Indiana’s legislature will end its current session this Saturday. (Your sigh of relief is appropriate.) Thus far–at least to the best of my knowledge–the House and Senate continue to disagree over whether to expand Indiana’s already far-too-generous school voucher program. The House wants to expand it; the Senate–mercifully–does not.
Vouchers were initially touted as a way to allow poor children to escape those “failing” public schools in order to improve educational outcomes. Enthusiasm for them waned as study after study rebutted virtually every argument for “school choice,” but lately–as the Right has trumpeted “parental rights” and attacked public schools as “woke”– proponents are once again having successes; South Carolina, for example, is expanding vouchers, and that state’s lawmakers are using the same dishonest rhetoric that Hoosier legislators employ.
SC senators that supported the bill for school choice vouchers spoke repeatedly about how they were motivated to help poor kids who were trapped in failing public schools and couldn’t afford other options. But on the last day of debate an amendment was filed to double the income threshold to help families making more than $100,000.
Just in case a member of Indiana’s Senate super-majority reads this blog and is on the fence about House efforts to sway the Senate, let me share a recent Time Magazine article by a professor of education policy at Michigan State, summarizing the multiple ways vouchers hurt students.The article begins by acknowledging the recent uptick in voucher programs, and notes that several states, including Indiana, have had such programs for several years. He then sets out what is known about the success or failure of these programs, asking “Do they work?” (The honest answer would be that these programs do achieve their actual goals: to funnel tax dollars to religious institutions, weaken or destroy teachers’ unions, and make war on the public schools.)
Of course, the purported goal of such programs is educational improvement. So what does the research have to say about that goal? The author of the article has studied school choice for nearly two decades, and–as he says–he’s in a good position to give an answer.
“Based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.”
Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements….In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.
For children who do transfer from a public school, the academic results are, in his words, “catastrophic.”
Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.
It turns out that elite private schools with strong academics “often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.”
In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.
The author cites data showing that 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they are disappointed, or because the schools (which-unlike public schools–can choose their students) push them out.
That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.
I applaud the Indiana Senate’s uncommon case of good sense. The last thing Indiana needs is expansion of a failed program that enriches fundamentalist religious schools while weakening Indiana’s struggling public education system.
Fingers crossed that the Senate’s unusual manifestation of good sense makes it to Saturday…
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