Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program (ICSP), one of the nation’s largest statewide school voucher programs, has over 34,000 participating students enrolled in over 300 religious and non-religious private schools as of the 2016-17 school year. Building upon our previous work examining impacts of the ICSP on student achievement, this paper examines the heterogeneous impacts of the voucher program on student achievement and attendance for students across Indiana private K-8 schools.

We analyze school-level heterogeneous impacts using longitudinal, student-level data from the first five years (2011-12 to 2015-16) of the program with a pair of complementary estimation approaches. Using student fixed effects models and propensity score matching with OLS and difference-in-difference models, we estimate longitudinal achievement and attendance impacts for students who use a voucher to transfer from a public to a private school. We disaggregate the main impacts by various characteristics of private schools in the year prior to a voucher student attending, including by schools’ racial/ethnic and socioeconomic compositions; proportion of English-language learners and special education students enrolled; and average academic achievement.

Overall, we find that voucher students who transfer to private schools experience statistically significant losses in mathematics achievement, with null gains in English/language arts (ELA) in comparison to their achievement gains in their previous public schools. The effects on math and ELA turn positive the longer students participate in the program (i.e., by years three and four enrolled in a private school). We also find that voucher students experience improved attendance once enrolled in private schools. For both achievement and attendance outcomes, we find some degree of variation in impacts based on the characteristics of the private schools that students attend. We find the greatest degree of heterogeneity in impacts based on the demographic rather than academic composition of the school. These findings suggest that the choice of private school may be important for students choosing to use a voucher to transfer from a public school. We discuss these results in the context of the growth and modification of Indiana’s voucher program and additional qualitative and survey research conducted on the voucher program.

We conclude the paper by suggesting future mixed-methods research that may help explain our findings and uncover school-level conditions under which voucher programs may be most effective.