The Louisiana Scholarships Program (LSP) is a statewide program offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family incomes no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded to a statewide program in 2012. In a previous paper, we examined the achievement effects associated with the LSP in the first year of the program expansion and largely found statistically significant negative effects associated with being randomly assigned to receive an LSP scholarship. This paper examines how the LSP has affected student achievement after two years of operation.

In this study, we use the results of the oversubscription lotteries for nearly 10,000 eligible applicants to analyze the achievement impacts of LSP as a randomized control trial (RCT). In particular, we compare the achievement of students randomly assigned to receive a voucher with students who had the same private school choice set who were not assigned a voucher. Student-level data have been obtained via a data-sharing agreement with the state of Louisiana. Given the experimental nature of this study, any differences in outcomes can be causally attributed to the LSP.

Our analysis leverages the random assignment generated by the LSP “Roth” placement lottery to generate unbiased estimates of the impact of receiving an LSP scholarship on student achievement two years after the program’s statewide expansion. In addition, we examine the extent to which the program’s impacts differ across three subgroup comparisons: (1) males relative to females, (2) African American participants compared to all other program participants, and (3) New Orleans participants compared to other participants.

Results presented in a preliminary analysis of the LSP on student achievement in the first year of the statewide program expansion indicated significant negative impacts for both reading and math. These negative findings are the first of their kind among RCT evaluations of school voucher programs in the United States. Thus, this paper will additionally examine the extent to which these negative results persist into the second year of operation of the statewide program.

This study benefits the existing literature on the participant effects of publicly funded voucher programs for three reasons. First, it uses a highly rigorous experimental design to estimate treatment effects while avoiding endogeneity concerns. Second, it is the first empirical evaluation of a statewide voucher program as an increasing number of voucher pilot programs are being expanded statewide. Finally, this study will provide a more detailed understanding of the persistence of the negative effects estimated in the year one impact evaluation of the LSP. These contributions will add to the existing knowledge on the effects of publicly funded voucher programs on student achievement outcomes.