Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

Rouse, Cecilia Elena

doi:10.1162/003355398555685

Cited by 472 publications

(285 citation statements)

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“…5 Lotteries were used by Rouse (1998) to study the impact of the Milwaukee voucher program. Angrist, Bettinger, Bloom, King, and Kremer (2002) also study the effects of vouchers when there is randomization in selection of recipients from the pool of applicants using data from Chile.…”

Section: Non-compliersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Education Programs That Have Lotteried Admission and Selective Attrition

Engberg

Epple

Imbrogno

et al. 2014

Journal of Labor Economics

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The purpose of this paper is to provide a new framework for evaluating education programs that ration excess demand by admission lotteries when selective attrition cannot be ignored. Differential attrition arises in these models because students that lose the lottery are more likely to pursue educational options outside the school district. When students leave the district, important outcome variables are often not observed. We provide conditions that allow us to identify the proportions of latent student types and, thereby, the extent of differential attrition. We provide estimators of the proportions of the these latent types and their characteristics. We apply our methods to study the effectiveness of magnet programs in a mid-sized urban school district. We show that the students that cause the differential attrition have very different observed characteristics than the other students. Selective attrition implies that treatment effects are not point identified. We discuss how to construct informative bounds when point identification is not feasible. Our findings show that magnet programs help the district to attract and retain students. The bound estimates also demonstrate that magnet programs offered by the district improve behavioral outcomes such as offenses, timeliness, and attendance.

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Section: Non-compliersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Education Programs That Have Lotteried Admission and Selective Attrition

Engberg

Epple

Imbrogno

et al. 2014

Journal of Labor Economics

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“…Thus, the effect of "eligibility" is the most important parameter to estimate for policy makers (Rouse, 1998;Katz, King, and Liebman, 2001;and Bettinger and Slonim, 2005). Fourth, the estimation of the effect of "eligibility" requires less restrictions than the estimation of the effect of "receiving the grain-subsidy".…”

Section: Evaluation Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Does a food for education program affect school outcomes? The Bangladesh case

Meng

Ryan

2009

J Popul Econ

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Does a Food for Education Program Affect School Outcomes? The Bangladesh CaseXin Meng Jim Ryan The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit company supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. The Food for Education (FFE) program was introduced to Bangladesh in 1993. This paper evaluates the effect of this program on school participation and duration of schooling using a household survey data collected in 2000, after 7 years of operation of the program. Using propensity score matching combined with difference-in-differences methodologies we estimate the average effect of FFE eligibility on the schooling outcomes. We found that the program is successful in that the eligible children on average have 15 to 27 per cent higher school participation rates, relative to their counterfactuals who were not but would have been eligible for the program. Conditional on school participation, participants also stay at school 0.7 to 1.05 years longer than their counterfactuals.JEL Classification: J38, I28

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“…It is also the largest urban voucher program, having grown from about 340 students enrolled in 7 schools in 1990 to more than 20,000 students enrolled in more than 100 schools during the 2010-2011 school year (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2012). Studies of the program in its early yearsbetween 1990 and 1995-uncovered either insignificant (Witte, 2000) or small positive effects on student achievement (Greene, Peterson, & Du, 1998;Lamarche, 2008;Rouse, 1998) (Witte, Carlson, Cowen, Fleming, & Wolf, 2011). However, the official evaluators discerned a small, positive effect of voucher usage on the likelihood of high school graduation and enrollment in 4-year colleges (Cowen, Fleming, Witte, Wolf, & Kisida, in press).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the effects of a voucher program are positive (e.g. Barnard, Frangakis, Hill, & Rubin, 2003;Howell, Peterson, Wolf, & Campbell, 2006;Rouse, 1998), the effects of exiting the program and returning to the public sector may be negative. On the other hand, if voucher impacts are largely neutral (e.g., Metcalf et al, 2003;Witte, 2000) or disproportionately realized by a marginally more advantaged group of students (e.g., Wolf, Kisida, Guttmann, Rizzo, & Eissa, 2011), and if low performers are those most likely to leave in the first place Howell, 2004), then perhaps students who give up a voucher are simply returning to a schooling environment that is simply a better academic fit.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Life After Vouchers

Carlson

Cowen

Fleming

2013

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

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Few school choice evaluations consider students who leave such programs, and fewer still consider the effects of leaving these programs as policy-relevant outcomes. Using a representative sample of students from the citywide voucher program inMilwaukee, Wisconsin, we analyze more than 1,000 students who leave the program during a 4-year period. We show that low-performing voucher students tend to move from the voucher sector into lower performing and less effective public schools than the typical public school student attends, whereas high-performing students transfer to better public schools. In general, transferring students realize substantial achievement gains after moving to the public sector; these results are robust to multiple analytical approaches. This evidence has important implications for school choice policy and research. Keywords: school vouchers, student achievement, program evaluation, attrition Student selection is one of the most controversial aspects of school choice policy. The literature has given prominent attention to the characteristics of students who select into various alternatives to traditional public schools (Betts & Fairlie, 2001;Bifulco & Ladd, 2007;Campbell, West, & Peterson, 2005;Fairlie & Resch, 2002;Figlio, 2008;Figlio, Hart, & Metzger, 2010;Figlio & Stone, 2001;Goldring & Phillips, 2008;Howell, 2004;Lankford & Wyckoff, 2001;Long & Toma, 1988). Accounting for systematic student selection processes is critical for obtaining internally valid estimates of the effect of school choice programs on educational outcomes. Even when threats to internal validity appear minimal, differences between the students who select into a school choice program and the larger population of school children may limit the extent to which estimated effects can provide an externally valid guide to policymakers looking to replicate or expand the program at hand.Despite the attention devoted to student selection into various choice programs, there have been few studies explicitly concerned with students who select out of such programs. Even in an educational environment with several schooling options, some students will undoubtedly elect to remain in, or return to, the traditional public sector for a variety of possible reasons. Earlier studies by Cowen, Fleming, Witte, & Wolf (2012) and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis June 2013, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 179-199 DOI: 10.3102/0162373712461852 © 2013 AERA. http://eepa.aera.net at UNIV OF OKLAHOMA on January 20, 2016 http://eepa.aera.net Downloaded from 180Carlson et al. Howell (2004) have analyzed the characteristics of individuals who leave voucher programs and return to the traditional public sector, but to our knowledge, there has been no research that systematically considers the academic careers of former choice students after they have enrolled or reenrolled in public schools. 1It is toward this understanding that we are focused in the current article. Drawing on data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) and Milwaukee Publi...

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Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

Cited by 472 publications

References 23 publications

Evaluating Education Programs That Have Lotteried Admission and Selective Attrition

Evaluating Education Programs That Have Lotteried Admission and Selective Attrition

Does a food for education program affect school outcomes? The Bangladesh case

Life After Vouchers

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