Studies from Indiana and Louisiana found that the longer students stay in a private school through a voucher program, the more likely they are to catch up with their old public school classmates.
The Louisiana study found that voucher students showed no significant difference in math and English scores after three years.
This report shows progress for the school choice program. A 2016 study found that the voucher program negatively impacted students’ test scores in the first two years. But by year three, the students “recovered substantially” from the losses.
A subset of lower-achieving students showed increased English language arts test scores after three years over their public school peers.
The Louisiana study researched the standardized test scores of low-income, public school students (grades 3-8) who were picked by lottery to switch to a private school.
The study doesn’t give a definite reason for the initial drop in performance, but the authors speculated several options: that changing schools is disruptive, the program implementation may have been rushed, and that public schools prepared their students for state accountability tests. Meanwhile, private schools have other, arguably better, goals.
This research can benefit both sides of the debate. Students do backslide but catch up after a few years.
The Indiana private school choice study, which is being peer-reviewed, showed similar results to that of Louisiana. The unpublished research analyzed the largest private school choice systems in the country. They found that only voucher students’ math test scores were negatively impacted for the first few years, and there was no difference in English scores.
In the fourth year, voucher students caught up, and actually surpassed their public school classmates in English scores.
School choice not only benefits students, but also public schools through increased competition. A North Carolina State School University study found that “Thirty of the 42 evaluations of the effects of school-choice competition evaluations on the performance of affected public schools report that the test scores of all or some public school students increase when schools are faced with competition.”
The benefit of competition may be the biggest perk of school choice, as summarized by Milton Friedman:
“Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go. We are far from that ultimate result,” Friedman said. “If we had that – a system of free choice – we would also have a system of competition, innovation, which would change the character of education.”
This sure sounds better than a system focused on test scores and state-mandated educational benchmarks. Free choice allows multiple paths to success, rather than to be forced through one form of education.
