Louisiana’s school voucher program is actually harming students academically, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. While the paper will surely be used by school choice opponents to call for an end to the program, a detailed look shows that school choice advocates should instead use it to call for program reforms.
The paper showed that attending a private school participating in the Louisiana Scholarship Program would increase the likelihood of a failing math score by 50 percent. “Voucher effects for reading, science and social studies are also negative and large,” researchers wrote. “The negative impacts of vouchers are consistent across income groups, geographic areas, and private school characteristics, and are larger for younger children.”
The paper was authored by Atila Abdulkadiroglu with Duke University, Parag Pathak with MIT and Christopher Walters with the University of California at Berkeley.
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The trio explained that students were learning less because the private schools participating in the voucher program were so bad, while high-quality private schools wouldn’t participate. Researchers found that private schools entering the program were quickly losing students, seemingly showing that schools enter the program in a last-ditch effort to maintain falling enrollment numbers.
If that’s the case, Louisiana needs to improve the program to ensure high-quality private schools are interested in participating. “These results suggest caution in the design of voucher systems aimed at expanding school choice for disadvantaged students,” researchers wrote.
School choice advocates have long urged school choice programs to regulate private schools only lightly or else high-quality schools would keep their distance. The Louisiana Scholarship Program has “significant regulatory intrusion on private school autonomy,” according to the Center for Education Reform. The problems include “required open enrollment for voucher students, mandatory state testing, and exclusion of new private schools from participating.” If a high-quality private school is doing fine without voucher students or those burdensome regulations, it has little reason to join the program. Overall, the group gives Louisiana’s voucher law a C grade, behind five other states and Washington, D.C.
The study also has a couple of other problems that give us reason to doubt that the program hurts students. It only examined students in their first year after changing schools. It’s possible students learn more the longer they stay in a private school. A student’s first year in a new school can be difficult for many reasons, so it would be understandable if academic performance dipped before improving.
The study also only looked at school-wide scores without following individual students in the voucher program. It’s possible that individual students in the program are excelling while their peers stall, or that students are avoiding the failing private schools that participate. Two-thirds of private schools in the program are meeting or exceeding academic expectations, up from less than half last year, according to the Louisiana Education Department. Several of the schools that posted poor scores have since closed.
The Louisiana Scholarship Program gives low-income families in bad public schools tuition vouchers for private schools. About 7,400 students participate across 131 schools. It has been a statewide program since 2012.
Undoubtedly, some will use the study as ammo to call for an end to the scholarship program. Instead, the study shows that, with a few tweaks, the program can be successful. High-quality private schools need to be allowed to take voucher students while operating in whatever way they’ve been found to be successful. New schools that show promise must also be allowed to participate.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
