Chris Lubienski is a Professor of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois. He was invited to testify before a U.S. Senate committee on the subject of vouchers. The committee was considering the reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (aka vouchers). Please be aware that vouchers have never been endorsed by voters; wherever they exist, they were enacted by legislatures. Voters in Florida decisively rejected vouchers in 2012, as did voters in Utah in 2007.

Lubienski’s written testimony is here.

The video of the hearings is long. If you want to watch, it is here.

Lubienski reviews voucher research in an impartial manner. Overall, he finds that voucher schools do not produce higher test scores.

If you choose not to watch the hearings or read his testimony, here are his conclusions:

The academic impacts of vouchers on student achievement are generally lacking, and sporadic and inconsistent, at best. Even focusing only on the studies highlighted by the pro-voucher Friedman Foundation, most found no effect for the clear majority of overall and subgroup analyses. However, for both achievement and attainment, the problem is that findings of impact that do exist reflect no underlying causal logic. In the exceptional cases where researchers report an impact, they appear to have an effect for one group in one grade in one subject, but not with that same group in a different subject, or year, or in a different city — or even if examined in a different study, even by the same researchers. Indeed, the equity premise for vouchers — that private schools offer students a better educational opportunity — may be misguided, since nationally representative evidence indicates that private schools are no more effective (and often less so) than public schools 14(Braun, Jenkins, & Grigg, 2006; Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014; Reardon, Cheadle, & Robinson, 2009). So there are reasons for caution in hearing claims about the impact of vouchers. Said another way, there are better arguments for vouchers than their academic impacts.
At the same time, while we have evidence on the academic benefits (or lack thereof) of vouchers, policymakers and researchers may also need to attend to the question of potential social costs. Research points to concerns about social segregation from choice programs that may further hinder educational opportunity for disadvantaged students, relative to their more advantaged peers, even though disadvantaged students are often the intended beneficiaries of voucher policies. As the OECD noted:

“School competition can involve costs and benefits that may not be equally distributed across students. Some of the intended benefits of competition… are not necessarily related to student achievement, and must be weighed against the possible cost in equity and social inclusion. (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2014)”

Weighing the potential costs and benefits of education policies is a contentious and difficult exercise, with serious implications for individuals, schools, families, and communities. While there is an obvious appeal to interventions that may appear to be a panacea for the deep-seated problems facing urban schools, the best evidence in this case indicates that this approach is not particularly effective, and should be treated by policy makers with a reasonable degree of caution.