Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of Texas is trying to raise funding to take a research team to Chile to study the failure of the voucher progr. He needs your help. Tickets cost either $1,000 round trip or 30,000-60,000 frequent flyer miles. Please consider sponsoring a member of his research team. We can learn from what happened in Chile. With so many states adopting voucher plans without evidence, we should get the facts now from the world’s longest running voucher program.
Chile has had vouchers for decades. They did not improve education, and they increased social segregation. The newly elected government of Chile plans to pare back the choice system that was launched during the regime of the military dictator Pinochet. Help Professor Heilig and his team gather the facts about vouchers and inform our policymakers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Research is indispensable for intelligent decision making and rational policy formation, but you can never convince True Believers that their religion is wrong — so the only answer in the long run is getting the True Believers in Marketism and Moneytheism out of positions of political power.
Chile knows about fascism…please help us in Los Angeles beat back the oligarchs who rule LAUSD.
Pass this petition to keep Magruder on the Bond Oversight Committee to all your lists and all your blog sites. Sign it right now, so LAUSD can see the world is watching and they can no longer operate in secrecy.
https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/reappoint-lausd-bond-oversight-committee-citizen-member-stewart-magruder-as-a-watchdog
It is only with vast national attention that we in LA have any chance of overcoming this inept and seemingly complicit BoE, and the ruling hand of Eli Broad and his puppet, Supt. Deasy.
Come on, Diane — how can this be described as “research.” You know research. You have a doctorate. You headed OERI for heavens sake! While one may have a hypothesis about what may be found, a researcher must be open to all evidence with any reasonable set of findings. In reading your notice, you identify the outcomes in advance! Actually, I think an exploratory investigation and report are great ideas. I suspect the Chile experience is problematic and that we can learn from it. But Julian doing that would be investigative journalism, not research. Respectfully, Max
Policyjazz, you are right, of course. Research begins with questions, not answers. However, there is little doubt that vouchers failed in Chile. What Heilig hopes to do is document what can be learned as the goverent attempts to steer a different direction. Very difficult after so many years.
No serious researcher would advertise his findings in advance of actually doing the research.
Nor is there “little doubt that vouchers failed in Chile,” except if one makes up one’s mind in advance of reading the research.
Bravo et al.’s 2009 paper (athena.sas.upenn.edu/petra/papers/voucherpaper.pdf) found that Chilean vouchers “increased high school (grades 9-12) graduation rates by 3.6 percentage points and the percentage completing at least two years of college by 2.6 percentage points. An examination of distributional effects indicates that individuals from both poor and non-poor backgrounds on average benefitted from the reforms and that the reform led to a modest reduction in earnings inequality.”
Gallego’s 2006 paper found that vouchers improved both the private schools and the public schools too: hernando.cl/educacion/Bibliografia/Chile/Gallego_Vouchers.pdf
Apparently if someone even thinks about challenging the accuracy of claims about the success of self-styled “education reform” in Chile then the results of one’s research are automatically discounted. In advance. No need to read or think. Hmmmm…
I will now quote the Chairwoman against the Chairwoman:
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
And I will invoke one of the highest principles of the “hidden hand” fundamentalists: let people battle it out in the free marketplace of ideas.
Don’t agree? Then convince your Lord Coleman and Her Ladyship Rhee to get up on a public stage with Diane Ravitch and have a frank and full discussion, one-on-one.
Game, set, match, Julian Vazquez Heilig and Diane Ravitch.
May I invoke the Little League mercy rule?
😎
Why isn’t Julian finding grant funding to do this study? His university is one of the most well funded in the nation. Most of the rest of us write an abstract for our grant proposals that do not include outcomes in advance of the data collection.