The Potential Impact of Vouchers

Abstract

This article provides an updated review of recent empirical research on the potential impact of private school vouchers. It addresses 3 questions: (a) do students that use vouchers to attend a private school obtain better outcomes than would be obtained in a public school? (b) Do vouchers encourage student sorting and how does sorting affect student outcomes? (c) Does the offer of vouchers promote competition, improving outcomes of students who remain in public schools? Conclusions are that African American students who are offered vouchers experience small achievement gains. The results are highly sensitive to analytical assumptions and are not evident for other racial or ethnic groups. The evidence further indicates that large-scale voucher plans encourage sorting that could lower the achievement of public school students. There is no compelling evidence that such losses are outweighed by competitive gains in public schools. The conclusions on sorting and competition are most applicable to unrestricted choice plans in which flat-rate vouchers are offered to a large number of students with few eligibility restrictions. Some emerging evidence indicates that alternate approaches to policy design could yield more promising results.Vouchers are tuition coupons that parents can redeem at schools of choice. They are rarely used in the United States, with publicly funded 57

Rhetoric Versus Reality: What We Know and What We Need to Know About Vouchers and Charter Schools

“…Several of the studies examining student performance in charter schools also looked at the systemic effects of charter schools on stu-______________ 122 McEwan and Carnoy, 1999. 123 McEwan, 2004. 124 Bjorklund et al, 2005. dent performance in public schools. 125 Eric Bettinger's study of academic achievement in Michigan charter schools examined the effects of charter schools on nearby public schools.…”

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature

“…For the purposes of this review, we define a voucher to be a government-supplied coupon that is used to offset tuition at an eligible private school. 1 Programs that distribute such vouchers exhibit variation in dimensions including 1 For other reviews and discussions see Ladd (2002), Neal (2002), McEwan (2004), Gill et al (2007), Levin (2008), and Rouse and Barrow (2009 who is eligible to receive them, their source of funding, and the criteria for private-school participation. For example, vouchers are frequently "targeted" to low-income students, are sometimes funded privately rather than through tax proceeds, and religious schools may or may not be eligible to participate.…”

What Have We Learned About Homeschooling?

“…Administrative data allows researchers to analyze charter schools (Hill, Angel, & Christensen 2006). Similarly, the relatively few voucher programs in the United States have received scrutiny (McEwan, 2004). There has been extensive research on the effect of private schooling on outcomes by using panel data such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, High School and Beyond, or National Education Longitudinal Study (Neal, 1998(Neal, , 2000.…”