Thursday, November 6, 2014: 2:45 PM-4:15 PM
Enchantment I (Convention Center)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Organizers: Jonathan Mills, University of Arkansas
Panel Chairs: Eugenia Toma, University of Kentucky
Discussants: David Figlio, Northwestern University and Lauren Perry, Louisiana Department of Education
Despite a doubling in per pupil real expenditures, student achievement in the United States has not grown substantially over the last four decades. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers have proposed a number of reforms to help address this mediocre performance. Private school choice reforms are based in part on the idea student outcomes will improve if all families are given the opportunity to choose their child’s school. Despite strong criticism from supporters of traditional public schools, the number of publicly and privately funded school voucher programs has increased dramatically over the last two decades.
The papers composing this panel provide helpful insight into the effects of voucher programs on participating students by examining both the cognitive and non-cognitive effects of school choice programs. In particular, the papers examine such outcomes as student achievement, school safety, high school attainment, college attendance, and college graduation.
First, Mills, Wolf, and Greene examine the achievement impacts of the Louisiana Scholarship Program, a publicly funded statewide means-tested voucher program. The study uses the results from a centralized oversubscription lottery to estimate the impact of receiving a voucher on student achievement after two years by comparing students who were randomly assigned to receive a voucher with those who did not receive a voucher. This work is part of the ongoing evaluation of the Louisiana Scholarship Program and constitutes the first study of a statewide publicly funded voucher program as well as the largest voucher to date.
Next, Bender and Zager examine school safety in schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), a publicly funded means-tested voucher program in Wisconsin. Using actual police call records, along with school surveys and administrative data, Bender and Zager are able to describe differences in school safety and its relationship with academic achievement. This study provides interesting insight into how school safety serves as an important outcome of school choice programs.
The final two papers of the panel explore long-run impacts of participating in a school voucher program. First, Chingos and Peterson combine lottery data from a privately funded scholarship program in New York with college enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse database to examine how the program affected participant college-going experiences five years after high school graduation. Using these rich data, Chingos and Peterson are able to track students throughout the college experience as well as provide initial estimates of the program’s impact on college graduation.
In addition, Cowen, Fleming, Witte, and Kisida use survey and administrative data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to examine high school attainment, college-going rates, as well as likelihood of graduating college within four years.
Combined, the papers in this panel provide important insights into how private school choice programs affect participants along a number of dimensions.