Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

School choice is one of the most salient educational policy issues of our time. Given the ideological dimensions to the question of whether a child’s parents or address should determine where they go to school, reliable evaluation data on school choice is vital.

The Louisiana Scholarships Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative 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 statewide in 2012. In previous work, we examined how use of an LSP scholarship affected student achievement in the first two years of the program’s statewide expansion, with results indicating large negative effects in Year 1 that appear to have diminished slightly by Year 2. This paper examines how the LSP has affected student achievement after three years of operation.

In this study, using student-level data obtained via a data-sharing agreement with the state of Louisiana, we leverage 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. In addition, we explore the extent to which effects are experienced differentially by gender, ethnicity, and geography. Given the experimental nature of this study, any differences in outcomes can be causally attributed to the LSP.

Our earlier work, much discussed by the media and policy groups, provided evidence of initial large negative impacts that appear to dissipate over time. It is possible that this trend captures the growing pains associated with the dramatic expansion of the program: schools and families likely have had to adjust to this new environment, including student testing requirements. Given this possibility, it is important to determine if the observed negative achievement effects continue to diminish over time or if they stabilize. By exploring how student achievement was affected three years into the program’s expansion, this work helps to address the question of the medium-term academic impacts of a statewide school voucher program. Our preliminary results indicate the large negative achievement effects in the first year of the LSP mainly attenuated in the second and third years, so that the average test scores of program participants appear to be statistically similar to those of the experimental control group in most cases.

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 evaluation of a statewide voucher program. Finally, this study will provide a more detailed understanding of the time pattern of effects of voucher programs that has particular relevance given that some school choice studies are limited to assessing short-term effects.