The confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of
education was a signal moment for the school choice movement. For the
first time, the nation’s highest education official is someone fully
committed to making school vouchers and other market-oriented policies
the centerpiece of education reform.
But even as
school choice is poised to go national, a wave of new research has
emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who
receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of
the field, researchers say.
While many policy ideas have murky origins, vouchers emerged fully formed from a single, brilliant
essay published in 1955 by Milton Friedman, the free-market godfather later to be awarded a
Nobel Prize.
Because “a stable and democratic society is impossible without
widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum
degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens,” Mr.
Friedman wrote, the government should pay for all children to go to
school.
But, he argued, that doesn’t mean the government should run all
the schools. Instead, it could give parents vouchers to pay for
“approved educational services” provided by private schools, with the
government’s role limited to “ensuring that the schools met certain
minimum standards.”
The voucher idea sat dormant
for years before taking root in a few places, most notably Milwaukee.
Yet even as many of Mr. Friedman’s other ideas became Republican Party
orthodoxy, most national G.O.P. leaders committed themselves to a
different theory of educational improvement: standards, testing and
accountability. That movement reached an apex when the
No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001 brought a new focus on tests and standards to nearly every
public school nationwide. The law left voucher supporters with crumbs: a
small demonstration project in Washington, D.C.
But
broad political support for No Child Left Behind proved short-lived.
Teachers unions opposed the reforms from the left, while libertarians
and states-rights conservatives denounced it from the right. When
Republicans took control of more governor’s mansions and state
legislatures in the 2000s, they expanded vouchers to an unprecedented
degree. Three of the largest programs sprang up in Indiana, Louisiana
and Ohio, which collectively enroll more than a third of the 178,000
voucher students nationwide.
Most of the new
programs heeded Mr. Friedman’s original call for the government to
enforce “minimum standards” by requiring private schools that accept
vouchers to administer standardized state tests. Researchers have used
this data to compare voucher students with similar children who took the
same tests in public school. Many of the results were released over the
last 18 months, while Donald J. Trump was advocating school choice on
the campaign trail.
The
first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana
voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of
students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,”
they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools
experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no
improvement in reading.
The next results came a few months later, in February, when researchers published a
major study
of Louisiana’s voucher program. Students in the program were
predominantly black and from low-income families, and they came from
public schools that had received poor ratings from the state department
of education, based on test scores. For private schools receiving more
applicants than they could enroll, the law required that they admit
students via lottery, which allowed the researchers to compare lottery
winners with those who stayed in public school.
They
found large negative results in both reading and math. Public
elementary school students who started at the 50th percentile in math
and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school dropped to the
26th percentile in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the
second year, but were still well below the starting point.
This
is very unusual. When people try to improve education, sometimes they
succeed and sometimes they fail. The successes usually register as
modest improvements, while the failures generally have no effect at all.
It’s rare to see efforts to improve test scores having the opposite
result. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana “as large as any I’ve
seen in the literature” — not just compared with other voucher studies,
but in the history of American education research.
There’s
always the chance that a single study, no matter how well designed, is
an outlier. Studies of older voucher programs in Milwaukee and elsewhere
have generally produced mixed results, sometimes finding modest
improvements in test scores, but only for some subjects and student
groups. Until about a year ago, however, few if any studies had shown
vouchers causing test scores to decline drastically.
In June, a third
voucher study
was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think
tank and proponent of school choice. The study, which was financed by
the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation, focused on a large voucher
program in Ohio. “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools
have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers
attending public schools,” the researchers found. Once again, results
were worse in math.
Three
consecutive reports, each studying one of the largest new state voucher
programs, found that vouchers hurt student learning. Researchers and
advocates began a spirited debate about what, exactly, was going on.
Mark Dynarski of the Brookings Institution
noted
that the performance gap between private and public school students had
narrowed significantly over time. He argued that the standards, testing
and accountability movement, for all its political shortcomings, was
effective. The assumed superiority of private schools may no longer
hold.
Some voucher supporters
observed
that many private schools in Louisiana chose not to accept voucher
students, and those that did had recently experienced declining
enrollment. Perhaps the participating schools were unusually bad and
eager for revenue. But this is another way of saying that exposing young
children to the vagaries of private-sector competition is inherently
risky. The free market often does a terrible job of providing basic
services to the poor — see, for instance, the lack of grocery stores and
banks in many low-income neighborhoods. This may also hold for
education.
Others have argued that standardized
test scores are the wrong measure of school success. It’s true that
voucher programs in Washington and some others elsewhere, which produced
no improvements in test scores, increased the likelihood of students’
advancement and graduation from high school. One study of a privately
financed voucher program in New York found positive results for college
attendance among African-Americans.
But
research
has also linked higher test scores to a host of positive outcomes later
in life. And voucher advocates often cite poor test scores in public
schools to justify creating private school vouchers in the first place.
The new voucher studies stand in marked contrast to research findings that well-regulated
charter schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere
have a strong, positive impact
on test scores. But while vouchers and charters are often grouped under
the umbrella of “school choice,” the best charters tend to be nonprofit
public schools, open to all and accountable to public authorities. The
less “private” that school choice programs are, the better they seem to
work.
The
new evidence on vouchers does not seem to have deterred the Trump
administration, which has proposed a new $20 billion voucher program.
Secretary DeVos’s enthusiasm for vouchers, which have been the primary
focus of her philanthropic spending and advocacy, appears to be
undiminished.
