Unaddressed but relevant peer - reviewed
evidence on school choice policies suggest that the claimed academic and economic benefits of ESAs are speculative and overstated.
A Friedman Foundation (now Ed Choice) survey of the empirical
evidence on school choice looked specifically at the impact choice programs had on public schools.
A week after Wisconsin Watchdog trumpeted WILL's voucher findings, National Review Online did the same in an article headlined, «New
Evidence on School Choice Successes in Wisconsin: Higher test scores for students who attend schools their parents freely choose.»
In A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice, Dr. Greg Forster compiled 28 fiscal studies, 25 of which revealed school choice proposals save money.
This research was summarized by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice in their 2016 report, A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice.
In A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice, Friedman Foundation senior fellow Greg Forster looked at 12 empirical studies that «examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the «gold standard» of social science.
The findings about segregation from «A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice» are not ambiguous.
In April, Greg Forster, also of the Friedman Foundation, released the third in a series of reports on school choice which includes vouchers and, to a lesser extent, educational savings accounts and tax credit scholarships: «A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice.»
In today's release of the fourth edition of a Friedman Foundation flagship report — A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice — author Dr. Greg Forster says,
These results are one part of Dr. Greg Forster's A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice, which we recently updated and released.
(See, for instance, this report by the former Friedman Foundation, now EdChoice, «A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice»....
The fourth edition of A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice brings together 100 empirical studies on each of these essential questions in one comprehensive report.
[2] Greg Forster, «A Win - Win Solution: The Empirical
Evidence on School Choice,» Fourth Edition, EdChoice, May 2016, http://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/A-Win-Win-Solution-The-Empirical-Evidence-on-School-Choice.pdf (accessed October 26, 2016).
As
the evidence on school choice continues to grow, it is tempting to compare the results achieved by school voucher programs to those of charter schools — to ask whether one option or the other represents a more promising avenue for expanding educational opportunity.
The most frustrating thing about Diane Ravitch's new book, Reign of Error, isn't the way she twists
the evidence on school choice or testing, or her condescending tone toward leaders trying to improve educational outcomes, or her clever but disingenuous rhetorical arguments.
Finally, most of the previous reviews of
the evidence on school choice have generated more fog than light, mainly because they have been arbitrary or incomplete in their selection of studies to review.
Not exact matches
So it is that we bring together in this issue the best of the new
evidence on how
choice may be affecting public
schools as well as a robust, informed conversation about its longer - term potential.
To explore the influence of
school choice on district policy and practice, we scoured media sources for
evidence of urban public -
school districts» responses to charter competition.
On the contrary, the
evidence seems to suggest that the families that are most in need of
school choice — minorities, low - income households, and students with lower prior academic achievement — are more likely to apply.
Rather than bet their legacy
on a single idea such as universal pre-
school or
school choice, Kane argues that state policymakers should use the ESSA
evidence requirements to create the infrastructure for piloting and testing interventions.
On the other hand, he defies proponents of charters, vouchers, and other forms of
school choice as wishful thinkers disposed to let marketplace theories trump
evidence of student achievement while also undervaluing education's civic and cultural roles.
These lessons add to MDRC's
evidence on the implementation of small high
schools of
choice in New York City.
The most commonly cited
school choice review, by economists Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow, declares that it will focus
on the
evidence from existing experimental studies but then leaves out four such studies (three of which reported positive
choice effects) and includes one study that was non-experimental (and found no significant effect of
choice).
The sum of the reliable
evidence indicates that,
on average, private
school choice increases the reading scores of
choice users by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by 0.15 standard deviations.
As a result, a typical theme is that there is «little
evidence»
on school choice, so that only «preliminary» and «tentative» conclusions can be reached.
International
evidence suggests that adoption of market - based education policies that rely
on school choice and competition between
schools over enrollment often leads to segregation of children into different
schools according to their socio - economic background, race or parents» awareness of educational opportunities.
It's also a cautionary tale regarding charter -
school authorizing, particularly when done
on a large scale, and will inevitably be used by
school -
choice foes in the U.S. as
evidence in support of their scary predictions that chartering will lead to «witchcraft
schools» and such.
Or, given that Slate is precisely backward about nearly every aspect of the Swedish educational experience, should we assume
on the Swedish
evidence alone that
school choice is good?
There is now a body of
evidence on the effects of
school choice: the positive findings from Charlotte comport with the positive results of privately funded programs in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Dayton, as well as pilot voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland.
Indeed, when we calculate effects by the percentage of students at a high
school who attend college, we find no
evidence of effects
on college
choice in the
schools with the lowest college - sending rates.
We find clear
evidence that the availability of public
school -
choice options under NCLB increased demand for information
on school quality.
But this result provides suggestive
evidence that charter
school entry induces parents to obtain
school - quality information and that the effect of
choice on demand for information may not be limited to NCLB.
For more information
on New Orleans, read «Good News for New Orleans: Early
evidence shows reforms lifting student achievement,» by Douglas N. Harris, and «The New Orleans OneApp: Centralized enrollment matches students and
schools of
choice,» by Douglas N. Harris, Jon Valant, and Betheny Gross.
To incorporate empirical
evidence when possible, we draw
on data from interviews with 21 parents and surveys of 504 parents about the OneApp and
school choice, conducted in the spring of 2014 by the Center
on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).
For more information
on New Orleans, read «Good News for New Orleans: Early
evidence shows reforms lifting student achievement,» by Douglas N. Harris, and «Many Options in New Orleans
Choice System:
School characteristics vary widely,» by Paula Arce - Trigatti, Douglas N. Harris, Huriya Jabbar, and Jane Arnold Lincove.
This study of Washington, DC's, Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) provides the first experimental
evidence on the effect of a publicly funded private
school choice program
on college enrollment.
School Choice: Evidence and Recommendations, a collection of 10 policy briefs on specific topics under the umbrella of choice, brings together some of the top scholars in the field and presents a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important pol
Choice:
Evidence and Recommendations, a collection of 10 policy briefs
on specific topics under the umbrella of
choice, brings together some of the top scholars in the field and presents a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important pol
choice, brings together some of the top scholars in the field and presents a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important policies.
To learn more about the available empirical
evidence on the effects of
school choice programs, flip through this handy slide show, curated collectively and carefully by EdChoice's research team.
Last week, several news outlets circulated a report by the U.S. Department of Education's research division that found negative results for students who participated in the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only private
school choice program for low - income children in Washington, D.C. Predictably, opponents of
school choice descended
on the report to tout it as
evidence that
school choice does not work.
Here is
evidence on how expanding
school choice afftects the achievement of kids who are «left behind»: https://jaypgreene.com/2009/04/27/systemic-effects-of-vouchers-updated-42709/
They contend that the
evidence points to a mismatch, specifically that «a
school choice program's impact
on test scores is a weak predictor of its impacts
on longer - term outcomes.»
As we look at the
evidence on private
school choice — the actual
evidence, not speculation — we should consider it in comparison with the continuing epidemic of ethnic segregation in the public
school system.
If the
evidence does not clearly show the superiority of a high - regulation approach to
school choice, we may need to rely
on our values when deciding how to proceed.
Within the limitations of available data and methods, the empirical
evidence is very encouraging for private
school choice on ethnic segregation — just as it is
on academic outcomes, effects
on public
schools, fiscal effects and effects
on civic values and practices.
The RAND study focuses
on three key variables that
schools focused
on to varying degrees — flexible pacing, student
choices to personalize learning, and evaluation based
on evidence of proficiency.
In this regard, there is a body of
evidence indicating that information
on racial composition dominates
school choice searches.
School choice opponents have seized
on these findings as
evidence that these programs are ineffective and even harmful while advocates point out that Louisiana is heavily regulated, the first few years of an evaluation tell only the worst part of a story (i.e. there are transition effects), and that we should be careful about a heavy - handed focus
on test scores.
We present experimental
evidence on the impact of a
school choice program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) that provided students with a voucher to finance attending a private
school of
The available empirical
evidence on these private
school choice programs makes it clear they positively affect the academic performance of participating students, while doing so at a lower cost than public
schools and benefitting public
school students, decreasing segregation, and improving civic values and practices.
It does so despite the preponderance of
evidence that, as the authors of one educational study from 2002 wrote, «
school choice,
on average, does not produce the equity and social justice that proponents spin.»