Editor's note
About this series: A growing number of states are making school choices funding available to parents, often without regard to their financial means. Over the past two months, CNHI reporters have explored those options, which include education scholarship accounts, voucher programs and tax credits. This series of stories examines how these programs work, how effective they are in improving education and the impact they are having on traditional public education. This special report also looks at how school funding has become a hot-button political issue in the 2024 presidential election.
In June, a Florida school district voted to close at least five buildings in response to students leaving for private schools or to pursue homeschooling through the state’s universal voucher program.
Broward County Public Schools reported it had 54,000 empty classroom seats across its more than 200 buildings. District officials expected to lose 4,300 more students this school year.
Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. offered advice to districts experiencing a mass exodus of students.
“What they need to do is continue to innovate and provide programming that is attractive to parents so that, in that open competition, they have the best option for those parents to choose,” Diaz said during a state board of education meeting in May. Proponents have long argued the voucher programs force public schools to foster innovation in order to compete for students.
“Can a competitive system built on the principle of choice serve as a rising tide that lifts all boats?” asked a 2020 EdChoice study investigating the impacts of school-choice programs. EdChoice is a nonprofit that advocates for school choice.
More than 30 years since Milwaukee, Wisconsin, became the first city to launch a voucher program, the answer remains unclear.
That’s because researchers don’t agree on how to measure the success or failures that come with competition from voucher schools, argued Paul Bruno, who studies education policy at the University of Illinois.
“It’s a very complicated and very unsettled area of research, so I think we should probably not be super confident about what kinds of impacts we’re going to have,” he said.
One popular approach is looking at students’ academic success at public schools after a state launches a voucher program.
Over 25 studies since 2001 have “overwhelmingly” indicated positive or unchanged results in student achievement, explained Patrick Wolf, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
The uptick in public-school students’ tests scores is modest, he noted, but it marks an improvement following the injection of competition through private-school vouchers.
“Has it totally revolutionized their lives and turned them all into Einstein?” Wolf said. “No, but I think it’s encouraging to see this consistent pattern of even just modest gains in student achievement in these public schools.”
However, one of the most recent studies of vouchers and competition found public-school students in Indiana experienced detrimental educational outcomes compared to privateschool voucher students over an eight-year period.
Yusuf Canbolat, a doctoral student at Indiana University who published the study in 2021, found the main reason for the decline came from high-achieving students leaving public schools for private ones.
“Once those students leave public schools, the fall of the learning environment’s quality and student achievement could not be compensated for in the long term,” he said.
To attract high-performing students, many public schools spend money on marketing and advertising campaigns that promote their schools, rather than actually beefing up academic programs or classroom instruction that help all students, Canbolat noted.
Wolf agreed public schools often turn to marketing to maintain and attract students, but research also shows competition leads many districts to more actively and meaningfully engage with parents to support their child’s education, which can lead to better academic outcomes.
The mixed bag of research on voucher-induced competition ultimately has little impact on whether many state lawmaker s choose to implement or expand schoolchoice programs, argued Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University.
School choice essentially boils down to a philosophical idea that parents — not the government — have the fundamental right to determine how their child is educated, he explained. Both supporters and opponents of vouchers often cherry-pick studies that support their views.
As more research on school competition ensues, there’s little evidence that it will change how people think about school choice, Lubienski argued.
“We’re largely in a post-truth period now,” he said. “At this point, it’s more of an assumption about ideology rather than any kind of thought-out theory.”
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