McParadigm wrote:Yet another metastudy reminding us that the research is consistent, well-constructed, and clear.
http://www.epi.org/publication/school-v ... hievement/
Sample:
- Spoiler: show
Voucher proponents argue that offering students the opportunity, through public financing, to attend private rather than public schools produces significant gains at two levels: that individual students gain from attending a more effective (private) school, and that students remaining in public schools gain because increasing private school competition for public school students pushes public schools to improve.
Most studies test the first of these claims. In the late 1990s, voucher experiments were conducted in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio (Howell et al. 2000). The New York experiment, which involved low-income students entering private schools via vouchers in grades 2–5, was the only one that showed significant gains in test scores for any group of voucher students after three years, and gains appeared only for black students in a single cohort (Mayer et al. 2002). However, a closer examination showed that these gains had been overestimated and were not statistically significant because part of the baseline group of students had not been included in the sample of students analyzed (Krueger and Zhu 2004). The experiments in Dayton and Washington, D.C., had such large “losses” (students with vouchers who left voucher schools during the evaluation period) that no valid estimates of voucher effects could be made.
A later voucher plan in Washington, D.C.—the Opportunity Scholarship Program—was funded directly by Congress and began in 2004. It, too, was targeted at low-income students. Students who volunteered to participate were randomly awarded vouchers to private schools, the majority of which were religious/Catholic schools. Those students offered or using vouchers in the two cohorts evaluated (students entering the program in 2004 and those entering in 2005) showed no significant reading or math gains over those who did not receive scholarships/vouchers, but high school graduation rates were significantly higher for those students in the sample who were in ninth grade or higher and therefore could have graduated in the period evaluated (Wolf et al. 2013). The most interesting policy aspect of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, however, was the relatively few placements (1,700) offered to students via the program by the 90 to 100 private schools operating in the district during this period (Washington, D.C., had about 70,000 public and charter students in 2004), and the high rate of school-switching among voucher recipients (Carnoy 2009).
The most recent voucher programs evaluated are in Indiana and Louisiana. The Indiana program began in 2011 and offers vouchers to low- to middle-income students to attend private schools. Parents can supplement the publicly funded voucher with private funds. About 34,000 students took vouchers in 2016––2017. An evaluation of the Indiana program that compared time trends of voucher students’ test scores with the test score time trends of similar students in public schools showed significantly lower math and reading gains on the state test for voucher students (for a summary, see Dynarski, 2016). A statewide voucher program in Louisiana begun in 2008 and also aimed at low-income students now has almost 8,000 voucher recipients attending private schools. It, too, has been evaluated. Researchers used a quasi-experimental method and, again in this case, found that voucher students in private schools scored significantly lower in math and reading on the state test than the control group attending Louisiana’s public schools (Dynarski 2016).
The EPI is absolute garbage, further to the left than Cato is to the right. I wish I could find the recent post in which you claimed you only read journals and peer-reviewed work, and that you do research on the editors and those that do the vetting, because you clearly don't if you buy what the EPI sells.
Their director of research completed his PhD at The New School for Social Research, which cannot be found in
the top 300 of worldwide PhD-granting institutions. Why? Because they, along with UMKC, U New Mexico, and UMass-Amherstare are so left-heterodox as to be entirely unemployable on the academic market, except where others with similar hardline political priors are in charge. Judging by the rest of the staff's credentials, safe to say they also work backwards from policy to analysis.
If you want a picture of what the actual literature looks like,
this is a great site that aggregates the thoughts of
actual academics of renown. Their politics are all over the board (as one should expect). You can see how respected economists come down on any number of about 100 topics (immigration, minimum wage, trade, education, etc). It's great.
Here's how they come down on education.
tl;dr: McParadigm's source is the hottest of partisan garbage, and he's mostly - but not completely - wrong on the voucher issue.
