School Voucher Programs: What the Research Says About Parental School Choice

Brigham Young University Law Review, 2008 by Wolf, Patrick J

I. INTRODUCTION

A number of important policy questions surround school voucher initiatives. Before a new voucher program is enacted, policymakers usually want to know answers to questions such as: (1) Do voucher programs primarily serve disadvantaged students?; (2) Do parents like voucher programs?; and (3) Do students benefit academically from vouchers? The answers to these questions provide policymakers and the general public with crucial information regarding what societal goals are and are not advanced when parents are allowed to use public funds to enroll their child in a private school of their choosing.

Fortunately, enough voucher programs have been established and evaluated to provide us with consistent and reliable answers to many of the policy questions surrounding school vouchers targeted at disadvantaged students. Had the Utah universal school voucher program not been defeated in a recent public referendum, it would have been the thirteenth school voucher program launched in the United States.1 The Utah initiative would have been the first voucher program in this country open to all school-age children.2 The twelve voucher programs that are approved and operating in the United States3 all target voucher eligibility to students that are disadvantaged in various ways. Thus, the research to date on school vouchers provides only speculative information about the likely effects of universal programs even as it provides a wealth of data on the effects of the targeted voucher programs that are becoming an increasingly common feature of the school-reform landscape.

The high-quality studies on school voucher programs generally reach positive conclusions about vouchers. The many evaluations of targeted school voucher initiatives confirm that these programs serve highly disadvantaged populations of students. Of the ten separate analyses of data from "gold standard" experimental studies of voucher programs, nine conclude that some or all of the participants benefited academically from using a voucher to attend a private school. The evidence to date suggests that school voucher programs benefit many of the disadvantaged students and parents that they serve.4

Part II of this Article describes the twelve voucher programs that currently exist in the United States and the student populations that they serve. Part III discusses and critiques the various methods that have been used to evaluate school voucher programs. Part IV argues that the evidence from rigorous voucher evaluations indicates that voucher programs increase parental satisfaction with schools and tend to boost student test scores, at least for some participants. Readers are cautioned that this evidence is drawn from targeted voucher programs and may not apply to universal programs such as the one proposed for and subsequently rejected by the citizens of Utah. Part V concludes by encouraging more rigorous research on the impacts of voucher programs with various design features.

II. SCHOOL VOUCHER PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES

A school voucher program is an arrangement whereby public funds are made available to qualified parents to cover some or all of the expenses associated with enrolling their child in a participating private school of their choosing. Privately funded scholarships are not school vouchers, although, like vouchers, they are used to allow disadvantaged students to gain access to private schools. The placement and funding of special needs students in private schools by public school districts also is not a voucher program, since district officials, and not parents, choose the school. The definitional aspects of school vouchers are the source of the funds (governmental), the purpose for which the funds are provided (to enroll a school-age child in a private school), and the party whose decisions fulfill that purpose (a parent or legal guardian of the child).5

According to this definition of school vouchers, twelve voucher programs had been established or were being implemented in the United States as of the fall of 2007.6 A total of 56,285 students were enrolled in these programs at the start of the 2006-2007 school year.7 America's first school voucher program was established in Vermont in 1869. The Vermont "town tuitioning" program provides vouchers for students in rural areas without public junior high or high schools.8 The vouchers in most towns enable parents to enroll their children in the public or private high school of their choosing.9 Other towns send all their students to one school. A similar program has operated in Maine since 1873.10 Milwaukee, the site of the largest school voucher program in the country, enrolled 17,275 students in the fall of 2006.11 Two new voucher programs were enacted in Arizona in 2006, serving students with disabilities and students in foster care.12 Georgia also enacted a voucher program for students with disabilities in 2007.13

The incremental trend of establishing additional voucher programs in the 1990s paused from 1999 to 2003 as policymakers awaited the outcome of the constitutional challenge to the Cleveland voucher program. Upon the issuance of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris,15 in which a majority of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of school voucher programs such as Cleveland's, school voucher initiatives re-emerged on the policymaking docket in many states. Whereas only five voucher programs had been established in the 130 years between 1869 and 1999, an additional seven programs were enacted in just the first five years post-Zelman.16