Voucher Use in Washington Wins No Praise from Students

The title of this entry is a wordplay off Cato’s Adam Schaeffer's latest post, where he criticizes the NY Times and Washington Post coverage of the recent DC voucher program study, arguing the media outlets made too much of the report’s conclusion that voucher students fared no better than public school counterparts in the first year of the DC program, while downplaying the news that parents of voucher recipients were happier with schools than a control group. In calling the parental support a “wild success,” Schaeffer misses a key aspect of the analysis.

Compared to a control group, parents of students enrolled in the voucher program gave higher grades to their child’s school and believed the school had less violence. James Forman Jr. argues that parental satisfaction, if it matters in voucher program success, should be factored in public school accountability. Still, to hold up parental support as evidence of success here is pretty superficial, especially when we consider who made up the control group in the study. The authorizing legislation mandated the “strongest possible research design for determining the effectiveness of the program,” so the Institute of Education Sciences adopted a lottery system for the program, so that the results of the voucher recipients could be compared to the results of non-recipients, while controlling for motivation and other factors. The control group consisted of students who applied but were rejected for the vouchers. This makes for a valid comparison for student achievement, but not necessarily for parental happiness. All of the parents wanted their child educated outside of the DC public schools; it only makes sense that the ones who achieved this goal were happier than the ones who didn’t, especially after only one year.

Moreover, who is the best judge of violence and overall school quality—parents, or the students themselves? On violence, students reported no statistically significant difference between public and private schools. In other words, the people who actually witness and experience violence, the students themselves, reported no increases in seeing weapons; being offered drugs; or being victims of theft, physical assault, or bullying. On school quality, the only sub-group who noticed a difference was the lowest performing students. They rated private schools worse, not better, than traditional public schools.

Honestly, there’s not really that much to be excited about here one way or the other. The voucher law passed, it’s being implemented and studied, and one year’s worth of data probably isn’t enough time delay to evaluate its effectiveness. While I’m a little less optimistic about the program than Schaeffer (who makes the mighty claim that, “all scientific assessments of choice programs show positive gains, and nearly all of those studies show statistically significant gains”), I’ll wait for more evidence before jumping ship or onto the bandwagon.