See
At Least as Good at a Fraction of the Cost? Some “Flop”! by Neal McCluskey of Cato.
"A lot of well-intentioned people think it is not enough for
families to be able to choose schools. They have to choose “good”
schools. Those people often do not think private school choice programs
that give parents a lot of control over which schools they select are up
to par. Fine. But just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it
a “clear flop.”
Writing at The 74, Richard Whitmire warns that we should beware Trumps bearing school choice gifts. He argues that President-elect Trump’s proposal to spend $20 billion on school choice could be dangerous not because of, say, federal rules that might be attached to unconstitutional
largesse, but because the money might not be restricted to “great”
schools. “Great,” presumably, should be defined by legislators or
bureaucrats. After all, you don’t want to replicate the Milwaukee
voucher program:
Those in the school reform movement learned the hard way
that choice alone does not produce more seats in great schools. If that
were the case, we’d all be praising the early voucher program in
Milwaukee and the widespread charters in Ohio and Michigan. But in all
those cases, choice alone produced nothing.
In Milwaukee, for example, which I visited repeatedly while researching my book On the Rocketship,
about the creation of one best-in-class charter network, the
more-than-two-decade-old voucher experiment proved to be a clear flop.
(Note that I didn’t say unpopular. Who objects to free tuition for their
kid’s parochial schools?)
Set aside the first evidence that Milwaukee’s program isn’t a “clear
flop”: It is popular, indicating that the people it is supposed to serve
are at least getting something they want. What about other important
measures, including test scores, graduation rates, competitive effects,
and costs? According to researchers at the University of Arkansas’ School Choice Demonstration Project, who intensively studied Milwaukee:
Our main findings included that the program had a
positive effect on a student’s likelihood of graduating from high school
and enrolling and persisting in a 4-year college. We found little
evidence that the Choice program increased the test scores of
participating students, though our final analysis revealed a positive
effect of the program on reading scores when combined with high stakes
testing. There was no evidence of program effects on math scores.
Competition from the Choice program appears to have boosted the test
scores of students who remained in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), but
those systemic effects of the program were modest in size. Because the
maximum value of the voucher…is substantially less than what the
government pays to educate students in MPS, the state saves over $50
million per year from the operation of the program.
Is the choice program transformative? No. But a flop? It appears to
have produced somewhat better outcomes at much lower taxpayer expense
than the public schools. It is also nowhere near a free market, with
regulations constraining admissions policies, hours of instruction, and
testing. And freedom is the key to unleashing competitive pressures, specialization, and innovation.
The Milwaukee voucher program is not a flop, and making policy based on the idea it is would be a mistake."
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