Are Private School Choice Programs Beneficial?

In this feature, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas makes the case for private school choice programs while Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University argues against such programs.

Private school choice programs are delivering and not just on test scores.
Patrick J. Wolf

School choice is having a moment. Once restricted to rural states, like Vermont and Maine, and low-income families in Milwaukee and Cleveland, programs that provide financial support for parents to send their children to a private school now operate in 33 states plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico. Recent programs tend to allow all students (irrespective of family income) to participate in them. Many new programs take the form of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) – flexible accounts, directed by parents, that can be used to purchase a variety of educational products and services, including private school tuition.

Oklahoma does not have an ESA, but it does have a private school voucher program for students with disabilities, a tax-credit-funded scholarship program for low-income students, and a newly enacted individual tax-credit program - The Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit. Oklahoma’s program is the first in the nation to offer a sizable tax credit ($5,000-7,500) to all new and continuing private school students. So in an unconventional way, Oklahoma’s policy makers have delivered universal school choice to the Sooner State.

Is this a good thing? I am confident the answer is “yes.”

The best way to determine the effect of any program on students is through randomized experiments, often referred to as randomized controlled trials. Without randomized experiments, researchers cannot conclusively say whether student outcomes are driven by what a school is doing or if they are simply a product of the types of students the school enrolls.

When programs limit how many students can participate, lotteries are often used, which can provide a credible randomized experiment. All eligible students are entered into a lottery and random chance determines which students get into the program. The students who lose the lotteries provide the ideal comparison group to determine the effect of a school choice program.

Whenever randomized experimental evaluations exist, we should focus on results from these rigorous studies. To date, there are 18 randomized experimental evaluations of private school choice programs on reading and math outcomes. In reading, six of the 18 experimental studies report that private school choice programs have a clear positive effect. Ten studies find no significant difference. Just two experimental studies of a single private school choice program in Louisiana report negative findings in reading. The findings are similar for math with seven randomized experimental evaluations reporting positive effects of school choice, nine finding no significant effects, and the two studies of the Louisiana voucher program reporting negative effects.

The negative achievement effects in Louisiana can be partly attributed to school choice opponents saddling the program with excessive regulations that scared away high-quality private schools. The Louisiana program had the lowest private school participation rate of any modern school choice program, and it is the only choice program to demonstrate significant negative achievement effects in an experimental evaluation.

Fewer studies have looked at educational attainment, such as receiving a high school diploma, enrolling in college, or obtaining a college degree. Student educational attainment is a stronger predictor of positive life outcomes for young adults than educational achievement. That’s good news for private school choice programs because their effects on attainment are decidedly positive so far.

Of the 12 results coming from nine different studies, nine find that access to private schooling through a choice program generates a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion. The remaining three results indicate that school choice has no significant effect on attainment, either positive or negative.

But what about non-academic factors? Schools are expected to prepare young Americans for their civic responsibilities in our constitutional democracy. Some critics claim that choice programs “undermine our democracy.” The evidence says otherwise.

To measure civic values, researchers assess political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, voluntarism, and social capital. Thirty-four different studies show that private schooling is positively associated with civic values for 50 of the 86 statistical findings. Thirty-three of them show no significant difference and only the remaining three results favor public schools. Private schooling scores +47 when it comes to boosting civic outcomes.

Economic theories predict that increased competition will pressure public schools to either improve or risk losing students. But what happens to the students who are proverbially “left behind” in public schools?

The research record overwhelmingly indicates that private school choice programs have positive competitive effects on students in affected public schools. Twenty-nine studies examine the competitive effects of private school choice programs, with 26 of them reporting significant test score increases for students who remain in public schools while one finds non-significant effects and just two report mixed results. An analysis of all the findings states: “Overall, we found small positive effects of competition on student achievement.” Since students who remain in public schools are far more numerous than students who participate in private school choice programs, choice is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

The data from private school choice programs show that low-income families, Black and Hispanic students, and low achieving students participate in these programs at very high rates. So school choice is also a matter of fairness. For previous generations of Americans, private schooling was largely a preserve for the privileged. Working class and lower-income families want the options that affluent families have long had.

It is both just and desirable that all parents have an opportunity to choose their child’s school. Who knows better than a parent what school is the best fit for their child? The answer is “no one.”

Private school choice programs raise red flags.
Joshua Cowen

Over the past two years, in states across the country—including Oklahoma—lawmakers have proposed new plans to divert taxpayer dollars toward private school tuition and expenses. Oklahoma’s version, signed by Governor Stitt in May, is a refundable individual tax credit, which means families can receive between $5,000 and $7,500 annually for private school costs on their state income taxes.

As far as state budgets are concerned, that plan, known as a tax expenditure, is mathematically equivalent to a direct expenditure on private or homeschool expenses. In 2023, six other states passed such direct expenditures through private school choice programs.

Collectively, these plans fall under the broad category of school voucher systems: public funding of private school costs, either by direct appropriation or by a tax expenditure.

Recently, one of the most popular forms of public funding for private school expenses is an education savings account (ESA): a funding mechanism that reimburses parents for tuition, tutoring, or other personal educational costs. Compared to traditional vouchers, which only cover tuition, the big difference is that ESAs are vouchers-plus. They can be used like a voucher plan, plus families can use them for other educational expenses. In states like Arizona and Florida, allowable expenses include such items as kayaks, trips to amusement parks, or big screen televisions in addition to school tuition.

And that’s the problem with these schemes. Because as I’ve written in more detail for Brookings Institution and Time Magazine, the research on traditional vouchers not only raises huge red flags about the older voucher programs, but rings warning bells about the newer ESA version today.

Let’s start with the basic idea that vouchers, as public education reform programs, should make improvements to the status quo. Certainly that’s how voucher advocates pitch these programs.

But on test scores, new evidence on voucher impacts shows that these plans are worse: the larger and more recent the voucher program, the worse the academic results for kids. In Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., large programs—what researchers call “scaled up” statewide models of small pilot versions—have shown large negative impacts on test scores, especially in mathematics. How large? in Louisiana and Ohio, the negative impact of using a voucher is almost double the average estimates of the pandemic’s own test score impact.

How could that be? Aren’t private schools elite providers of high quality education? Actually, no, not on average. One problem with vouchers is that elite providers either want nothing to do with taxpayer subsidies, or simply have no room for new students.

In Louisiana, for example, most vouchers went to private schools scoring at a D or F range on the state’s accountability exam. And in Wisconsin, many voucher providers were simply new schools popping up to cash in on the voucher payout, with 41% of them closing since that program began—on average, within 4 years of opening.

Now, there may be reason to expect that typical private schools will be more stable providers of educational options. But that raises another problem. In states with universal school choice programs, most beneficiaries have never been in public school in the first place. In state after state, that number seems to be about 70%. When voucher programs expanded in either the size of the payment offered or in the income threshold for eligibility, as many as 3 out of 4 users were already in private school without taxpayers having to pick up the tab.

Then there’s the problem of oversight. We only know about the dreadful academic results for expanded voucher programs because older voucher legislation had tough accountability and transparency requirements. These are largely absent from new voucher bills today. However, in typical private schools taking at least some voucher payments, an average of 85% of enrollment is covered by taxpayers. These public-in-name-only schools usually don’t face the same testing and reporting requirements as their district-run public school counterparts. And that’s bad for voucher outcomes themselves. In what is still the only rigorous study of reporting requirements and vouchers, my colleagues and I found in Milwaukee that when the state required publicly funded private schools to report their academic results by school name—like traditional public schools do—academic results for vouchers actually improved.

It’s pretty simple. Parents need full information to make informed choices. But even if families have such information, too many don’t have much of a choice.

The issue is that private schools have admissions requirements—and requirements to stay enrolled. Investigative reporting has shown that voucher-receiving schools have learned to game the system when it comes to non-discriminatory rules on admissions policies. If your child has special academic needs or, for example, identifies as an LGTBQ student, chances are the private school can quietly ask your kid to leave even if admissions seem open and hospitable on the surface.

We know that voucher programs have high exit rates. As many as 30% of students give up their voucher every year. These kids tend to be students of color, low scorers on exams, and lower in family income, including for programs with income limits to participation. Fortunately, many do better once they return to their local public school.

And that’s really what these voucher and voucher-like plans come down to. Despite the rhetoric about giving parents new choices, these versions of voucher programs are mostly designed for kids whose parents have already cracked the code for private education.

Publicly funded private education is really the school’s choice, not school choice.

Author Bios

Patrick J. Wolf is a distinguished professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The opinions he expresses here are his own.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University. The opinions he expresses here are his own.