Cory Turner and Anya Kamenetz of NPR look at two new voucher studies: one from Indiana, the other from Louisiana. The common thread is that voucher students lose ground academically in the first couple of years. Then, in the third or fourth year, they make up their losses and catch up with their public school peers.
The Indiana study, not yet peer-reviewed, found:
“The researchers studied student data for the program’s first four years and noticed an interesting pattern. If students stayed in their voucher schools long enough, the backslide stopped and their performance began to improve.
“The longer that a student is enrolled in a private school receiving a voucher, their achievement begins to turn positive in magnitude — to the degree that they’re making up ground that they initially lost in their first couple of years in private school,” Waddington tells NPR. “It’s like they’re getting back to where they started” before they enrolled in a private school.
“New voucher students fell statistically significantly behind their public school peers in math after switching. On average, those losses continued for two years in private school before students began making up ground. In the fourth year, those who were still enrolled in a voucher school appeared to catch up.
“In ELA, voucher students also lost ground but, ultimately, surpassed their public school peers by the fourth year.
“This pattern may give new hope to voucher supporters, but it comes with an important caveat: Many students did not stay in the system long enough to see this improvement, instead bouncing back to public schools, especially the lowest-achieving voucher students.”
So the lowest-achieving students returned to public schools, and the better-performing students showed gains. Hmm. No miracles there.
The study also found that vouchers are used by 3% of Indiana students. Half of them had never attended a public school. In other words, the voucher was used to pay tuition for students already attending a nonpublic school.
The other study, reported here yesterday, found a similar pattern of losses followed by a recovery.
Remember we were told for years that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? It turns out that this was speculation. It hasn’t happened. The students in voucher schools are not posting amazing gains. It takes four years in a voucher school to catch up to their public school classmates, and modest gains are registered by those who survive.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So they lose so much ground that it takes three years to catch back up with where they were and that’s supposed to be a good thing? Ay ay ay.
And that’s, of course, if you believe that test scores are worth more than the paper they’re printed on….
I don’t understand what is so miraculous about this third or fourth year at a private school. Kids backslide, and then somehow it all gets fixed?? Something is weird in this analysis.
Yes, imagine what would have happened had they not backslid. Wouldn’t they then be three or four years ahead?
And if this were reversed, there would be screams against public schools. Nothing miraculous here re: vouchers.
“something is weird in this analysis”
That’s because in the 3rd or 4th year, the ONLY students being looked at are the ones who remain in their private school. When school have the right NOT to teach the students who aren’t learning fast enough, they can show remarkable improvement over a period of years.
So the NOT peer-reviewed study has been marketed to NPR as if it is newsworthy.
This is the new ethic of “market your study” before it is ready for prime time.
The NOT peer-reviewed results also appear to be marginal and hardly worth the press from NPR.
So now we know what NPR stands for: Not Peer Reviewed
“Not Peer Reviewed (NPR)”
NPR is peerless
And, therefore, not reviewed
Reporting there is fearless
Of being in the nude
Good one, SomeDAM Poet.
Was Fordham’s Ohio voucher study reviewed by Anya on NPR? It would have been interesting to see if she could match the foreword’s citation of research “finding” about the benefit of competition to the paper’s content. BTW-the research conclusion that vouchers were a failure “surprised” its funders. What could they do? Write a foreword that…
“Vouchers are like Ketchup: worth waiting for”
If getting back to start
Is education goal
Then voucher is a wart
That folks should not extol
Nobody bothered to study those left in under resourced public schools. If these students have restricted options due to voucher drain, shouldn’t they be studied too? Even if what they state is true, these results are hardly a victory. Why bother to move them in the first place? If the students in voucher schools are mostly white, and those remaining in under funded public schools are black, is this victory? This is segregation, and the federal government has no business funding it, particularly for no better academic gains.
Years ago, I recall a study suggesting that changing schools was detrimental to children. They said it set a kid back about six months. Makes sense to me. You go from a place where everybody knows what you need to,a place that take awhile to learn who you are. If voucher alternatives were so dramatically better, catchup might occur quickly. This seems to support the need to keep a kid in a stable school.
“The study also found that vouchers are used by 3% of Indiana students. Half of them had never attended a public school. ”
So Indiana lawmakers have devoted hour after hour after hour to pushing policies that affect only 3% of students, half of whom didn’t “leave” public schools but actually were never public school students?
Doesn’t that seem nuts to you?
For NINETY SEVEN PER CENT of Indiana citizens this voucher obsession is completely irrelevant, yet education commissions in state legislatures spent whole sessions promoting it.
One would think at some point they could put in an hour of two of work directed to the 97% of students who are NOT in private schools. Is that an unreasonable demand?
The dissing of public schools are fueled by DARK MONEY and arrogance to the MAX. Ka-Ching!
Diane has followed the $$$$$ and so have others. And the people with DARK $$$$$ don’t send their kids to public schools…SAD.
Public school education is THE BEST and I would hire a public school grad over a preppy any day.
Money misspent (in the light, not in the dark) – Two state departments of ed and the U.S. Dept. of Ed. joined Gates, Broad and the usual suspects to fund Public Agenda. We all recall the first part of the ALEC template, manufacture a crisis. For K-12, it was “schools are failing”. Public Agenda’s crisis for higher ed…. drumroll… “The Waning of Confidence in Higher Ed.” Ohio and Nebraska are the two states with tax money to burn.
I presume Public Agenda is being snarky rather than disingenuous when it invokes “democracy”, as if the oligarchs funding the site ascribed to that form of government.
At the NPR site the extended article suggests that there is no “skimming” going on.
One characteristic of low income families is that there is a higher probability of home insecurity (trauma) — family drug abuse, loss/change of home, job loss, physical abuse, marital instability, contact with the criminal justice system, etc.
I wonder if this study of low income students is in fact noting two populations — one that is managing to have higher home stability, and therefore capable of continuing at the private school, and a second that is having higher home instability and is unable to last for more than two years at the private school. If one identified those kinds of trends, then you would likelier attribute the student success to family stability and not so much to anything private school did.
I find it ridiculous when articles report on studies saying “there is no skimming going on” without providing any evidence that there is no skimming going on. We are just supposed to take the word of the people who did the study and the reporters fail to due their due diligence and ask the questions that would allow us to know if there was skimming or not.
To whit: It is clear that there is attrition with students leaving. So when they say that students suffer a decline for a few years and suddenly do better, what does that mean?
The students who do well stay and the ones who don’t leave. Therefore after 4 years, the cohort you are studying will be missing the lowest performing students. Of course it would “show gains”. The students who remain are the one who will show gains.
Without having any numbers as to which students remained after 4 years and which disappeared, and their socioeconomic background, family structure, etc. this is a meaningless study.
The key words “Those who survive”
What I learned is that it take 4-years for the voucher schools to identify and get rid of the children that don’t make gains at the pace the greedy corporate pirates need to look better than the public schools.
My thoughts: PUKE! Pure PUKE!
Exactly: what these studies show is that low income kids with low test scores “test out” of their chosen religious schools in the first few years, go back to public school, while the average test score of the kids remaining is religious schools is the same as those in public school.
Isn’t this the very definition of skimming students?
Yes. And how does this nonsense get published as if it was real research?
Yeah, way too many uncontrolled variables (as noted in above thread) to rely on conclusions of this study. What one can can conclude is that even if the kids who remained in these voucher schools for four years were cherry-picked in some way– suggesting that they should have performed better than the norm– all we can conclude is that by year four they got up to grade-level & started advancing. [With no controlled comparison to how they might have done had they remained in their piblic schools.]
A very lukewarm commentary on voucher schools.
What I take from these studies is that no matter where kids go to school, they have no choice but take tests instead of getting educated.