A new working paper presents findings from an evaluation of the Indiana voucher program—a hot topic given the Trump Administration’s embrace of private school choice. Mark Berends (University of Notre Dame) and Joe Waddington (University of Kentucky) examine the impacts of the voucher program (a.k.a. Indiana Choice Scholarship Program) on Hoosier State students in upper elementary and middle school (mostly grades 5–8) who used a voucher to transfer to a private school during the 2011–12 through 2014–15 years, which were the first four years of the program.
Indiana’s program is now open to both low- and middle-income families, with lower tuition amounts available to the latter group; the average scholarship amount is still pretty low, at about $4,700 in grades 1–8. All students in private schools enrolling voucher students must take the state test. Over 34,000 students received a voucher in 2016–17, and the analysis focuses on the roughly 4,000 lowest-income students (i.e., those receiving the full voucher) who moved from a public to private school for the first time. They are matched to similarly poor public school peers in the same grade, year, and school as the student who receives a voucher and attends a private school the following year. They also match the two groups on a host of other observable characteristics like prior test scores and demographics such that they have similar likelihoods of receiving a voucher.
Descriptive findings show that low-income voucher students are moving into private schools substantially lagging behind their new peers by up to half of a standard deviation (SD). But the headline is that, overall, students who receive a voucher experience an average annual loss in math of 0.10 SD after attending a private school, compared to matched public school students. The biggest losses in math occur during the first and second years; they still lag behind in year three. But by year four, those who remain have regained what they lost, and statistically significant differences between voucher and public school students in math achievement disappear. That being said, the lowest achieving students who receive a voucher and attend a private school tend to return to the public school, so these later estimates are a little noisier and may in part be measuring persistence.
As for English Language Arts (ELA), there are no significant differences overall (both groups perform similarly), though voucher students attending Catholic schools see small gains. Moreover, when looking at achievement over time, voucher students have slightly higher ELA achievement by year four, after recovering from losses in years one and two. What about those who return to the public school system? Students who receive a voucher and then go back to a public school in a later year score 0.24 SD lower in math and 0.13 SD lower in ELA. Results are similar in the program for both white and black students.
Analysts posit an explanation for the empirical rough ride: Maybe we’re seeing voucher students adjust to their new schools and their schools adjust to them? It seems likely to this reader that the voucher movement would experience its own set of growing pains, especially when stretched across the state, similar to the scale-up challenge we’ve seen in the charter movement. In the face of multiple, tepid voucher findings, though, it’s our own tolerance and understanding of such growing pains that is being tested.
SOURCE: R. Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends, “Impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program: Achievement Effects for Students in Upper Elementary and Middle School,” Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, University of Notre Dame (ongoing).
