Why we need to consider variation among voucher schools, by Megan Austin

School vouchers are currently one of the most controversial educational policies and are hotly debated among politicians, practitioners, and researchers. Largely missing from both the debate and research on voucher effectiveness, however, are the schools that voucher students actually attend.  Given that the role of schools is so central to the logic of vouchers, their omission from dialogue and research leaves a substantial gap in our understanding of voucher programs. In order to resolve some of the mixed findings and make progress in answering the question of voucher effectiveness, we need to recognize and study the variation among schools that accept voucher students.

Proponents of vouchers and other forms of choice argue that providing choice to students and their families opens up the education market to competition and innovation, improving the quality of education in all schools. Opponents argue that vouchers take funds and higher-achieving students away from public schools and divert them into private schools, undermining the quality of public education. These high-level debates about the role of public and private schooling in the United States raise important points about the long-term impact of choice on school quality. However, voucher proponents also embrace the premise that in the short term, allowing students and their parents to move into different schools will improve their academic outcomes.

This is a testable assumption, and much research has attempted to identify the effect of receiving and using a voucher on student achievement. Results have been mixed, ranging from gains in high school graduation and college enrollment rates (e.g., Chingos and Peterson 2012), small increases in reading and math scores (e.g., Greene et al. 1998), or increases in math but not reading scores (Rouse 1998), to no significant change in test scores (e.g., Howell and Peterson 2006; Wolf et al. 2011). Further, the results have often been controversial – for example, Chingos and Peterson’s 2012 finding that African American students who use vouchers are 24 percent more likely to attend college than African American students who do not led to a debate (summarized in Inside Higher Ed) between Chingos and Peterson and Goldrick-Rab over whether their findings actually demonstrate that vouchers improve students’ college going.

Some of the mixed findings and controversial interpretations are the result of methodological challenges. Typically, researchers studying voucher effects attempt to isolate the effect of receiving a voucher from family background variables by comparing students who have the opportunity to use vouchers and choose to pursue it with those that do not take advantage of their opportunity. Lotteries that randomly select voucher winners and losers from a large pool of applicants provide a quasi-experimental approach and a step toward isolating voucher effects, but even these are subject to scrutiny and methodological critiques. As a result, the practical and philosophical debate over voucher effectiveness continues unresolved.

Beyond the methodological issues, however, is a fundamental conceptual issue: students use vouchers to attend a variety of different schools. How might variation among schools that accept vouchers affect students’ outcomes? Students who receive vouchers may attend one of any number of private schools, with varying religious and demographic identities, organizational contexts, and levels of academic effectiveness. In addition, schools may adapt differently to incoming voucher students, further increasing variation among voucher students’ educational experiences. Within this context, research points us to several possible mechanisms:

• Sector Effects: Many voucher schools are Catholic schools. Carbonaro and Covay (2010) confirm long-standing findings that Catholic school students benefit from a less-differentiated and more academic curriculum. Bryk, Lee, and Holland (1993) identified other Catholic school characteristics that promote student achievement, including differences in teachers’ expectations of students and stricter norms enforcing discipline and homework completion. If voucher students enter these schools unprepared to meet these standards, schools may respond in different ways. Principals may expect voucher students to adapt to existing classes or create new lower- level or remedial courses, teachers may invest time helping voucher students adjust to expectations or adopt a different set of expectations, and existing students may be unaware of voucher students’ differences or find that their classroom experience is disrupted. In some schools, teachers or administrators may develop supplemental programs outside of school hours to help new students and their parents learn and adjust to school norms, reinforcing rather than undermining the characteristics that presumably made voucher schools attractive alternatives to public schools in the first place. Differences in schools’ ability to respond to such challenges may lead to better or worse academic outcomes for students who use their vouchers to attend these schools.

• School Composition: Most voucher programs are means-tested, meaning vouchers are available only to low-income students. As these low-income students enter private schools, where socioeconomic status tends, on average, to be higher than in public schools, their presence often alters schools’ racial and socioeconomic composition. Crosnoe (2009) demonstrated that low-SES students benefit academically from attending relatively higher-SES schools. However, such students remain disadvantaged in important ways—for example, they may be crowded out of more academically challenging courses or lose out on the highest letter grades to their higher-performing peers; additionally, they may suffer psychosocial problems as a result of comparing themselves to higher-SES peers. Schools’ ability to integrate new students academically and socially will also have an important impact on voucher students’ success in their new schools.

Given that students use vouchers to enter any of a wide variety of schools, it is not surprising that their experiences in voucher schools will differ. What is surprising is that these differences among voucher schools have not been carefully considered as contributors to the mixed evidence regarding voucher effectiveness. Examining school-level differences in capacity to respond to voucher student needs is an important contribution to the voucher debate.

Megan Austin is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame. She is interested in how school organization is shaped by education policy and what implications it has for students’ learning and achievement.  Specific research interests include school choice, social networks, and the stratification of educational opportunity within and between schools.

References

Bryk, A.S., V. Lee, and P. Holland. 1993. Catholic schools and the Common Good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carbonaro, W., and B. Covay. 2010. “School Sector and Student Achievement in the Era of Standards Based Reforms.” Sociology of Education 83: 160-182.

Crosnoe, R. 2009. “Low-Income Students and the Socioeconomic Composition of Public High Schools.” American Sociological Review 74(5): 709-30.

Greene, J.P., P. Peterson, and J. Du. 1998. “School Choice in Milwaukee: A Randomized Experiment.” Pp. 335-256 in P. Peterson and B. Hassel (eds.), Learning from School Choice. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.

Howell, W., and P. Peterson. 2006. The Education Gap: Voucher and Urban Schools. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.

Lederman, Doug. 2012. “Higher Ed Scholars’ Voucher War.” Inside Higher Ed, September 12. Retrieved September 14, 2013 (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/13/researchers-argue-over-school-vouchers-impact-college-going).

Rouse, C.E. 1998. “Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113:553-602.

Wolf, P., B. Kisida, B. Gutmann, M. Puma, L. Rizzo, and N. Eissa. 2011. “School Vouchers in the Nation’s Capital: Summary of Experimental Impacts.” In M. Berends, M. Cannata, and E.B. Goldring (eds.) School Choice and School Improvement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.