The headline gets straight to the point.
“After two decades of studying voucher programs,” it says, “I’m now firmly opposed to them. Here’s why public money should not be funding private tuition.”
The headline appears over an article written by Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. It appears in The Hechinger Report, a periodical devoted to education issues. In his essay, Cowen says voucher programs simply don’t measure up to their billing.
“They promise low-income families solutions to academic inequality,” he writes, “but what they deliver is often little more than religious indoctrination to go alongside academic outcomes that are worse than before.”
Sen. Brian Buchanan, a Republican from Lebanon, clearly lines up on the other side of the debate. He’s the author of Senate Bill 305, a measure he says is designed to give parents more say in the education of their children.
“Anytime you can get more choice, more options for parents, I believe it’s better, and that’s what this bill is doing,” he told the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development.
Buchanan’s measure would make something called Education Scholarship Accounts available to every student in the state. The bill would expand a program the legislature established two years ago.
Currently, the program is aimed at students who qualify for special education, and their families have to meet certain income limits. Buchanan’s bill would extend the program to all students, regardless of educational needs or income level.
The previous state budget appropriated $10 million a year for the program, and Buchanan says he’d be happy to keep funding at that level, enough to fund scholarship accounts for about 1,300 students. In its current form, the program has 143 participants.
In his essay opposing such programs, Cowen doesn’t mince words.
“Vouchers are dangerous to American education,” he writes. “They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety. In small doses, years ago, vouchers seemed like they might work, but as more states have created more and larger voucher programs, experts like me have learned enough to say that these programs on balance can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.”
Cowen is far from alone in his findings.
The Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University reached the same conclusion after looking at a number of studies.
“School vouchers have long been promoted on the grounds that they improve access to quality educational options,” that study concluded. “However, recent studies have shown large, negative impacts of vouchers on student achievement.”
Critics complain that voucher programs pull money away from public schools that need every dollar they can get. These programs, in the words of the Indiana State Teachers Association, are based on political ideology “and not on doing what’s best for students, communities and Hoosier taxpayers.”
Cowen was part of a study examining the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program over a five-year span ending in 2010.
“Our evaluation tracked more than 2,500 voucher kids alongside 2,500 carefully matched public school kids,” he wrote. “After five years, we found very little difference on test scores between the two groups.”
Cowen and his fellow researchers did find some positive results for graduation rates, and they learned that voucher schools performed better when required to use the accountability measures expected of public schools. But they also discovered in a separate study that marginalized students who went back to public schools actually performed better than those who stayed behind.
“The bottom line,” he writes, “is that the research case for vouchers doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, while the research case against them has been flashing warning lights for almost a decade.”
If they really care about education, Indiana lawmakers will pay attention to those flashing lights.
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