United States General Accounting Office
September 2002
Studies of privately funded voucher programs "provide some evidence that African American students who used vouchers to attend private schools showed greater improvements in math and reading than students in the comparison group, and have also found that the parents of voucher users of all racial and ethnic groups were consistently more satisfied with their children's education than parents of comparison group students." So reports the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO) in its new review of the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs. That vouchers help African-American children academically will come as no surprise to anyone who has read early research on this topic, especially that of Paul Peterson and colleagues. In fact, much of the data reported on by the GAO comes directly out of that research. This analysis by the government's independent accounting arm adds to the legitimacy of that research. Are privately funded vouchers (a.k.a. scholarships) a panacea for all that ails urban education in America? No. But such programs provide a significant tool in the struggle to improve educational opportunities for children in some of the country's most dysfunctional school systems. We note that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has donated about $2 million to such a scholarship program in Dayton, Ohio since 1998. In Dayton, the GAO notes, African-American voucher users showed improvement in reading, but the study in Dayton did not reach the 95 percent confidence level (the gold standard) for determining an effect to be significant. (It did reach a 90 percent confidence level, as previously reported by Peterson's team, meaning there is 90 percent certainty that these reading gains did not occur by chance.) According to the GAO, the New York study was more reliable; it shows "positive and statistically significant differences on reading, math, and composite test scores between African American voucher users and the control (no voucher) group." One interesting question raised by the New York study - as well as the Washington and Dayton studies - is why voucher programs help African American students improve academically but don't seem to have much effect on other children. The GAO report does not explain, but this is a question worth exploring further. This report will not end the voucher debate but it should encourage further experimentation with private scholarships and research on their long-term effects. To see for yourself, surf to http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02752.pdf.