Educational Vouchers: Multiple Issues and Contradictory Results
The Merriman-Webster online dictionary offers three definitions for "voucher": "...a documentary record of a business transaction; a written affidavit or authorization; a form or check indicating a credit against future purchases or expenditures." None of the three even approaches the emotionally charged version of the term "voucher" when it comes to the current debate swirling around public vs. private schools. This paper digs into the "vouchers" - or "scholarships," or "subsidies," if you prefer - provided to families in several cities and states, to move their children from less desirable, academically troubled public schools to more desirable, for-profit private, mainly religious schools.
Long before there was any discussion about vouchers, Horace Mann of Massachusetts - the "Father of American public school education" - was in the vanguard of the movement (1837) to solidify support for quality public education, excellence in teacher training, and free libraries (North Carolina State University, 2003). As the first Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann won financial support for public schools and doubled the wages of teachers. Later, his influence extended well beyond his home state. His "Common School Journal" (1841-1848) advocated - successfully, in most cases - for taxpayer support of public schools, that it was every child's American right to a free education, and that religious schools should pay their own way.
Meanwhile, in the late 1870s, the voucher concept's likely genesis emerged through the writings of English philosopher John Stuart Mill (Howell & Peterson, 2002). Mill, a celebrity thinker in the UK, favored compulsory pubic education albeit he insisted families should have the right to choose their children's schools. About his turbulent times, he said England was a "...battlefield for sects and parties, causing the time and labor which should have been spent in educating, to be wasted in quarreling...." Little could Mill have known that today, roughly one hundred thirty years later in the American educational system, there truly is a battlefield between the proponents of voucher system and those against taking money away from public schools. It pits a loose conservative coalition up against a loose coalition of unions, liberals, and church vs. state hard-liners.
Milwaukee & Cleveland and Evaluation Issues
Credit for the initiation of the American school voucher concept generally goes to economist Milton Friedman, who, in the 1955-57 period, with his wife Rose, argued vigorously for vouchers. "Governments...could finance [education] by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on 'approved' educational services," he said. "Parents would then be free," Friedman continued, "to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services...of their own choice" (Howell & Peterson, 2002).
Among the first of several large cities to launch large voucher programs were Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1990), and Cleveland, Ohio (1996). In Milwaukee, the voucher program (Milwaukee Parental Choice Program - MPCP) began with 7 private schools, 300 voucher students, and roughly $700,000 paid to parents of those 300 students. By the 2000-2001 school year, an estimated 9,600 students were paying to attend 103 private schools - at a cost of $49 million. And so, the next question logically is how has the program been doing? What are the data to show whether students attending private schools are improving (since leaving their public schools) - or to show that there is little change, little advancement in the learning among the voucher students? This is where the evaluative difficulties enter into the picture of assessment.
A highly respected research team led by Kim K. Metcalf (Metcalf, 2002), of the Indiana Center for Evaluation, has studied the studies and the original program research. Utilizing the exact same set of data from the Milwaukee voucher program, "...three different teams of researchers produced three different results," Metcalf states in the report, titled "Interpreting Voucher Research: The Influence of Multiple Comparison Groups and Types." Metcalf continues [lengthy research team lists omitted for space purposes; all researcher names are found in Metcalf's above-mentioned report]:
One team of researchers found no significant impact on students' achievement after four years; a second team found significant positive impacts in reading and mathematics after four years; and no third team found no significant impact in reading, but a significant impact in mathematics after four years. Data that are available from the first two years of the voucher experiment in Cleveland have similarly been subjected to varying analytic approaches producing differential results. (Metcalf, 2002)
Another researcher looking into...
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