Vouchers Get an “A” Grade

Education ministers eager to make their mark should watch for education policies that don’t just sound good, but that have clearly proven benefits for students. Educational vouchers are just such a policy.

Studies of voucher programs in diverse countries have shown that they are a way for politicians to make education dollars work more efficiently and improve the educational odds for disadvantaged children. Vouchers are tuition certificates that allow students to attend the school of their parents’ choice. They give low-income families the means to opt out of a government school—if they are unhappy with it—and into an independent school of their own choosing.

Three countries have recently tested the effect of voucher schemes on academic achievement and parental satisfaction. In doing so, they have demonstrated that independent schools often educate low-income students better than the government monopoly, and that school choice offers hope to families whose children often fall through the cracks of a “one-size-fits-all” system. In the past year, studies have been published on three programs: the British Assisted Places scheme, New Zealand’s Targeted Individual Entitlement (TIE) scheme, and New York City’s School Choice Scholarship Program. The growing body of evidence is hard to dispute, even while it makes teachers’ unions squirm.

The British Assisted Places scheme

Britain’s voucher program enabled over 75,000 low-income, academically able students to attend independent secondary schools over a sixteen-year period between 1981 and 1997. A recent London School of Economics and Political Science study¹ compares the national, school-graduation exam marks of two groups of students to determine whether or not voucher use affected their results. Students in the first group accepted a voucher and completed high school at an independent school, while the second group was offered but declined a voucher and finished secondary education in a government school.

To determine the students’ academic abilities at the time they applied for a voucher, the authors compared the verbal reasoning scores on a test all the students had taken before starting secondary school. There was no significant difference between the mean results from the two groups. The voucher and non-voucher students, therefore, entered high school with the same likelihood of doing well.

By the end of high school, however, the two groups looked very different. Despite their nearly identical abilities, voucher students at independent schools had achieved significantly superior results on national graduation A-level exams. Voucher students received, on average, a full letter grade higher on each exam than their government-sector counterparts. For example, if the average voucher student received an A and two B grades, then the average government-school student received a B and two C grades on a comparable selection of subjects.

The “New” Labour party cancelled the program six months before this study was published, reinstating what has been called an “educational apartheid” between independent and government schools.

New York City’s School Choice Scholarship Program

As the British program was being cancelled, a new voucher program was being launched across the Atlantic. The chronic problems of New York’s inner-city schools prompted “a group of concerned New Yorkers to provide non-public educational opportunities to 1,300 children in [their] city’s lowest performing public schools”² and so to establish a significant private voucher program for some of the city’s most disadvantaged students.

In 1997, its first year, the New York School Choice Scholarship Program received more than 20,000 applications for the 1,300 primary school vouchers available. A lottery for the places allowed the program’s Harvard University evaluators to “conduct a natural randomized experiment, in which students were allocated randomly to scholarship and control groups.”³ Data on the students’ family backgrounds and academic abilities were collected from both the voucher winners and the control group before the lottery, and a year later.

After only a year in independent schools, voucher students out-per- formed their peers in both reading and math by 2 to 6 percentile points, gains that are statistically significant.

Quantifiable academic improvement, however, was only one of the many benefits reported by voucher recipients. The study also found that parents of voucher winners were much more satisfied with their children’s education, and that student safety, tardiness, vandalism, absenteeism, fighting, cheating, and racial conflict were not such significant problems in the voucher winners’ schools as they were in the control group’s.

Independent schools were no more likely to expel or suspend students as a means of discipline, and were more likely to reduce the racial isolation of minority students than government schools. Other questions revealed that voucher students were educated in smaller classes and were asked to do more homework than their peers. Voucher parents were nearly four times more likely to give their chosen school an “A” than were non-voucher parents.

The success of this and other well-studied American voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland has contributed to a blossoming of private voucher philanthropy across the US, and is putting pressure on municipal governments to offer choice in the form of charter schools, tuition tax credits, or vouchers themselves.

New Zealand’s Targeted Individual Entitlement (TIE) scheme

The New Zealand government is currently studying the results of its own pilot project on vouchers for low-income students. In each of the past three years, the Ministry of Education offered 160 vouchers to low-income families, redeemable at certain independent schools for the price of tuition.⁴ The aim of the scheme was “to lift the educational achievement” of low-income families and to make it “more likely that these families [would] get the kind of education that they want for their children.”⁵

Evaluation shows the scheme to be an overwhelming success in both regards. Ninety-seven percent of participating families rated themselves as either satisfied or very satisfied with the program. “The vast majority of parents (in most cases between 84 and 96 percent) were very positive about every aspect of the TIE school for their child, including academic and sporting activities, teachers, level of work, other students, and peer relationships.”⁶ Students and parents agreed that their independent school was superior to their old school in almost every way.⁷

The teachers and principals involved hope to see the program continued and expanded because they perceive great benefits for the student recipients. The near-unanimous enthusiasm of the principals is remarkable when one considers that many schools had waiting lists of fee-paying students, and that the majority of schools covered expenses that the TIE families could not afford.⁸

The government recently decided to continue the program indefinitely at its present level of 160 new students per year. Despite the program’s evident success, opposition parties are threatening to cancel the scheme if they win an election later this year.

While such important education policy decisions hang in the balance, these three studies add weight to arguments in favour of school choice. The research confirms that vouchers significantly improve both the quantitative results of education—student test scores—and the assessments of participating parents, students, teachers, and principals. A competitive market in education helps low-income students more than the status quo public education monopoly. These are lessons on which all Ministries of Education should be tested.

Notes

1Anne West and Robert West, 1997, “Examination Results of Pupils Offered Assisted Places: comparing GCE Advanced level results in independent and state schools” Educational Studies, 23, no. 5, pp. 287-293.

2School Choice Scholarships (n.d.), Program Description (New York: School Choice Scholarships Foundation, Inc.)

3Paul E. Peterson, David Myers, and William Howell, An Evaluation of the New York City: School Choice Scholarships Program: The First Year (Washington: Mathematica Policy Research, and Cambridge: Program on Education Policy Governance, Harvard University, October 1998).

4Independent schools were reimbursed at the rate of 110 percent of the average per student cost of the state schools, which was NZ $3,685 for primary students and NZ $5,995 for secondary students.

5New Zealand, Ministry of Education, 1996, What is TIE? p. 2.

6Michael Gaffney and Anne B. Smith, 1998, Evaluation of the TIE Project: A Second Preliminary Report (Dunedin: University of Otago), p. 64.

7Some families reported that transportation to and from the new school was less convenient.

8The average participating independent school normally charged fee-paying students NZ$1,650 to NZ$2,500 more than the voucher amount.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, October 20, 1999.