Matt Yglesias discusses the results after three years of the DC Voucher program:
-After 3 years, there was a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores, but not math test scores.– The OSP improved reading achievement for 5 of the 10 subgroups examined.
That’s not nothing, so I’d be all for moving forward with it. But given that the baseline is what’s probably the worst-performing big city public school system in the country the results are actually kind of meager.
So the results at this point suggest very modest gains as a result of vouchers. I am assuming this study controlled for a great many things to make it valid. What I am wondering if we are expecting too much of vouchers. Were we really expecting that they would be a cure-all? That by themselves they would create the results we seek? If so, I think it was a policy doomed to fail.
I think the proper way to sell vouchers is that additional choice (efficacy) is a benefit of its own, and that we might expect modest benefits. That even in the first two years you saw a dramatic increase in parental satisfaction with their kids’ schools without performance increases speaks to this improvement of efficacy. On performance, simply not being worse would allow for a successful policy (because the benefit of the first goal is not offset by costs). Whether because of school-based improvements due to better fit, or because of greater parental involvement due to the choice mechanism, it does seem that vouchers improve performance, if only slightly.
At the end of the day, the reason not to expect vouchers to have much effect on performance is because no school reforms should really be expected to have much effect. The main determinants of performance lie outside the school. They involve parental education levels and their involvement in their own child’s education (reading to them, etc)…this is largely a question of poverty, allowing the parents to make enough with one job that they have time to spend with their kids. A second aspect is one of the quantity and quality of teachers, which subsequently has to do with school budgets (teacher pay, number of slots/classroom size) but also has a lot to do with regulations of the teaching profession.
There is a lot of work to be done to reform our education system (P-16), but it seems that vouchers have gotten far too much ridicule. They offer modest relative benefits over exclusive alternatives. It really shouldn’t be so controversial if bundled with modest regulation of curriculum.
