The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a school choice program that provides public funds for low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Initially piloted in New Orleans in 2008, Act 2 of the 2012 Regular Session expanded the LSP statewide, allowing thousands of public school students to transfer out of their residentially-assigned schools and into private schools of their choosing. In the first year of statewide expansion, almost 5,000 eligible Louisiana students from low-performing public schools used a voucher to enroll in private school; in the second year, that figure climbed to almost 8,000 students. All of these students were low-income and approximately 90 percent were African American. This article uses a restricted access, student-level panel data set covering the state of Louisiana to examine the impact of the LSP on racial integration in both public and participating private schools in Louisiana in the first two years of the expanded program.

Critics of school choice programs have typically raised the concern that such programs can harm desegregation efforts by allowing students to transfer out of their current public schools and into private schools that are stratified by race/ ethnicity (Berliner, Farrell, Huerta, & Mickelson, 2000; Cobb & Glass, 1999; Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010). Such concerns are particularly relevant in Louisiana, a state with a history of state-sponsored segregation. The decades since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision have seen a significant level of judicial oversight of school desegregation efforts nationally. In Louisiana, the 1975 Brumfield v. Dodd case signaled the end of public financial support for private schools that segregate or discriminate in admissions by declaring such schools ineligible for state assistance of any kind. This includes funding for textbooks, school supplies, student transportation, or classroom materials. Today, the federal government continues to monitor schools to ensure their compliance with desegregation plans. The United States remains a party to desegregation suits in 24 Louisiana school districts. Additionally, any districts not under court orders can submit voluntary desegregation plans for their schools to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Given the ongoing efforts to improve integration in Louisiana’s public schools, it is important to understand if the LSP is actually improving or reducing these desegregation efforts. In this article, we are able to empirically examine this issue using data on actual LSP voucher users. We track individual student transfers and determine if such transfers improved or reduced integration at students’ former public schools and current private schools by nudging the school’s racial composition nearer to or further from the racial composition of the broader community. These findings should help answer important, policy-relevant questions about whether or not parental choice is harming current desegregation efforts in Louisiana.