Michael McShane writes about misperceptions stemming from research into school choice programs.
[T]here has been an interesting pattern that has emerged in the research literature on school choice, one that was just reinforced by a paper on Ohio’s voucher program released last week by the Urban Institute.
Matthew Chingos, David Figlio, and Krzysztof Karbownik found that Ohio’s voucher students:
“were substantially more likely to enroll in college than students who remained in public schools (64 versus 48 percent). The differences in college enrollment were especially large at four-year colleges (45 versus 30 percent) and selective colleges (29 versus 19 percent). The enrollment impacts were strongest for male students, Black students, students with below-median test scores before leaving public school, and students from the lowest-income families.”
If those names sound familiar, it is because two of them authored the 2016 paper that found negative math and reading results for voucher students in Ohio.
They are not the only people to have this experience. The 2021 paper on the voucher program in Louisiana by Heidi Holmes Erickson, Jon Mills, and Pat Wolf that found negative achievement effects (at least in math) found no negative attainment effects.
It was different research teams in Indiana, where a 2018 paper by Mark Berends and Joe Waddington found negative results in math and null effects in English. But, a 2021 paper by Megan Austin and Max Pardo found positive attainment effects. As Pat Wolf summarized for Education Next, “Adjusted for their background, high-school students who participate in the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program enroll in college within a year of graduating from high school at a rate of 61 percent, 9 percentage points higher than the rate of 52 percent for similar students in traditional public schools.”
These findings only reinforce what Colin Hitt, Pat Wolf, and I argued in an AEI paper and subsequent book chapter back in 2018. As we wrote then:
“A growing number of studies are finding that school choice programs can improve high school graduation rates, college attendance, and earnings—without producing gains in test scores.”
