Correspondence

Education Next, Spring, 2002

A-Plus for vouchers?

In "The Looming Shadow" (Research, Winter 2001), Jay P. Greene of the Manhattan Institute examines whether the threat of vouchers under Florida's A-Plus program forced the state's failing schools to improve. The A-Plus program is essentially a top-down accountability system with a voucher add-on, The state grades schools from A to F based on their test-score performance. If schools labeled F fail to improve, their students become eligible for vouchers.

Greene found that the test scores of failing schools did increase, This leads him to jump to the conclusion that the threat of vouchers was the primary reason, However, how Greene can distinguish, based on Florida data alone, the effect of the voucher threat from the effect of being designated a failing school escapes me.

Greene makes an attempt at distinguishing between these two effects by narrowing the comparison to the highest performing F schools and the lowest performing D schools (so that the only real difference between the schools was whether they faced the threat of vouchers or not). He notes that the F schools were provided with $600 more per pupil than the D schools, but he finds that taking those resources into account would not change the conclusion. The basic problem remains, however. Given the increased public scrutiny and the stigma associated with being labeled a failing school, we should expect such schools to work hard at improving regardless of whether their students are given the option of a voucher.

North Carolina has a similar accountability system, in that low-performing schools are publicly identified as failing. My Duke University colleague Beth Glennie and I have found that schools that were designated as failing increased their performance the following year more than all the other categories of schools. Moreover, using Greene's methodology of narrowing the comparison to the highest performing schools in the failing group and the lowest-performing in the next group, we still find that failing schools improved more, In other words, schools in North Carolina exhibited the same pattern of improvement, yet they faced no threat of vouchers, Instead their performance reflected the response of failing schools to some combination of increased scrutiny, the shame of being labeled a failure, and intervention from state assistance teams.

Given that similar factors are at work in Florida's accountability system, I suspect that most, if not all, of the improvements in school performance in that state's failing schools are attributable to the state's administered accountability system, not to the voucher component of that program.

HELEN F. LADD

Duke University Durham, North Carolina

Jay R Greene Responds: Helen Ladd is correct in saying that the Florida A-Plus program is an "accountability system with a voucher add-on," or, as I put it more forcefully in my article, "an accountability system with teeth." She questions whether vouchers were the real "teeth" of the A-Plus program, contending that public shame or the threat of reconstitution may have been just as effective, if not more so, as the prospect of vouchers.

Ladd bolsters her claim with evidence from North Carolina that schools labeled as failing exhibited similar patterns of improvement, but without the threat of vouchers. However, her study and others like it neglect to establish that the gains realized by failing schools facing alternative sanctions represent real improvement in student learning. By contrast, my study validated the state test by correlating the state test results with the results of low-stakes national test results, Without establishing the validity of state testing results, it is impossible to know whether the gains made by failing schools in other states were as large as those realized by failing schools that faced the prospect of vouchers in Florida.

Even if sanctions other than vouchers inspired school improvement, my study's findings would not be undermined in the least. The point of my study was not that vouchers are the only effective sanction, My point was that vouchers were an effective sanction in Florida and that schools needed to have incentives in addition to resources in order to improve. Helen Ladd seems to agree that sanctions are effective at inspiring school improvement, suggesting that we agree on my fundamental point about the crucial role of incentives in school reform.

Old choices

A common shortcoming in research and commentary on school choice is the failure to recognize the extent to which school choice already exists. As a result, a typical theme is that there is "little evidence" on school choice, so that only "preliminary" and "tentative conclusions can be reached.

This assumption underlies each of the articles in your "When Schools Compete" Forum (Winter 2001) The contributors discuss two limited forms of choice in K--12 education--vouchers and charter schools-when in fact a large share of the population has always exercised one or another form of choice. As Richard Elmore and Bruce Fuller explain in Who Chooses? Who Loses? "Choice is everywhere in American education. It is manifest in the residential choices made by families... [and] when families, sometimes at great financial sacrifice, decide to send their children to private schools.... In all instances, these choices ... are strongly shaped by the wealth, ethnicity, and social status of parents and their neighborhoods."