Study: Private school vouchers favored by DeVos don’t offer real advantage over public schools

A new study reports that there is no evidence that school vouchers — which use public dollars to pay for private school tuition and are favored by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — offer students significant academic advantages and are a proven education reform strategy.

The study comes at a time when DeVos and President Donald Trump have made clear that expanding school “choice” is a priority, arguing that traditional public schools are failing too many students and that parents should have choices. Trump has said he wants to spend $20 billion to help states expand voucher programs, and the people who administer the only federally funded voucher program currently operating, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, say they expect to get more federal money soon to expand by “hundreds of new students” for the 2017-2018 school year.

Critics say DeVos and Trump want to privatize the public education system, the most important civic institution in the country. They say that school “choice” options — including charter and online schools — exacerbate segregation and do not broadly help improve student achievement; that traditional public systems, which educate the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren, are financially harmed by choice; and that vouchers used for religious schools violate the constitutional separation between church and state.

The study, released Tuesday and written by Martin Carnoy, a Stanford University professor and research associate at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, reviews the evidence based on the effectiveness of vouchers. It includes examinations of evaluations of programs in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota and Louisiana as well as in Chile and in India. It finds “limited improvements at best in student achievement and school district performance from even large-scale programs” and says:

“In the few cases in which test scores increased, other factors, namely increased public accountability, not private school competition, seem to be more likely drivers. And high rates of attrition from private schools among voucher users in several studies raises concerns. The second largest and longest-standing U.S. voucher program, in Milwaukee, offers no solid evidence of student gains in either private or public schools.

“In the only area in which there is evidence of small improvements in voucher schools – in high school graduation and college enrollment rates – there are no data to show whether the gains are the result of schools shedding lower-performing students or engaging in positive practices. Also, high school graduation rates have risen sharply in public schools across the board in the last 10 years, with those increases much larger than the small effect estimated on graduation rates from attending a voucher school.”

There are 25 voucher programs in 14 states, allowing families to use taxpayer dollars to pay for private or parochial schools, according to EdChoice, a pro-school-choice organization: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana (two), Maine, Maryland, Mississippi (two), North Carolina (two), Ohio (five), Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin (four) as well as in Washington.