For the past thirty years, school choice advocates have claimed that the best way to improve education was to give families public money to send their child to a private or religious school. The very fact of “privateness,” they said, meant better quality. This turns out not to be the case. Students never receive a voucher that is enough to pay for elite private schools. Typically, the voucher schools are lesser quality than the public school the cHold leaves, because voucher schools are not required to have certified teachers. In recent years, numerous studies show that children who leave a public school and go to a voucher school lose ground academically.
This study was published in 2018. Its findings are consistent with studies of voucher effects in the District of Columbia, Ohio, Indiana, and other states. Voucher schools are free to teach scientific nonsense and fake history. In Florida and elsewhere, they are free to discriminate against groups of people they don’t like.
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters write in the Journal of the American Economic Association that participation in Louisiana’s voucher program “lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and also reduces achievement in reading, science, and social studies. These effects may be due in part to selection of low-quality private schools into the program.”
Despite the negative effects of vouchers, Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and a host of school choice advocacy groups have continued to demand more and more funding for low-quality, unaccountable voucher schools. This funding is subtracted from public school funding, through a variety of schemes. Whether it’s a tax creditor a “scholarship,” individuals and corporations are diverting money to private schools that belongs in the state coffers to support public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For Charles Koch and the DeVoses, there’s reason to think that the goal was never better educational outcomes. Window dressing was required for propaganda purposes
Private profit and non-profit and religious schools have the opportunity to instill in the students of the working class, authoritarianism. And, the schools legitimize entitlement based on notions of superiority tied to the demographics of gender, race and religion..
yes, a key point: teaching authoritarianism, controlling the debate
School choice has never been about improving education even though it was sold to parents as such. It has always been about replacing the public sector with a private sector. It has always been about undermining unions and allowing private schools to discriminate against under served groups. Instead of bringing diverse students together so different groups of people can learn tolerance and acceptance, various private options are free to promote segregation and inferior academics. With so little oversight and accountability there are ample opportunities for waste, fraud and poor quality curricula. All of these inferior options are wasteful, and they drain funds from the schools that most students attend.
I think the “school choice movement” has allowed politicians and policy makers to neglect and ignore public schools and public school students- made that acceptable. All lawmakers have to say is “I support vouchers” and their obligations on education are met.
Is it any wonder politicians have grabbed this with both hands? It gives them a complete pass on “education”. Hand out a low value voucher for private schools and they don’t have to do any work on “public education” at all. And they don’t do any work on public schools- there was no urgency or effort on behalf of public schools in the pandemic at all- instead we got the usual ed reform mantra on “choice” and no practical or useful assistance of any kind.
Anything public schools succeeded in or didn’t succeed in during this pandemic was solely the result of the efforts of the individual schools- none of the tens of thousands of people they’re paying in government assisted at all. Ed reform not only allows this situation, they encourage it. Check the ed reform boxes on cheerleading charters and lobbying for private school vouchers and you’re good to go- nothing is offered to public school students at all.
The US Department of Education and the Trump Administration spend more time promoting and campaigning for private school vouchers in this pandemic than they did assisting public schools. This is ludicrous- 90% of students attend the schools they’re ideologically opposed to so they simply decided to expend no effort or attention on them at all. This is a direct result of the complete capture of policy by ed reformers. It’s distorted and overwhelmingly tilted toward “choice” because ed reform is an echo chamber and that’s the policy preference of ed reformers. No advocates for or supporters of public schools are permitted inside the echo chamber- you’re either a full time charter and voucher cheerleader or you’re not at the table.
What does this mean for the 90% of students in public schools? It means they are always the last priority. And they have been. Over and over and over, thru Bush and then Obama and now Trump. There are public school students who will graduate high school in June who have NEVER had a President who supported public schools.
Good to see the faith folks have developed in economists analyzing education. I am sure that if this paper was cited back when it was published there would have been many comments arguing that nothing done by economists, especially ones trained and Harvard and MIT, could possibly be correct.
Most states with school choice programs do not have or require data on their programs. The EdWeek Research Center conducted a national survey about private school-choice policies in each state. This survey, published in February 2020 and funded by the Walton Family Foundation, sought information on state “choice” policies in three broad categories: public reporting/transparency, accountability for quality, and student access/eligibility.
Survey results are available in a data base you can search by state. A checkmark indicates a state requires the policy for at least one of its private school-choice programs. There are 28 states and the District of Columbia (DC) with policies that channel money to private schools through “choice programs.” Most choice programs offer parents at least one of three main types: vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts. All of these schemes recruit students who might otherwise attend public schools. Some schemes, especially vouchers, raid funds intended for public schools to finance private schools.
With 29 sources of data, the EdWeek survey makes it possible to see which policies states (and DC) have formalized and which offer an unregulated environment for choice.
It is also possible to make inferences about the “freedoms” to discriminate that private schools and their lobbyists hold dear. Here is what I learned from the survey database.
State-level transparency.
15 states list of all private schools eligible/participating in a school-choice program,
12 list all scholarship-granting organizations participating in a school-choice program,
8 publish results on national or state assessments, 6 publish high school graduation rates, and
4 track student enrollment/participation by demographic group.
In other word most states with choice programs assume little of no responsibility for providing information about who can enroll in these programs or how well the available programs are functioning in relation to national or state assessments, high school graduation rates, and enrollments by demographic groups. Private school choice programs have freedoms to operate in a “black box.” They are not held to accountability standards that public schools must meet.
Access to, eligibility for, and state priorities for private school choice. In
20 states, “choice” laws prioritize eligibility of students in low-income families.
14 states prioritize eligibility of students regardless of disability status.
8 states– prioritize eligibility of students in low-performing schools.
At the same time, few states require choice-participating private schools to admit students regardless of religion (only six), regardless of disability status (only five), or regardless of sexual orientation of the student (only three).
In sum, most choice programs for private schools are largely free to discriminate among students on the basis of religion, disability status, and sexual orientation while also recruiting students in low income families, students with disabilities, and those attending low performing schools. Parents of students with disabilities are really stiffed by state policies.
Indicators of private school “quality” in choice programs. The attributes of quality are thin. In
17 states, private schools participate in national or state student assessments.
15 states require scholarship-granting organizations for school-choice to be financially sound.
14 states, require participating private schools to be financially sound.
14 states require all private school employees to have criminal background checks.
11 states require private schools to employ teachers with a bachelor’s degree. Only
5 states require private schools to employ licensed teachers.
The “private school choice industry” is sustained by state policies that encourage marketing to parents of vulnerable students. They operate in an unregulated policy environment. In this respect the opportunities for profiteering exist along with illegal and morally reprehensible discrimination.
EdWeek writers have produced an excellent summary of additional concerns about the availability and use of choice programs, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/02/28/private-school-choice-programs-fall-short-on.html