Educational Vouchers

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the "vouchers", "scholarships" or "subsidies" provided to families in several cities and states, to move their children from less desirable, academically troubled public schools to more desirable, for-profit private, mainly religious schools. The paper points out that the credit for the initiation of the American school voucher concept generally goes to economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose, who, in the 1955-57 period, argued vigorously for vouchers. The author stresses that especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision favoring vouchers in June 27, 2002 educators are concerned about the effect of the vouchers on the public schools.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Milwaukee & Cleveland and Evaluation Issues
Cleveland and the Supreme Court Decision
New York City Voucher System
Positive Results in Charlotte
Florida's Vouchers: Punish Schools that Fail
Washington D.C. Vouchers Showed Gains for Blacks
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Meanwhile, the School Choice Scholarship Foundation (SCSF) in New York City is in its 5th year, and like other statistical reporting on voucher projects it has seen mixed messages. Three years into the privately financed program studies by Mathematica and Harvard showed African-American students scored 5.5 percentile points higher in composite test scores for math and reading, than black students in public schools who did not receive a scholarship. That promising gain, however, was balanced with the fact that composite test scores of Latino students who received scholarships showed little or no difference from those Latinos who did not get into the voucher scholarship program. While other statistical data was available from the Mathematica research of SCSF " 64% of scholarship parents say their kids had an hour of homework a night; 41% of parents of non-scholarship students say their children had an hour homework " there is a dearth of hard, cold, factual, empirical data showing great gains from vouchers, or a lack of gains. Like the Supreme Court decision, the thumbs up tend to be conservatives, while thumbs down on vouchers tends to be liberals and unions."

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