The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, one of the nation’s leading advocates for school choice, commissioned a study of Ohio’s voucher program. To what must have been their surprise and disappointment, the study concluded that students in voucher schools perform worse than students in public schools.
I was a founding member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation–now the Fordham Institute–and I will affirm that TBF told unpleasant truths, even to its own disadvantage and the disadvantage of its causes. I left the board in 2009, after I fell away from choice, competition, and accountability as answers to the needs of America’s students.
This is a study that does TBF proud, even though it disproves its foundational belief in school choice.
Here are the key findings:
There are now some 18,000 students receiving publicly funded vouchers in Ohio.
The voucher students are overwhelmingly low-income and minority, but somewhat higher-achieving and less economically disadvantaged than students who were eligible for vouchers but chose not to use them.
The public school students improved their performance, and the study attributes their improvement to the voucher program that they did not enroll in.
The effects: “The students who used vouchers to attend private schools fared worse on state exams compared to their closely matched peers remaining in public schools. Only voucher students assigned to relatively high-performing EdChoice eligible public schools could be credibly studied.”
The study was led by Dr. David Figlio of Northwestern University.
This study adds to the mountain of evidence that public schools in Ohio outperform the charter sector and the voucher sector. Does anyone think that policymakers and legislators in Ohio will do anything to support their much-maligned public schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In answer to the final question, no. From the Dayton Daily News, about the opinion of the ODE, relative to the Northwestern report, “Halpin chose to focus on the study’s positive findings, that EdChoice competition has created small improvements in public school performance “, followed by a direct quote, “Competition…incentivizes….”. Where were these findings in Figlio’s study?
Yes, the causation fallacy in full effect. Stats 101 must not be an Ohio official’s prereq course.
I think the problem with private/parochial/charter schools is teachers are ignored or silenced. Giving teachers a voice would vastly improve all schools.
Competition as a motivator for individuals (or, schools), appeals to those you seek total control. At a micro level, a person, who improves or works harder, as a result of generator, from within himself, has power and, is not controlled externally. The illusion that competition is necessary, feeds plutocratic insecurity, which manifests itself in the subjugation of other people. G.E.s Welsh, famously, proclaimed that the work force’s loyalty to an organization or, to the best interests of the customers/clients, lacked value. He was wrong. That motivation was essential to the growth and vitality of U.S. society and economy.
From Columbus Dispatch, “Chad Aldis Commentary”, “Figlio…studied…the macro effect of EdChoice on the public school system-its competitive effects…Competition by Ed Choice modestly improved academic achievement in the schools the voucher recipients left…Milton Friedman was right…”
Where, in Figlio’s research paper, is the substantiation for cause and effect for competitive motivation and school improvement?
These free marketers see competition as the solution to every issue. Most forget Adam Smith wrote a book on morality before Wealth of Nations. Where Smith argued open trade and specialization were an improvement over the guilds and central monarchies, I highly doubt he would agree the current, dysfunctional, corrupt economic system is efficient or functional. What we have now is a perversion of markets and a rigged system. That is Friedman’s legacy.
Free markets only work well when there is transparency, informed participants, parity, and adult supervision to enforce fairness. And where free markets fail, like education and health care, the public good needs a public sector. Try finding that plank in the GOP platform.
The failure evidence is in the financial sector’s long-term drag on the US economy, most recently documented by the Roosevelt Institute, in the work of Thomas Picketty and, in the 30-year theft of labor’s rewards, from their productivity gains.
No question labor and the middle class have not seen the rewards of productivity gains. Most of the theft from labor recently occurred under W. Bush, but started with Reagan and Clinton did not reverse the trends. I still wonder what happened to all those “poison assets” the banks held during the Great Recession. The bank bailout shifted enormous power to the financial sector away from main street. The Wall Street titans should have ben held accountable and pay a heavier price for poor judgment and incompetence. Socialized risk, privatized rewards.
Iceland did not bail out its corrupt institutions. They let the banks fail and devalued the currency. They have recovered and have an unemployment rate currently under 4%. If the 2008 meltdown taught us anything, it should be that some form of regulation is necessary to avoid reckless investing. http://www.worldfinance.com/infrastructure-investment/government-policy/failing-banks-winning-economy-the-truth-about-icelands-recovery
The use of vouchers to send low income minority children to private schools comes pretty close to the “Trading Places” dream of just about every teacher who works with struggling, inner city youth. After 15 years of being told that they and their schools are failing the students in their classrooms, the unspoken response, from exasperated teachers to know-nothing critics goes something like this:
Why don’t you take all those highly effective teachers from the suburbs and have them “trade places” with us – for just one year. Then they can show us how its done.
Well, sending poor black and brown students into presumably pricey private schools shows just what happens when teachers “trade places”. And these were the higher functioning students who made use of the vouchers.
That’s a fallacy of “reform.” “The teacher is the single most important variable.” This is a Bill Gates lie. I have taught middle class and poor students. Teachers in my middle class school that formerly taught in the South Bronx in a school with low test scores, now in the middle class school suddenly had students performing at or above grade level. It’s not the teachers’ issue. It’s POVERTY.
Exactly! The entire reform movement has been built on a series of calculated, pre-meditated lies, deceptions, and vacuous spin. Unfortunately for us, the media abdicated their responsibility on this and has become complicit in the ling list of failure and the very large pile of wasted money.
This can’t be true. Everyone knows private schools are better than government schools.
It won’t matter a bit- they’ll be back next legislative session to expand vouchers. The goal is a completely voucherized system.
No one in state government seems much interested in the 93% of kids who attend the unfashionable public sector schools. Thousands of state public employees in Columbus who ideologically oppose public schools. Utterly ridiculous.
Shows you what happens when the advantage of teaching “select” students disappears!
Good students make any teacher look like a genius. Think about the corollary.
I’ll wait to see what Sen. Sherrod Brown thinks about vouchers. Time’s a wasting. It only took him years (until this summer), to find out about the problems with charters. Unless he knew, and…..
Figlio is a NBER research associate. Can we expect his latest work, cited in this post, to published by NBER?
When there is little or no control of the variables, the most profound and far-reaching effect of competition, is it forces organizational members to sacrifice to maintain personal integrity. Even for the amoral, and immoral, the exercise of spinning falsehoods and keeping track of lies, is onerous.
Sounds like the entrenched politically powerful are afraid Trump will ruin there game not the country because the conservative coalition has never spoken publically if their concern over communities of color in the past or Muslim innocents abroad who have suffered at the hands of military objectives as collateral damage!
You can find an amusing set of “theories” about the results reported in this research at the 74. Why there? The Waltons, who funded the study as well as the 74, need to have an explanation for the results.
In any case, these narrowly focused studies of test scores as indicators of major educational achievements (or failures, or flat lines) are really misleading.
The game of test score comparisons is not unlike the “mine is bigger than yours” card that Trump exploited in the Republican debates as a signal for masculinity and dominance.
But that mindset, “Gotta be numero uno,” “Be better than anyone else,” is also pervasive in many male dominated affairs where a competitive drive is glorified. Thanks to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the same mentality rates the “performances” of countries based on test scores. In discussions of education, “high-performing nations” earn that label based on the test scores of their students. In the case of OCED tests, nations are rated based on the test scores of 15-year-old students who happen to be enrolled in schools.
https://www.the74million.org/article/ohio-study-latest-to-show-poor-voucher-results-7-theories-dissect-the-trend
“In any case, these narrowly focused studies of test scores as indicators of major educational achievements (or failures, or flat lines) are really misleading.”
Ya think?? LOL!!
Not only misleading but COMPLETELY INVALID!
There’s a mountain of evidence of untrustworthiness, manipulation and desperation to provide cover for politicians acting against America.
Policy makers keep throwing expectations at public educators and they manage to keep improving. The choice concept does not seem to be working. Perhaps the answer is accountability with support.
The term “accountability” is part of the contrivance and lexicon of those out to destroy the public sector. It only acts as a hammer. You won’t find any “accountability” among the politicians or, fully-captured government education departments, like the U.S. Dept. of Ed. and Koch state, departments of ed., e.g. $71 million, in federal tax dollars, to Ohio, to expand charter schools, that the citizens don’t want, Ohio’s David Hansen and, in Indiana, Tony Bennett. If the campaign contributions are high enough, you won’t find “accountability” in the private sector e.g. on-line schools, off shore tax dodges, etc.
The Republicans are the perpetrators of the “accountability” fraud, with the assistance of senators like Sherrod Brown, who couldn’t find the issue of charter school failure until this summer. Only one U.S. Democratic senator voted against the recent confirmation of a privatizing secretary of education.