Originally published in Kappan.
When House Republicans cut a trillion-dollar budget deal with Senate Democrats and the White House last spring, Speaker of the House John Boehner demanded a couple of pot sweeteners. One was relaunching the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that gave low-income District of Columbia residents federal vouchers to pay tuition at the city’s private and parochial schools. Established by Congress in 2004 under Republican leadership, the program was defunded five years later, with Democrats in control of Capitol Hill and teacher unions pushing the Obama Administration to shutter the program.
Boehner got the money he wanted for D.C. — nearly $120 million over six years — and his victory has helped fuel a resurgence of the school voucher movement following last year’s elections, which brought pro-voucher Republicans to power in the House and many states. In Wisconsin, newly elected Gov. Scott Walker, who made national headlines for eliminating teacher collective bargaining rights, has lifted the enrollment cap on the state’s voucher program for Milwaukee, allowed middle-class rather than just economically disadvantaged students to receive vouchers, and expanded the program into other regions in the state. Indiana lawmakers approved a statewide voucher program last spring. And in Florida, where special education students attend private schools with state vouchers and corporate tax credits support disadvantaged students in private schools, officials will be asking voters next year to approve a statewide voucher plan for disadvantaged students that was struck down by the state’s top court in 2006.
Those with philosophical and financial stakes in the resurgence of vouchers — libertarians wanting a way to avoid government-run schools, Catholics and Catholic educators, some civil rights advocates, and school reformers favoring market-based reforms — are thrilled with the revival of the voucher movement. But today’s voucher renaissance comes two decades after the nation’s first substantial voucher program was launched in Milwaukee. And there’s hasn’t been much evidence since then to recommend vouchers as a solution to the nation’s systemic educational challenges.
Vouchers have been tickets out of failing public schools for some students. But, in many instances, voucher students are moving to private and parochial schools that are as problematic as the schools they’ve left. Last summer, Wisconsin auditors confirmed that there are no significant differences in test scores between Milwaukee’s 21,000 voucher students and the city’s 86,000 public school students. After a comprehensive study of over a hundred of the city’s voucher schools several years ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded that, “Milwaukee’s school choice program is very much like a teenager: heartwarmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others.” Several of the city’s voucher schools have been closed.
The voucher picture has been much the same in the District of Columbia, where several research organizations determined that voucher students from underperforming public schools or students with low scores did no better in math or reading after moving to private or parochial schools than a control group of public school students.
In July, the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank, summarized research on student performance under the roughly 20 state and federally funded voucher and tuition tax credit programs: “Studies have generally found no clear advantage in academic achievement for students attending private schools with vouchers.”
Worth the investment?
We don’t know how some voucher students are doing — or what taxpayers are getting for their money — because some voucher programs don’t require schools to report student achievement information, or they make comparisons with public schools difficult or impossible. By contrast, charter schools operate independently with public funds but must participate in standardized testingas a way of holding them accountable.
Nor have voucher schools been the engines of educational innovation or supplied the range of educational options that one would hope. “The voucher schools [including some 50 new schools that have emerged since the onset of the voucher program] feel and look surprisingly like schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools district,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded. The city’s voucher program has “preserved . . . school options in the city more than it has offered a range of new, innovative, or distinctive schools.”
More promisingly, studies have found that students with vouchers graduate from high school at a higher rate than their public school counterparts. There’s some evidence that competition created by vouchers has spurred improvement in public school systems. And voucher schools score high marks in parent satisfaction surveys (though parents often keep their children in voucher schools that are demonstrably bad, reports Paul Teske, a school choice expert at the University of Colorado-Denver).
Catholic support
One of Republican lawmakers’ strongest allies in the fight for vouchers is the Catholic Church. With an exodus of parishioners to the suburbs and the rise of tuition-free charter schools, Catholic school enrollment has plunged 60% from its peak of 5.2 million in the early 1960s. Catholic educators view vouchers as a way to slow a resulting tsunami of school closures. Their lobbying helped convince Boehner, a product of Cincinnati Catholic schools, to revive the D.C. voucher program.
Vouchers have been a lifeline for the archdiocesan school system in Milwaukee, where 50% of the city’s Catholic and Lutheran school students receive vouchers, and the District of Columbia, where nearly half of the city’s 1,900 voucher recipients attend Catholic schools. But Catholic schools nationally have probably lost more students to charter schools than they’ve gained through chial schools when they apply for vouchers.
The new programs in Indiana and elsewhere will expand the voucher population. But, even if voucher students could spend their money at uniformly good private and parochial schools (an unlikely eventuality, given the under-whelming record of voucher schools over the past two decades), it’s not clear that either the demand for or the supply of voucher seats would increase sufficiently to make voucher and tax credits a significant lever of reform rather than an escape route for a smallish number of additional students.
As a source of both education options and competitive pressure on public education, vouchers have been eclipsed by the over 5,000 charter schools that have emerged in the past two decades, a form of choice and competition that’s more accountable to taxpayers. It’s telling that nearly a quarter of the students who have won vouchers in the District of Columbia, a city with a large concentration of no-cost charter schools, haven’t used them. The charter sector also has attracted many of the educational entrepreneurs needed to start new schools and a significant number of empty Catholic schools have been sold or leased to charter schools.
The demand for the empty seats that Catholic school systems have would be greater — and more schools would likely supply voucher seats — if the value of vouchers were higher than they are today. In Milwaukee, a voucher is worth $6,442, considerably less than the $14,183 the city’s public schools spent per student last year. Several dozen new private and parochial schools, many of them small elementary schools, have opened in response to the voucher program, but several have closed. In Cleveland, one of the city’s largest private voucher schools switched to charter status because the funding was greater.
Still, the private education sector’s uncertain capacity to respond to greater parental demand, the intense political opposition to vouchers, and the emergence of charter schools suggests that the most practical way for policy makers to drive reform in public education through choice and competition on a large scale would be to double down on charter schools and increase school choice within the public system itself. New York City now requires its 79,000 middle school graduates to select from among over 600 high school programs in the city’s five boroughs. Some say choice within the public system isn’t real choice. The principals who compete for students in New York would disagree.