Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been a voucher researcher for two decades. The more he studied vouchers, the more he realized that they harm children. In this post, he looks at the students who use a voucher, but change their minds and return to public schools.
Cowen writes:
Author: Josh Cowen
We don’t talk enough about children who give up their school vouchers.
One of the many problems with the “Education Freedom” marketing campaign for school privatization—and it’s a problem with the market approach to education more generally—is that schools are anything but products to sample.
Betsy DeVos likes to say that schools shouldn’t be “one size fits all.” She’s conceding more than she knows with that analogy because unlike clothing, or a car you can test drive down at the Ford dealer, there’s a real cost to trying a school on and having it fail to fit.
Study after study has shown how harmful school mobility is for kids, both those who actually move between schools and those whose classrooms are full of peers coming in and out.
As Russell Rumberger, an expert in this area has succinctly summarized:
“The research literature suggests that changing schools can harm normal child and adolescent development by disrupting relationships with peers and teachers as well as altering a student’s educational program.”
And in the general population of public school children, we know who’s likely to be more mobile. They’re students of color, students from families with lower levels of income, students with special academic needs, and students with housing insecurity.
No one’s saying student mobility isn’t an issue for public schools, but public educators don’t see student churn as a feature instead of a bug. For example, a key element of the federal McKinney-Vento Act designed to help homeless kids is a set of best practices to help kids stay in one single public school even if they can’t remain in one stable home environment.
States with large-scale voucher programs are beginning to report out statistics for how many users come from public or private schools each year. And by the way these statistics put a lie to the claim from activists that vouchers are needed for families to choose, because we know from states like Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin that more than 75% of voucher kids were already in private school without taxpayer support.
But now we need more statistics reported on the mirror image: how many new students give up their vouchers each year. Recent numbers from Florida indicate roughly 60% of new voucher users give the voucher up after just a couple of years.
Think about that number as the voucher equivalent of a public school mobility or drop-out rate—both statistics used by critics to help indict public educational quality.
When I was working on an official evaluation of Milwaukee’s voucher program more than a decade ago, I led two reports on exactly these sorts of children. We found that around 15% of kids gave up their vouchers every year. Meaning that, as in Florida, more than half the kids we were studying left private schools over a short period of time!
Who were those kids? They were more likely to be Black, lower scoring on the state exam, and more likely to be enrolled in schools that had lots of other voucher-using kids (i.e. newer schools that popped up to take tax dollars once the program was created, rather than more established private institutions).
What happened when they left? Well actually that was a bit of good news. In still the only study to track kids over time after giving up their vouchers, we found that they enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools and then improved substantially after arriving. The shame of it was they had to lose some academic growth in the voucher program before their parents realized it was a poor fit and fixed the problem.
Sometimes though, kids may even want to stay in their private school but the school itself shuts down and they have to move anyway. Voucher activists pushing an entrepreneurial approach to education don’t talk enough about the consequences of failure. For example, in Milwaukee, 41% of private schools that ever took tax dollars eventually shut down.
Imagine what critics of public schools would be saying right now if public schools had a 41 percent failure rate!
We’re not talking about a local Burger King that shuts down and a family has to drive a few extra blocks to get that Whopper they crave from the next closest franchise. Or has to go to Taco Bell or Arby’s instead. We’re talking about potentially major academic and social setbacks for kids.
Finally, there’s one more reason voucher leavers matter—and it’s a bit technical so bear with me. Social scientists prioritize randomized control designs to estimate impacts of policy interventions. And when randomization isn’t possible, we try to find approaches that come close.
The problem that student exits from voucher programs causes for researchers is they create additional hurdles to estimating accurate impacts of those programs. All of the randomized studies of voucher programs have showed similar exit rates to our study in Wisconsin.
And in at least one study of Louisiana vouchers, the authors had to acknowledge that those exits—precisely the students who as in Wisconsin were not doing well in the program—probably caused any positive estimates of the program to be overstated. There are techniques researchers can use to adjust for that error, but no one agrees on exactly the right approach, so it continues to be a problem.
So to summarize: we need to know a lot more about kids who give up their vouchers. Most importantly because the evidence we do have tells us that school mobility is on balance a setback for kids, and we know kids exiting voucher programs are already more likely to be at some form of risk than those who stay.
But we also need to know because as a practical matter, voucher exits can cause analytical hurdles to studies estimating voucher impacts on learning or on educational attainment.
And what that means is that in the future, if voucher supporters trumpet a new study—credible or otherwise—that purports to show positive impacts over time, the very first question we need to ask is: how many kids left the program because it wasn’t working for them?
Based on the data already available, the answer will be another indictment for voucher programs.
Every child should get a voucher for education to do with as they and their parents see fit.
If they want to spend it toward a private school, fine.
But if they wish to spend it on a computer and books, that’s fine too.
If every child does not get a voucher, NO child should get a voucher.
How’s that for choice?
This is interesting and it ties directly into the research I did a few years ago on the high dropout rates of military-dependent children. Same disruptive churning issues for schools and for students.
Vouchers are simply bad, politically motivated policy and so are ESAs. They are reckless and wasteful, but it sounds like parents in Florida are figuring this out for themselves. These “scholarships” are way to shuttle mostly Black and Brown students into separate and unequal schools run by amateurs and religious zealots. The quality of education in these schools is poor, and the parents realize they made a mistake after removing their child from the local public schools.
“Study after study has shown how harmful school mobility is for kids, both those who actually move between schools and those whose classrooms are full of peers coming in and out.“
This is without a doubt the most obvious truth I ever experienced in my 40 years as an educator. Kids need a stable, positive peer group relationship. This is why extra-curricular activity is such an important adjunct to the life of the great school
School churn goes with poverty/ economic instability. My mother often told me of attending 6 different 1st grades [pubschs] in the Depression. Her father was employed by his family’s hard-hit mfg biz, & had to move from town to town, trying to to expand sales. Periodically she was sent to live with the other grandparents, where she regularly lost friends, as families lost their home mortgages and had to move away.
Now we impose school-churn on lower-income families—even more than they can be expected to experience in seeking employment/ affordable homes— through our egregious monetizing/ privatization of waning public goods. And call it a good thing! School choice!
Laurene Powell-Jobs wanted homeless students to receive their educational experiences out of the backs of vans and buses. The wealthy do not care about education or students. Betsy DeVos has ten yachts and wants eleven. That’s all there is to it.
Here’s a factor which Josh has left out: what happens to the money?
Early on in the arrival of charters, the language of the privatizers was that the funds accompanied kids who left the public schools to go to charters. But soon, in Boston, we saw that when kids left charters and returned to our public schools, the money had been allocated to the charters and did not follow the child back. After I brought this up to our union president, he began a campaign to restore our funding. The state, reluctantly, changed the process so that funds are dispersed at several times over the year instead of all at once in the fall.
Now of course, we see that as with vouchers, some students have never attended public schools. Their first entry into school is at charters. Rather destroys the argument that public schools funds should “follow the child”.
One group of people who know exactly what happens with students who leave public schools for some experimental gimmick and then return to public schools are teachers. Teachers deploy all of the resources available in public schools to help bring those kids back where they need to be. Most trachers are too busy teaching to write up their experiences for research reports, but I would expect that some fascinating focus groups could be assembled.
Thank you for an interesting post. School vouchers have been a controversial topic for a long time, and for students, and I think its biggest negative impact is reflected in student achievement. Once students give up their vouchers, school mobility will occur. Herbers et al. (2013) indicate that school mobility raises the possibility of low achievement, behavioral issues, grade retention, and high dropping out of school, by using data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study over 25 years. More specifically, students who move school more frequently between kindergarten and the 12th grade may experience five phenomena: 1. a lower probability of finishing high school on time; 2. a reduction in the number of years they spend in school; 3. a decrease in the prestige of their careers; 4. an increase in depressive symptoms; and 5. an increased probability of being arrested as an adult. These phenomena are most pronounced between 4th grade through 8th grade.
The study by Herbers et al. can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4139923/
Excellent.
The rise of homelessness for children, already the most vulnerable public school population, and the number of charters which shut down (because like the businesses they are, one in four fail) are destabilizing factors which also harm student achievement.
For children whose lives are in tumult, school is where responsible, dependable adults are consistently found. Teachers are able to be more effective advocates for kids in their care, especially siblings, when they know the children and don’t have to constantly re-establish their trust.