Christopher Lubienski is a professor of educational policy, organization, and leadership at the College of Education at the University of Illinois. He has written extensively about markets and schools. His most recent book is “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.”
He writes here about the recent studies of vouchers:
For years we’ve heard about how the most rigorous studies of voucher programs consistently show significant gains for students — especially urban minority students — and no evidence of harm. While that claim was highly questionable, it was nonetheless a central talking point from voucher advocates intent on proving that vouchers boost academic achievement. The idea that vouchers didn’t hurt, and probably helped, the students trapped in failing urban schools and most in need of options was used to justify calls for the expansion of vouchers from smaller, city-level policies to state-wide programs open to an increasing number of students.
Now, a slew of new studies and reviews — including some conducted by the same voucher advocates that had previously found vouchers “do no harm” — is telling quite a different story. New reviews of existing voucher studies are pointing out that, overall, the impact on the test scores for students using vouchers are sporadic, inconsistent, and generally have “an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
But some new studies on vouchers in Louisiana raise substantial concerns, finding that students using vouchers were significantly injured by using vouchers to attend private schools.
First, kudos to some of the study authors who have previously identified themselves as voucher advocates, in that they had the integrity to publish their findings.
But, what is particularly interesting here is the apparent confusion on the part of voucher-oriented reformers over these new results. After all, they have a strong theoretical account of how using vouchers to enroll in private schools will lead to greater gains in student learning. The fact that the new evidence shows otherwise is disorienting for reformers who had believed that private schools are better, and that moving poor students from public schools to private schools would lead to better outcomes. After all, according to them, at least, all the previous research supported their theory.
So what happened? Voucher proponents have wondered if the program was too new, too big, or open to too many private schools that had little experience with poorer children.
Actually, perhaps the past results were not so clear, and the new findings were not so unpredictable.
To understand why, let’s consider a related, even over-arching question before we return to these new voucher studies. Vouchers are premised on the assumption that private schools are more effective. It’s not just a matter of students in private schools getting higher scores on standardized tests, since it’s well known that they tend to serve, on average, more affluent students who would likely score higher no matter which type of school they attended. Indeed, some early studies on the public-private question from the 1980s and 90s indicated that, even when researchers control for student demographics and affluence, private, and especially Catholic schools in particular, appear to boost student performance more than do public schools — the so-called “private school effect.”
However, more recent research, including some I have collaborated on, has been showing the opposite: that public schools are actually performing at a level equal to or above private schools, and are thus often more effective. Such findings turn the assumptions for vouchers upside-down. Why would we want to move students from public schools, which the current generation of research demonstrates are actually more effective on average, to a less effective educational experience in private schools?
Voucher advocates thought they had an answer to that. They argued that their favored reports were “gold standard” studies that showed that private schools are better. Except those studies didn’t show that. Even if we accept their findings at face value, what they actually indicated is only that in a relatively few cases the types of students who would use a voucher to leave a failing urban public school for a presumably better private school sometimes scored higher. That is hardly grounds for scaling up the programs to broader populations. Those voucher studies are not drawing on representative samples of students, or representative samples of public or private schools, and thus tell us nothing about the question of what types of schools are more effective. Nevertheless, voucher advocates made this claim in an attempt to show their preferred reform leads to higher scores, and that we should thus expand these programs.
In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that improvements in student learning may have less to do with the type of school, but instead depend largely on the types of students served by a school. That is, vouchers sort students into more academically inclined groups by sending successful applicants to private schools, where they enjoy a beneficial “peer effect” of more affluent classmates, but not necessarily better teaching. The problem is that there are only so many affluent or academically inclined peers to go around, and as voucher programs are scaled-up, that beneficial peer effect dissipates.
Now, with the new results being released for a larger program in Louisiana, this may be exactly what we’re seeing. Students using vouchers in this state-wide program enrolled in poorer private schools with fewer affluent and academically inclined peers available to improve the learning experience.
These new findings are a direct contradiction to the frequent claim that no student has been shown to be harmed by vouchers. This raises an ethical issue. If vouchers have been an “experiment,” and randomized trials modeled after medical trials are showing evidence of harm, should policymakers end the experiment, as would be the case in medical research?
Regardless, now that voucher advocates are facing evidence challenging their claim that vouchers for private schools boost student performance, expect to see a further retreat from the test score measures they had been embracing to promote their claim on private school effectiveness. Instead, voucher proponents will move the goalposts and ask us to pay attention to other measures, such as persistence or parental satisfaction, instead. The problem is, those alternative measures are also problematic and susceptible to peer effects, as time will tell.
This is why Arizona wants statewide vouchers. Not only has the state managed to increase the inequity gap and resegregate schools via charter schools (allowing their good buddies to profit handsomely), but now even more of their buddies can run private schools with vouchers and have no accountability, hire unqualified “teachers” and pay them just above minimum wage, and dumb down the segment of the population that isn’t rich and white and attending either the BASIS or Great hearts charter chains or any of the high end private schools like Brophy. Destroy the public schools via charters & vouchers, and the GOP has pretty much guaranteed they’ll rule AZ for life.
Well, any time people get sick of ed reformers in government they can vote them out:
“A High Point University poll released last week found that two-thirds of state residents think public education in North Carolina is heading in the wrong direction. That unease was especially focused on the legislature’s willingness to let per-pupil funding slide and to let teacher assistants go.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article64419507.html#storylink=cpy
I think the evidence that they’re lousy advocates for children in public schools is overwhelming at this point. Not clear why public school parents and those who support public schools keep these folks on the public payroll.
Seems like we could do better than standardized tests and budget cuts, which is all “ed reform” is for public schools.
I was thrilled to hear Bernie Sanders address the importance of strong public education in last night’s debate. He said we cut taxes for billionaires and corporations, but we cannot “come up with the money to fix Detroit’s public schools; somehow we can’t make sure we have good and qualified teachers; somehow we cannot pay for summer school and after school programs for children…We are going to invest in our children and have the best public school system in the world.” While I don’t know how much he can deliver, I believe he would sincerely try.
States need to vote out the vandals and looters of public schools. Vouchers are a perfect example of looting public schools, and there is not a shred of evidence to support their value. We need change throughout our system, and we need to start with authentic leadership. Bernie will give public education a fighting chance.
“. . . the impact on the test scores for students using vouchers are sporadic, inconsistent, and generally have “an effect on achievement that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
Ay ay ay effin ay ay ay! Don’t know whether to laugh, cry, sigh, get pissed off, walk away from this crap. . . .
“Test scores” and “effect on achievement” more claptrap false goals and/or objectives for which the teaching and learning process should strive. If I believed in gods I’d say “false gods” (and perhaps that is what they are considering the holy high esteem in which those concepts are held). Seems to me that public education (and really education in general-private or public) deserve the scorn it receives due to he lies, errors* and falsehoods saturated throughout the whole realm.
Until we have radical, foundational, conceptual change the “Terror of Error” will continue to harm many students. How about a national commission on “Fidelity to Truth” in the public education sector???
*Originally typed terrors, which would also be true.
On the use and misuse and abuse of numbers & stats to increase $tudent $ucce$$…
As standardized tests scores and their offspring like VAM and SGP and the like lose their effectiveness of turning public education for the many into a private good for the few, the beneficiaries and enforcers of self-styled “education reform”—increasingly anxious to appear “agnostic” and ever ready to relabel and rebrand the same old failed eduproducts—are trying to turn to some other things than can be “measured.”
This blog. Yesterday, 3-6-16. Three postings.
1), Reader: Let Us Teach What We Know, Not “Grit” or Other Abstractions
2), Jan Resseger: Testing “Grit” as a Way of Blaming the Poor
3), Teacher: Why I Hate Pearson
Rheephormsters can’t help but, generally speaking, go for worst pedagogical and management practices. Self-correction in their circles is always Trumped by self-deception.
Summed up well by a NJ Comm. of Ed: “Whatever we’re doing, we need to double down.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/03/04/lyndsey-layton-governor-christie-fails-in-newark/
Doubling down on whatevers. That’s their entire bag of tricks in a single quote.
😎
If it is possible, vouchers represent an even greater anti-democratic sentiment than charters. With virtually no oversight, they allow taxpayer funds to be spent on almost any form of “education,” often in violation of the separation of church and state. Vouchers are more likely to help middle class students escape integrated schools than improve educational opportunities for the poor. Vouchers help underwrite the counter narrative to democratic principles. Vouchers enable the opposite of what a democratic nation should provide for its citizens.
YES. And so many citizens simply don’t know that they are allowing vouchers when the voucher system is euphemistically hidden behind titles like “student scholarships” or “tax credits.”
“This raises an ethical issue. If vouchers have been an “experiment,” and randomized trials modeled after medical trials are showing evidence of harm, should policymakers end the experiment, as would be the case in medical research?”
Not just an ethical issue tied to vouchers, but too rarely addressed. Experimental research on human subjects was once off limits unless the experimenter had proof of informed consent, with special cautions for underage participants. This was certainly true for university-based research, medical and social science research…with few exemption.
What we have witnessed for several decades is a total disregard for that caution, and a host of “interventions” modifying the architecture of public education and entering schools as if these are evidence-based, “best practices,” and so forth with not even a pause to ask for the informed consent of parents/caregivers or educators or members of a community , or taxpayers–fiats have become the rule, along with deep pockets for “disruptive innovation” as if that is either inevitable or an unquestioned virtue or both.
There is been much press about “unethical” tampering with test scores, but not much press coverage of the grand experiments in education (e.g., foisting the Common Core on schools in the absence of any evidence to support that large scale intervention) or unethical practice of foisting norm-based tests on students, then using those scores to judge teachers.
Nobody in the public eye has expressed outrage or even suspicion over the fact that about two thirds of students taking tests based on the CCSS have “failed.” These suspicious results should be considered as a form of “racketeering” or at least rigging especially when former test results showed more of an expected bell shape curve in the results. Then, we also have the inaccuracy of VAM which can damage or destroy careers, and nobody blinks an eye.