The Potential Impact of Vouchers

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.     

The impact of school choice and public policy on segregation: Evidence from Chile

Advocates argue that vouchers can make improved educational opportunity available to disadvantaged students. Critics contend that vouchers increase the risk of stratification. Researchers have found that Chile's voucher program has lead to increased socioeconomic school segregation. What has been overlooked, however, is segregation between schools within a sector and variation within private for-profit and non-profit school sectors. I find that public schools are more likely to serve disadvantaged students than private voucher schools. I also find that disadvantaged students are more segregated among private voucher schools than among public schools. While between and within sector segregation levels vary across private voucher school types, the differences are not always consistent with theory. The data also suggest that policies can either mitigate or exacerbate the stratifying effects of educational vouchers.     

Market Forces and Strategic Adaptation: The Influence of Private Scholarships on Planning in Urban School Systems

While the current debate about the effects of vouchers focuses on the effects of private schools on achievement, it is also important to examine how the introduction of need-based scholarships influences change in school systems. This study uses a qualitative method to examine the influence of a privately funded scholarship program on strategic adaptations within urban public and private schools in a major metropolitan area. The study revealed that senior administrators in public and private schools rapidly adapted their strategies to contend with the new program: suburban public schools prevented scholarship students from enrolling; urban public schools increased choices for public school students; and private schools actively recruited students. However, the scholarships had little influence on the ways these administrators viewed school choice.     

Educational choice (vouchers) and social mobility

A quantitative approach to study the impact of vouchers is thought to yield more meaningful results than theoretical arguments. This paper makes use of a model of the behavior of young people and schools to simulate the effects of vouchers of varying sizes on students in different income categories, living in three communities — poor, average and wealthy — under two assumptions about how public schools spend their resources. The first assumption is that public schools minimize their offerings to individual students (i.e. maximize their surplus) in order to further objectives not valued by students. The second assumption is that public schools act as competitive firms, maximizing their educational offerings to individual students.Findings from the simulation are neither uniformly positive nor negative. They do not support the argument that poor young people will be better off with a voucher system. Even in the most favorable case — when public schools maximize surplus — a systemic choice system would not come close to equalizing educational opportunity across income groups.     

教育券：教育领域的双赢政策——美国教育券实例分析

义务教育阶段公立学校的教育质量一直是包括美国在内的许多国家的问题，美国实施教育券改革带来的外部竞争促使公立学校进行改革，同时也发展了私立学校，是教育领域的双赢政策。     

教育券能否改进学校效率的分析

教育券提升学校效率的前提是学校间能形成竞争,而学校间竞争形成则需要具备相应的条件。在教育实践中,学校竞争所需的一系列条件如学校的可选择性、教育发展的均衡性、服务的异质性、信息的可获性、完善的退出机制等要素并不完全具备。且上述要件作为一种必要条件,得到满足也并不意味着教育效率的必然提高。教育券诱发的过度竞争、精英化和成本失控反而会导致教育效率的降低。     

Fixing Special Education

The current system of educating disabled students provides financial incentives to schools to overidentify students as disabled and underserve those that are identified. The incentive to overidentify is caused by providing schools with additional funds as more students are placed in special education categories that are ambiguous to diagnose and require relatively low additional expenditures to address. The incentive to underserve is caused by high information and transaction costs imposed on parents using the legal process to obtain desired services. An efficient alternative to the current system is to offer disabled students vouchers worth the cost of their education in public schools with which they can attend a private school if they wish. This article considers empirical analyses of the relationship between financial incentives and overidentification as well as the potential benefits of vouchers for special education. It concludes that vouchers for special education are a promising idea for improving the quality of education for disabled students while constraining growth in special education enrollments.     

Privatization And Vouchers In Colombia And Chile

The voucher model of financing schooling is becoming increasingly common throughout Latin America, with at least 12 countries using vouchers or voucher-like schemes. The present study focuses on the voucher models of Colombia and Chile, which have the most extensive programs of this type and those of the longest standing in the region. Using empirical evidence, the author compares the two models along four evaluative dimensions: educational quality, segregation, choice and socialization. After weighing the successes and weaknesses of each system, he concludes that, among other characteristics, the most effective and equitable voucher model features: (a) a flexible interpretation of educational quality; (b) financial grants which target solely the poor; (c) vouchers which cover the entire cost of tuition; (d) open enrolment at participating schools; (e) the participation of both secular and religious private schools; (f) accessible and meaningful information to parents; and (g) strong systems of accountability.     

Privatization And Vouchers In Colombia And Chile

The voucher model of financing schooling is becoming increasingly common throughout Latin America, with at least 12 countries using vouchers or voucher-like schemes. The present study focuses on the voucher models of Colombia and Chile, which have the most extensive programs of this type and those of the longest standing in the region. Using empirical evidence, the author compares the two models along four evaluative dimensions: educational quality, segregation, choice and socialization. After weighing the successes and weaknesses of each system, he concludes that, among other characteristics, the most effective and equitable voucher model features: (a) a flexible interpretation of educational quality; (b) financial grants which target solely the poor; (c) vouchers which cover the entire cost of tuition; (d) open enrolment at participating schools; (e) the participation of both secular and religious private schools; (f) accessible and meaningful information to parents; and (g) strong systems of accountability.     

Do educational vouchers reduce inequality and inefficiency in education?

Policy debates around the topic of educational vouchers as an approach to improve the public educational system are still ongoing and a consensus on the potential benefits or drawbacks has not been reached yet. This paper models the distributional processes entailed by two alternative educational voucher systems, universal and target vouchers, by using an agent-based model of a highly heterogeneous school district. Using this approach allows to track which students actually switch schools and thereby evaluate peer effects. At the same it is possible to model an endogenous reaction of public schools in order to assess their reaction to increased competition. The results indicate an ambiguous effect of universal vouchers on low-income students. The introduction has a negative peer effect on students in low-performing schools due to “cream skimming”, i.e. highly motivated students leaving the schools. In contrast, students who switch to better schools observe a positive effect. The negative effects are partly alleviated by low- performing schools improving their educational services as a response to a decline in enrollment. When examining target vouchers which are a function of student ability, the paper shows that they allow the school district to benefit from the increased competition while avoiding the deterioration of the peer group.     

Socio-economic Segregation with (without) Competitive Education Policies. A Comparative Analysis of Argentina and Chile

Within the differentiated forms of education provision, this paper intends to inquire into the causality governing the relation between the use of vouchers in education and an increased enrolment segmentation or student sorting. It does so through a comparative analysis of the quasi-market reform in Chile and the quasi-monopoly system in place in Argentina. Although from a national perspective these two countries have faced very different decentralisation reforms, they have presently arrived at similar states of their education system in terms of their enrolments' socio-economic segregation. The paper shows that vouchers are not an independent variable but an intervening one within the determinants of socio-economic segmentation. The evidence from Chile and Argentina shows that enrolment segmentation is not a consequence of the introduction of vouchers, and the causal relationship between these two variables is not a clear one. That is, the family school choice decisions brought about by the introduction of systems such as vouchers appear endogenous to a series of factors that determine such choice; factors that that are evidently important in the determination of socio-economic enrolment segmentations in non-voucher systems. This article questions the validity of the highly predominant empirical analyses which take student socio-economic characteristics and school choice decisions as independent determinant variables of student results, and intends initiating further thinking of what really lies behind the inequities in education in developing countries.     

The Legality of School Vouchers

ABSTRACT

In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state-supported vouchers, which parents can redeem in private schools, do not offend the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Thus, the legality of government vouchers to fund education will be determined primarily on the basis of state law. Specifically, programs are being challenged under state constitutional provisions calling for the legislature to provide for a uniform system of education or provisions prohibiting the use of public funds in sectarian institutions. This article explores legal developments in this regard, with particular emphasis on implications of the recent state supreme court decisions striking down challenged voucher programs. Also addressed is current legislative activity, which will likely generate additional litigation pertaining to school vouchers. doi:10.1300/ J467v01n03_05     

School quality, clustering and government subsidy in post-apartheid South Africa

This paper examines a range of historical and geographic factors that determine the quality of public school education in post-apartheid South Africa. Empirical analysis shows, first, that population groups are still spatially segregated due to the legacy of apartheid, which implies that, given the positive correlation between school quality and school fees, quality education is concentrated in formerly white, coloured and Indian schools in areas where the majority is non-African. Second, school quality, measured by the learner-educator ratio, improves as school fee and government subsidy increase. In this sense, school fee can be decreased with an increase in government subsidy to maintain school quality. It is also shown that government subsidy is allocated to schools with lower quality and fees, increasing the number of subsidized teachers. To address the current imbalance, financial support to disadvantaged locales and schools should be strengthened further.     

Finding a Golden Mean in Education Policy: Centering Religious and Public Schools

The separation between Church and State, private and public education, is blurring, and coming together, as the government gives families vouchers to attend private and religious schools. Religious groups are starting and supporting their own charter schools, and local jurisdictions (cities and counties) are providing free transportation and food services to children attending private schools. What emerges, and is the focus of this analysis, is the new “middle ground,” a “golden mean,” by which public schools learn diversity and choice while private/religious schools are helped by public programs and funds. The oldest, perhaps, was Lyndon Johnson's compromise with the Catholics to get Title 1 passed as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that sends public school teachers into private schools to help children in need. This study examines the emergence of a middle group in public–private education, and how the policies are working and what's changing. It argues that the child is the center of education, and government and private agencies are changing and should come together to serve the clients, the children.     

The impact of a universal class-size reduction policy: Evidence from Florida's statewide mandate

Class-size reduction (CSR) mandates presuppose that resources provided to reduce class size will have a larger impact on student outcomes than resources that districts can spend as they see fit. I estimate the impact of Florida's statewide CSR policy by comparing the deviations from prior achievement trends in districts that were required to reduce class size to deviations from prior trends in districts that received equivalent resources but were not required to reduce class size. I use the same comparative interrupted time series design to compare schools that were differentially affected by the policy (in terms of whether they had to reduce class size) but that did not receive equal additional resources. The results from both the district- and school-level analyses indicate that mandated CSR in Florida had little, if any, effect on student achievement.     

Fertile Soil? How Information does (and does not) Shape Attitudes toward School Choice in Rural America

ABSTRACT

The role of political factors, specifically of public opinion, in the relatively low penetration of charter schools into rural America remains unclear. We use 8 years of national survey data to demonstrate that rural residents express less support for charter schools than residents of other locales do. We attribute this gap to differences in familiarity with charter schools across these locales rather than to differences in satisfaction with local schools or to differences in demographics, party affiliation, or political ideology. However, using a survey experiment and an oversample of districts with charter schools, we show that increased exposure to these schools or information about them does not boost support in rural communities. Lastly, we demonstrate a similar urban-rural gap in support for private school choice policies such as vouchers and tax credits for private school scholarships.     

How to improve pupils’ literacy? A cost-effectiveness analysis of a French educational project

The Action Lecture program is an innovative teaching method run in some nursery and primary schools in Paris and designed to improve pupils’ literacy. We report the results of an evaluation of this program. We describe the experimental protocol that was built to estimate the program's impact on several types of indicators. Data were processed following a Differences-in-Differences (DID) method. Then we use the estimation of the impact on academic achievement to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis and take a reduction of the class size program as a benchmark. The results are positive for the Action Lecture program.     

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.     

Twice considered: Charter schools and student achievement in Utah

A relatively small state, Utah presents an interesting case to study charter schools given its friendly policy environment and its significant growth in charter school enrollment. Based on longitudinal student-level data from 2004 to 2009, this paper utilizes two approaches to evaluate the Utah charter school effectiveness: (a) hierarchical linear growth models with matched sample, and (b) general methods of moments with student-fixed effects regressions. Both methods yield consistent results that charter schools on average perform slightly worse as compared to traditional public schools, a result that is primarily affected by the low effectiveness and high student mobility of newly opened charter schools. Interestingly, when charter schools gain more experience they become as effective as traditional public schools, and in some cases more effective than traditional public schools. This research has implications for local and state charter school policies, particularly policies that avoid “start-up” costs associated with new charter schools.     

Private schooling for low-income families: A census and comparative survey in East Delhi,India

A census and survey of schools in the slums of East Delhi, India, explored the nature and extent of private education serving low-income families, and compared inputs to public and private schooling. Around two-thirds of all schools were private unaided, with more unrecognised private than government schools. Teaching activity was found to be considerably higher in private unaided than government schools, although teacher absenteeism was lowest in government schools. Most inputs showed either comparable levels of provision in government and private unaided schools, or superiority in private unaided schools. Possible implications are explored, concerning targeted vouchers, increased regulation and self-regulation.