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Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 92
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This case study uses data from a school district with a voucher plan that has been in place since 1990 to determine if increased competition resulted in improved student performance.
Author: Martin Carnoy
Publisher:
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 72
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study reviews recent empirical research on the effect of school vouchers on student achievement (particularly for low-income minorities attending private schools) and the effect of the threat of vouchers on low-performing public schools. The study examines the Milwaukee voucher experiment, the Cleveland voucher program, and new voucher research. Research on the voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee indicate that for African American students these programs have little or no positive effect on their academic achievement. Research from Dayton, Ohio, New York, New York, and Washington, D.C. shows no significant test score gains for Hispanic and White voucher students but statistically significant gains for African American students. However, several methodological issues make these comparisons of achievement problematic. Findings that the threat of vouchers for students in failing public school caused math and writing gains among Florida's lowest-performing schools to increase significantly more than gains of higher-performing schools are plagued by methodological problems. Three papers are appended: "What Caused the Effects of the Florida A+ Program: Ratings or Vouchers?" (Doug Harris); "Replication of Jay Greene's Voucher Effect Study Using Texas Performance Data" (Amanda Brownson); and "Replication of Jay Greene's Voucher Effect Study Using North Carolina Data" (Helen F. Ladd and Elizabeth J. Glennie). (Contains 33 endnotes and 29 references.) (SM)
Author: Alex Molnar
Publisher: Phi Delta Kappa International
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 84
ISBN-13: 9780873678292
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-07
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 022608907X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.
Author: Jay P. Greene
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 20
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study evaluates the initial effect of Washington, D.C.'s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) on the academic performance of public schools and its effects on the opportunities that District students have to attend integrated schools. The OSP is a federally sponsored school voucher program that provides vouchers worth up to $7,500 for an estimated 1,800 to 2,000 students in the District of Columbia. Students can use the scholarships to pay tuition at participating private schools in the District. The pilot program is designed to last for five years. The authors measure whether a public school's test-score gains are related to its distance to the nearest voucher-accepting private school or the number of voucher schools within a one-mile radius of a public school. In theory, public schools with shorter distances to private schools or that have more private schools nearby should face greater competition from the voucher program than public schools with fewer educational alternatives. The evaluation finds that the OSP has had no academic effect, positive or negative, on the District's public schools after its first year. This finding is different from those of most other studies, which tend to indicate that school choice programs have helped to improve public school performance. The authors argue that a null finding could be explained by the fact that the OSP was designed to have a minimal financial impact on public schools. They also suggest that the null finding could be explained by the small size of the program, the short time span in which it has operated (one year), methodological considerations, or a true lack of a relationship between vouchers and academic performance in Washington, D.C. The paper also compares rates of racial integration in D.C.'s public schools and private schools participating in the voucher program. The authors find that voucher-accepting private schools have populations whose racial demographics more accurately mirror those of the surrounding metropolitan region than do public schools in the District. The study also finds that students using an Opportunity Scholarship are less likely to be enrolled in a school that is 90% or 95% racially homogeneous than are students attending Washington, D.C., public schools. This finding, combined with a previous evaluation indicating that the vast majority of students participating in the OSP are African American, suggests that the OSP will likely lead to students leaving more segregated public schools for better-integrated private schools. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure and 14 notes.).
Author: Anna Margaret Jacob
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781321058772
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This dissertation examines the systemic effects of private school choice in the context of two statewide, means-tested school voucher programs---the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program (ICSP) and the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP). Specifically, I examine public school responses to private school competition from the ICSP and the LSP and the direct impacts of the LSP on racial stratification in public and private schools. In Louisiana, I show that the lowest-graded public schools had a modest, statistically significant, positive response to the injection of competition, with impacts ranging from .001 to .06 SD. In Indiana, the evidence is slightly weaker. In math, none of the four competition measures are significantly related to school-average performance whereas in English Language Arts, three out of eight results provide evidence of a statistically significant, positive competitive effect. Depending on the radius selected, a one-unit increase in the concentration measure (a modified Herfindahl Index) is associated with a .04 to .05 SD increase in school-average ELA achievement. Regarding racial stratification in Louisiana's schools, I show that LSP transfers reduce racial stratification in the voucher students' former public schools, but marginally increase racial stratification in the private schools. Specifically, 82% of all student transfers reduce racial stratification in the traditional public schools, compared to 45% in private schools. Overall, the articles presented in this dissertation demonstrate that private school choice programs have null to modest positive impacts on the students who remain in public schools. Given that traditional public schools are and will continue to be the primary provider of educational services in K-12, this is good news for public school students in states with expanding private school choice programs.
Author: William G. Howell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2006-02-14
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 9780815736868
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The voucher debate has been both intense and ideologically polarizing, in good part because so little is known about how voucher programs operate in practice. In The Education Gap, William Howell and Paul Peterson report new findings drawn from the most comprehensive study on vouchers conducted to date. Added to the paperback edition of this groundbreaking volume are the authors' insights into the latest school choice developments in American education, including new voucher initiatives, charter school expansion, and public-school choice under No Child Left Behind. The authors review the significance of state and federal court decisions as well as recent scholarly debates over choice impacts on student performance. In addition, the authors present new findings on which parents choose private schools and the consequences the decision has for their children's education. Updated and expanded, The Education Gap remains an indispensable source of original research on school vouchers. "This is the most important book ever written on the subject of vouchers."—John E. Brandl, dean, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota "The Education Gap will provide an important intellectual battleground for the debate over vouchers for years to come."—Alan B. Krueger, Princeton University "Must reading for anyone interested in the battle over vouchers in America."—John Witte, University of Wisconsin
Author: William G. Howell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2006-02-14
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780815736868
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The voucher debate has been both intense and ideologically polarizing, in good part because so little is known about how voucher programs operate in practice. In The Education Gap, William Howell and Paul Peterson report new findings drawn from the most comprehensive study on vouchers conducted to date. Added to the paperback edition of this groundbreaking volume are the authors' insights into the latest school choice developments in American education, including new voucher initiatives, charter school expansion, and public-school choice under No Child Left Behind. The authors review the significance of state and federal court decisions as well as recent scholarly debates over choice impacts on student performance. In addition, the authors present new findings on which parents choose private schools and the consequences the decision has for their children's education. Updated and expanded, The Education Gap remains an indispensable source of original research on school vouchers. "This is the most important book ever written on the subject of vouchers."—John E. Brandl, dean, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota "The Education Gap will provide an important intellectual battleground for the debate over vouchers for years to come."—Alan B. Krueger, Princeton University "Must reading for anyone interested in the battle over vouchers in America."—John Witte, University of Wisconsin
Author: Willie J. Newton
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Published: 2011-03
Total Pages: 52
ISBN-13: 1599423898
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study examines the results of multiple evaluations of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program (CTSP), a state-funded voucher program, by exploring extant evaluations and literature. Attention will be given to the following research question: Does participation in the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program have the hypothesized positive effect on traditional public school students' academic achievement? Cleveland's voucher program provides an ideal contextualized setting for ascertaining the extent to which school choice programs afford poor families the same educational options available to affluent families. This study concludes that overall there are no statistically significant gains in voucher students' academic achievement. In fact, it appears that some voucher students performed slightly worse in math. The program does, however, afford low-income students the opportunity to attend private secular or religious schools in accordance with the program's initial design and intent.
Author: David W. Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The educational reform movement produced only incremental improvements in student achievement, prompting a need for greater focus on structural and cultural aspects of school organization. Parental choice is the necessary element for successful school reform in the future. The public educational system that has evolved in America is widely perceived to be a failure: Efforts to assist low-income families and students have largely failed, and academic performance has not benefitted from present priorities. An examination of the history of public schooling and various alternatives, the consequences of court decisions regarding public and private schooling, and the results of multiple surveys suggests that a school voucher system would foster decentralization and accountability, extend opportunities to low-income families, and give parents a reason to support continued funding of education. These conclusions are supported by the few pilot projects that have been attempted, such as in the Alum Rock School District in California. Attempts to implement voucher systems will likely be opposed by vested interests, including teacher's unions, school boards, and state and federal bureaucracies. Because of growing social unrest, dissatisfaction with the present system, and the trend toward privatization of government functions, the movement toward educational choice, with or without vouchers, seems to be building momentum. (TEJ)
