Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Louisiana Scholarships Program (LSP) is a statewide program offering publicly-funded vouchers for students in low-performing public schools with family incomes no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line to enroll in a private school of their choice. In previous work, we examined how use of an LSP scholarship affected student achievement in the first three years of the program’s statewide expansion, with results indicating large negative effects in Year 1 that diminished slightly by Year 2 and were no longer statistically significant by Year 3. Our current study builds on our earlier work by examining the LSP’s impact on two important medium-run outcomes: achievement after four years of program participation and the likelihood of enrolling in college.

A key strength of this study is that we are able to estimate the LSP’s impacts on achievement and attainment using a highly rigorous experimental research design. In particular, we rely on oversubscription lotteries embedded in the procedure used by the LSP to allocate vouchers to eligible applicants. By comparing the academic outcomes of students randomly assigned to receive an LSP voucher with students who had the same private school choice set who were not assigned a voucher, we are able to identify the causal impacts of the program on both achievement and attainment.

Our study uses student-level data obtained via a data-sharing agreement with the state of Louisiana for the 2012-13 LSP application cohort. First, we examine the program’s impacts on student achievement for a subset of students participating in oversubscribed lotteries who had test results on the Louisiana state assessments in grades 3 through 8 in the 2016-17 school year. Preliminary evidence indicates a significant negative effect on students’ math test scores and an insignificant, yet negative, effect on student English Language Arts test scores. In addition to estimating overall effects, we explore the extent to which effects are experienced differentially by gender, ethnicity, application grade, and geography. We also explore potential heterogeneity of student achievement effects by various private school characteristics.

Next, using data on college enrollment obtained from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), we estimate the program’s impact on college enrollment for nearly 1,000 students applying for LSP placements in grades 7 through 12 in the 2012-13 school year. Preliminary evidence indicates positive yet statistically insignificant effects on college entrance for students using LSP vouchers to attend their first-choice private school.

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, this study will provide a more detailed understanding of the persistence of the negative achievement effects estimated in the year-one impact evaluation of the LSP. Third, by examining effects on college enrollment, this study offers one of the first examinations of a statewide voucher program’s impact on long-run outcomes using a highly rigorous experimental design. These contributions will add to the existing knowledge on the effects of publicly funded voucher programs.