Education Improvements Due To Vouchers

A series of scholarly papers has shown that students who take a voucher and switch to a private school do better academically than if they had remained in public schools.

A recent paper from Harvard University entitled "Test-Score Effects of School Vouchers in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, and Washington, D. C.: Evidence from Randomized Field Trials" (by William G. Howell, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Patrick J. Wolf, Assistant Professor, Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University and Guest Scholar, The Brookings Institution, Paul E. Peterson, Director, Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and David E. Campbell, Research Associate, Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University) examined the test scores of students who participated in private voucher programs in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, and Washington, D. C. After one year, African American students who took a voucher and switched from public school to private school scored 3.3 percetile points higher than their control group. and, after two years, they scored 6.3 percentile points higher than the control group. The two years difference was statistically significant. However, the report did not find a statistically significant effect, either positive or negative, on students from other ethnic groups who switched from public to private schools. The 6.3 percentile point difference is a "moderately large effect" and is approximately equal to one-third of the difference between black and white test scores.

A 1997 Harvard University report on the Milwaukee voucher program showed similar results. That report, entitled "Effectiveness of School Choice: The Milwaukee Experiment" (by Jay P. Greene, Center for Public Policy University of Houston, Paul E. Peterson, Program on Education Policy and Governance, John F. Kennedy School of Government and Department of Government, Harvard University, and Jiangtao Du Department of Statistics, Harvard University) compared the standarzized test scores of children who were randomly selected for the voucher program with a control group of other children who applied and qualified but were not randomly selected. The report noted that in math, there was no significant difference during the first two years. However, voucher students scored 5 percentile points higher than the control group after three years and 10.7 points higher after four years. Similarly, in reading, the voucher children scored 2 to 3 percentile points higher for the first three years and 5.8 percentile points higher in the fourth year. These results are all statistically significant. Voucher students did better than their counterparts in both math and reading, and this gap increased over time. The following tables (showing the raw data, not the percentile improvements) from the report shows these results:

               *=p < .10 in one tail t test

               **=p < .05 in one tail t test

In short, vouchers work. Students who use the vouchers learn more and get a better education than they would have if vouchers had not been available, and this effect appears to increase over time.

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