Reprinted from the NJEA Reporter, January 2004
(Fifth of a Series)
After more than a decade of research, there is no evidence that vouchers lead to higher student achievement
Central to the debate in New Jersey over the question of taxpayer-funded vouchers for private and religious schools is the claim by proponents that vouchers will produce student achievement gains that struggling public schools cannot.
Unfortunately for them, there's no evidence to support that claim.
In fact, more than a decade of research into public and private voucher programs has produced no proof that they are a "reform" worthy of the expenditure of millions - or billions - of public tax dollars.
General Accounting Office
In 2001, the U.S. General Accounting Office released a study of student scores on standardized tests in the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs, enacted in 1990 and 1996, respectively. "None of the findings can be considered definitive," the report concluded.
Official state-sponsored research on both programs led to the same conclusion.
Milwaukee
Starting in 1990, annual evaluations of the Milwaukee voucher program were conducted by Dr. John Witte of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over the next five years, Witte and his team found no appreciable gains by voucher students in either reading or math.
What they did find, however, was an annual attrition rate - 44% in the first year, 32% in the second year - that would be a scandal in any public school system. That attrition rate continues to this day, as voucher schools send a third of their students back to the public schools each year - while keeping public funding for the remainder of the semester.
Pro-voucher researcher Paul Peterson (who receives much of his funding from the right-wing Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee) analyzed Witte's data and claimed to find statistically significant gains in achievement by voucher students in the third and fourth years of the program, but his findings were disputed by the mainstream research community. Even the pro-voucher Wall Street Journal wrote he had been "loose with his claims."
Princeton University researcher Cecilia Rouse did a third analysis, and found slight gains by voucher students in math, but only for a small sub-group of students. She found no gain in reading scores. Perhaps most importantly, Rouse found that students in Milwaukee's public SAGE schools (see sidebar) - with small classes and additional state funding - kept pace with voucher students in math, and substantially outperformed them in reading.
In 1995, the Wisconsin Legislature eliminated further state evaluations, and exempted voucher schools from administering uniform testing. For eight years now, Wisconsin taxpayers have no current data on whether vouchers are having a positive impact on education.
Cleveland
The state-sponsored analysis of the Cleveland program led by Indiana University Prof. Kim Metcalf has found no improvement in the overall test scores of voucher students. It also found that scores in two private schools - HOPE Academies - run by entrepreneur David Brennan - who helped push the legislature to enact the voucher program - performed below their peers in public and other voucher schools.
Brennan hired Peterson to reanalyze Metcalf's data on the HOPE Academies, and he claimed to find significant academic gains by their students. But Metcalf fired back in an article titled "Advocacy in the Guise of Science," suggesting that Peterson's team "are strong supporters of vouchers and have done much to promote the implementation of voucher programs throughout the country."
African American students in New York
In August 2000, Peterson released findings claiming private vouchers had improved achievement for African-American students in New York.
A month later, the company that gathered research for the study - Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, NJ - took the unusual step of revising Peterson's claims, saying his findings were "exaggerated" and that they showed "no significant difference in test scores" between voucher students and the control group.
In April 2003, Princeton economist Dr. Alan B. Krueger released a new analysis of Peterson's data, concluding Peterson's findings were inconclusive at best. "We would counsel caution in concluding that vouchers raised achievement for African-American students in New York City," he wrote.
The fact remains that all independent, official studies of existing public and private voucher programs lead to the same conclusion: vouchers do not improve student achievement.
NEXT MONTH: - Who's Behind the Voucher Movement? A look at where the money and support is originating, and how it finds its way into New Jersey.