An Analysis of the Effects of North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Program on Student Achievement

Abstract

The North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program is a private school voucher program that provides state-funded vouchers worth up to $4,200 to eligible students entering kindergarten through 12th grade. Because the public and private school sectors administer different assessments, we recruited approximately 700 students to take a common, nationally normed, standardized test. Matching on baseline achievement and rich demographic data, we use a quasi-experimental inverse propensity weighting approach to maximize comparability between the public and private school student samples. Our preferred specification examines first-year effects for new Opportunity Scholarship students, revealing positive estimates of .36 SD in math and .44 SD in language; there is no effect on reading scores. Results for renewal students are statistically significant in language scores only. In further analyses, we estimate separate effects for private schools that regularly administer another version of the assessment used in this study, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. We conclude by discussing policy implications.

The excellence scholarships program: Analysis of implementation aspects and societal impact

“…Moreover, scholarships are also an external factor in education because they relate to socio-economic aspects (Abima Adi & Arief, 2016;Özoğlu, Gür, & Coşkun, 2015). Jayen, 2018) states that scholarships are one of the factors that dominate the influence of student achievement (Egalite, Stallings, & Porter, 2020;Hapsari et al, 2018).…”

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

“…Quasi-experimental evaluations of private school voucher programs report findings that tend to be less positive and more varied than those from experiments. The QE effects of vouchers on achievement outcomes range from large positive effects in North Carolina (Egalite et al, 2020) to null effects in Milwaukee (Witte, 2000) and Cleveland (Metcalf et al, 2003) to negative effects in the states of Indiana (Waddington & Berends, 2018) and Ohio (Figlio & Karbownik, 2016). Since none of these evaluations employed the same QE approach, and their results vary among themselves and with the findings from the experimental evaluations, it is important to assess whether the QE evaluations of private school vouchers tend to lack internal validity or whether the experimental evaluations of vouchers tend to lack external validity.…”

School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

“…As one component of our decomposition, we also measure, albeit imperfectly, the role of private school enrolment, a role that has not been explored in studies that rely entirely on data for public schools. 4 Given the fact that many private schools served as a way for White students to avoid racial integration in earlier periods of court enforced segregation, it seems useful to understand their contribution to racial segregation in the period of color-blind jurisprudence and, in recent years, after the introduction of NC Opportunity Scholarship for low-income students in 2013 (Egalite, Stallings, and Porter 2020).…”