Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Greg Forster

School Choice Advocate
Road to Reform Runs Through Indiana

In early 2011 I wrote an article headlined “School Choice Is Back!” Now, just a few months later, even that feels like too little. School choice is explosive this year. It’s a top issue in at least half a dozen states, and we’re seeing legislative breakthroughs that surpass anything the movement has seen before.

Naturally, with this policy revolution underway, people want to know whether school choice provides a better education, and how it affects public schools. Fortunately, there’s a large body of evidence on this question, and it consistently favors vouchers.

To make sure the public hears about this evidence and not just the unfounded claims of the teachers’ unions, this March the Foundation released A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Vouchers. In this report, I provide a comprehensive overview of scientific research on the effects of vouchers. It’s a revised and expanded edition of the report, adding new topics and more recent studies.

Currently, there are 26 school choice programs in 16 states and Washington, D.C. Through these programs, more than 190,000 students attend private schools using public funds. Researchers at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, the Federal Reserve Bank, the University of Florida, the University of Arkansas and other institutions have studied these programs using high-quality empirical methods.

The data consistently show that school choice provides a better education to those who use it. Ten studies have examined this question using “random assignment,” the gold standard of social science research. These studies compare students who got vouchers to students who applied for vouchers but weren’t offered them because of a random lottery – providing for the perfect treatment and control groups. The studies consistently show positive impacts from vouchers. No empirical study has ever found a negative effect.

The data also show that choice improves public schools. You can’t do random assignment studies on public schools, but there are plenty of studies on this question using other methods. Of the 19 studies conducted, 18 find a positive effect on public schools. One study finds no effect – and that’s in the D.C. voucher program, which insulates public schools from the effects of competition. As with the effects on participants, no study has ever found that school choice had a negative impact on public schools.

These results aren’t hard to explain. Putting parents in charge of the system creates the healthy incentives that schools need to sustain improvements in performance.

In fact, the evidence for vouchers is so overwhelming that when voucher opponent Jay Mathews covered my Win-Win report for the Washington Post, he freely admitted that vouchers deliver a better education and improve public schools to boot. The only excuse he could come up with to oppose vouchers was that they supposedly aren’t politically viable.

Well, the legislative record since then speaks for itself. After Jay’s article ran, I offered to bet him a fancy dinner based on how well voucher bills do this year. We settled on a threshold of seven new or expanded programs this year as the goal school choice has to meet. As of this writing, it looks like vouchers will pass that mark in a walk.

And the programs that are passing aren’t just any programs. Indiana has enacted what will be the nation’s largest program ever. Arizona has enacted the first ever “education savings accounts” – a new form of school choice that holds tremendous promise for creating even more direct parental control over tuition dollars. And in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker is pushing to make the Milwaukee voucher the nation’s first truly universal choice program.

When I win, Mathews has to buy me dinner in Milwaukee. I wonder if any of the restaurants there serve crow.

Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice.