Class Size vs. School Vouchers for Minority Student Achievement

Introduction

The continuous achievement gap between African-American students and their white peers is a major problem in American education. The gap in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) diminished in the 1970s, but since the early 1980s it has remained largely unchanged.

Evidence from many studies suggests that African-American students may benefit more than other students from improvements in educational quality. For example, class size effects have been greatest for African-American children.

This paper focuses on the effects of two programs — voucher programs and programs that reduce class size — on the achievement of African-American children, and on related studies covering both minority and non-minority students. Evidence for the effects of both programs is presented. In many studies across many locations, both voucher programs and class size reduction have been found to significantly increase student performance. The policy implications of these findings are discussed to determine whether class size reduction is a better alternative than voucher programs for increasing student performance.

The impact of class size versus voucher programs on student achievement has been a widely debated issue for years. Educational vouchers were proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a means of improving the quality of elementary and secondary education (Molnar, 1998). In recent years, the use of vouchers has resurfaced, particularly as a method to help minority students. Vouchers provide public money for students to attend private schools.

Several experimental voucher programs have been introduced in the past decade. One of the oldest and largest is a pilot program begun in 1990 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Initial analyses of this data suggested little or no improvement in the quality of education as the result of a voucher system (Molnar, 1998). These results, however, are quite controversial and are the subject of considerable debate. More recent pilot programs in New York City and Cleveland have provided additional evidence for this debate. Preliminary, and equally controversial, results from the New York Choice Scholarship Program suggest that a voucher system has produced modest improvements in test scores for low-income students who transfer to private schools as a result of a scholarship program.

Advocates of smaller classes argue that students learn better in smaller classes where the teacher has more time for each child. However, until recent years there was little conclusive evidence that smaller classes are more effective, so the idea was set aside in favor of other programs, such as the voucher program. As a result, many public school students — particularly those in inner-city schools — have been crowded into classes of up to 40 students.

Recently, the issue of small class size attracted a great deal of media and political attention as numerous studies presented clear evidence that smaller class size really does work (Taylor, 2002). In the early grades, all children learn better in classes of 15 to 17 students, and the improvements are even greater for poor children in inner-city schools. According to recent studies, the following evidence demonstrates the need for smaller class size:

Long-lasting effects: According to Harvard economist Frederick Mosteller, STAR — a Tennessee class-size study — is "one of the great experiments in education." STAR researchers analyzed the achievement of K–3 students who were randomly assigned to classes of 13 to 17 students, demonstrating that students in small classes performed much better than students in regular classes in math and reading, every year and in all grades. The small classes had the greatest impact on the scores of children in inner-city schools. Researchers who continued to follow students who participated in the experiment discovered that the benefits of small classes in the early years last at least into high school, long after students return to regular-size classes.

Half a year difference in fourth-grade math: Harold Wenglinsky, a researcher who analyzed fourth- and eighth-grade math scores on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress, found that "fourth-graders in smaller-than-average classes are about half a year ahead of fourth-graders in larger-than-average classes," with the "largest effects" for low-income students in urban areas. The effects are even stronger for urban eighth-graders.

Voucher advocates argue, however, that voucher programs are a better way to improve student performance (Taylor, 2002). Princeton professor Cecilia Rouse (1998) conducted a thorough study of performance in Milwaukee elementary schools — both public schools and those accepting vouchers. She found that public school students in certain special schools where the pupil-teacher ratio was reduced to 17 to 1 progressed as well as voucher students in math and made "substantially faster" progress in reading than voucher students. These were low-income, minority children — the same profile as students in the voucher schools.