Parents Give Voucher Schools an 'A'

Three weeks before Capitol Hill lawmakers rejected a proposal to spend $50 million on a multi-city school voucher experiment, Harvard researchers released the first survey of parents who had participated in a nationwide voucher program that was privately funded and ultimately will cost three to four times the amount Congress was unwilling to spend.

The survey results were overwhelmingly positive, with a clear majority of parents reporting they were "very satisfied" with the private school the vouchers had enabled their children to attend.

In sharp contrast, only a small minority of parents reported they were "very satisfied" with the public schools where their children had remained because they had not been awarded a voucher by lottery. Just 16.2 percent of public school parents gave their school an "A" grade, compared to 71.5 percent of private school parents. Overall, parents whose children received vouchers gave their children's schools an A- grade; parents whose children stayed in public schools gave their school only a C+.

"Parents of children in private schools are very satisfied with their new schools, both generally and in regards to specific aspects of a child's educational environment--academic rigor, discipline, safety, and the values taught by the school," report Harvard University researchers Paul E. Peterson and David E. Campbell in their May 2001 report, "An Evaluation of the Children's Scholarship Fund."

Peterson and Campbell found that private schools are smaller, classes are smaller, and students report far fewer disruption caused by other students--even though there's no evidence private schools turn away "problem" students. Parents are less likely to encounter problems like fighting, gangs, stealing, and cheating in their child's private school. Parents also report they are more likely to be treated with respect by teachers in private schools.

Private schools are also more likely to lack the facilities and programs that most public schools have, such as a nurse's office, cafeteria, guidance counselor, music program, and special programs for advanced learners and students with learning disabilities. A notable exception, said Peterson and Campbell, is the availability of individual tutors for students--a resource private schools are more likely than public schools to have.

Despite the disparity in resources and programs, 73 percent of parents of students with learning disabilities reported the private schools met their child's particular learning needs "very well," compared to only 30.1 percent of parents with comparable students in public schools.

"We can conclude that the Children's Scholarship Fund has had a measurably positive effect on the educational experiences of its recipients," the researchers stated. "And based on test score data collected in previous evaluations, it is plausible to speculate that the educational improvements cited by CSF parents will lead to improved academic performance--and thus improve prospects for the future success--of their children."

Philanthropists Ted Forstmann and John Walton formed the Children's Scholarship Fund in 1998, putting up $100 million of their own money and looking for matching donors to create a tuition fund of up to $200 million to offer private school scholarships* of $600 to $1,600 to children in needy families. Although the needy families were required to put up an additional $1,000 a year for tuition, CSF received 1.25 million applications nationwide for 40,000 scholarships.

The survey, conducted under the auspices of Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance, is the first evaluation of a large-scale national voucher program designed to help low-income parents send their children to the private school of their choice. Previous studies had been conducted on students in three potentially unrepresentative cities--New York City, Washington, DC, and Dayton, Ohio--and questions had been raised about whether the results could be generalized to the nation as a whole. The new survey indicates they can, since the survey results parallel those from studies of the individual cities.

Previous evaluations of students in CSF programs also found that, after two years in the program, African-American students who switched from public to private schools scored 6.3 National Percentile Ranking points higher than those who remained in public schools, although no gains or losses were found for other racial and/or ethnic groups. One-year results from another CSF program, in Charlotte, North Carolina, showed a similar gain of 6 percentile points among predominantly African-American students.

Significantly, the 6.3 NPR point gain from exercising a choice of schools is larger than the 4.9 NPR point gain reported from the well-known Tennessee experiment that reduced class size from 24 to 16. The gain from using a voucher is roughly one-third of the gap in test scores between black and white students.

"If the remaining two-thirds could be closed in subsequent years of elementary and secondary schooling, the social impact would be of great significance," noted Peterson and Campbell. They also pointed out that "the cost-benefit ratio for the CSF intervention was much larger than the Tennessee class-size intervention, which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to introduce nationally."

The survey was conducted at the end of the first school year in which CSF scholarships were used, 1999-2000, and involved over 2,300 applicants and 850 children in applicant families. Some applicants were awarded scholarships and subsequently sent their children to private schools; other applicants did not receive scholarships and their children remained in public schools.

For the evaluation, the researchers employed the methodology of a randomized field trial, a common experimental design in the testing of medical and surgical treatments where patients are randomly assigned to a treatment group or control group. Since the voucher-seeking students were assigned to private or public schools based on a random lottery draw, any subsequent differences between the students can be attributed to the effect of receiving a voucher and transferring to a private school.

Although opponents of school choice have charged that allowing parents to choose schools for their children could lead to separatism and divisiveness, the CSF survey found no differences between public and private school students in their levels of political tolerance or political knowledge.

* The CSF scholarships are referred to here as "vouchers" since--apart from the fact the scholarships are privately funded--they function in all respects in the same way as a publicly funded voucher.

For more information . . .

The 75-page report by Paul E. Peterson and David E. Campbell, "An Evaluation of the Children's Scholarship Fund," is available at the Web site of Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance at www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg. A six-page Executive Summary also is available. While statistical data provide several measures of the wide difference between public and private schools, it is only by reading the comments of parents in the full report that a real appreciation can be gained of the huge cultural divide between the two school systems regarding the expectations each has of its students.