Indiana Center for Evaluation
September 2001
As is well known, Cleveland is one of two cities in the U.S. with publicly funded scholarships (aka vouchers) available to low-income children whose families would like to send them to private schools. About 4000 youngsters now participate. From the program's beginning (1996-97), one of the organizations evaluating it (in this case at the behest of the state of Ohio) has been the Indiana Center for Evaluation, led by Kim Metcalf. They have now published a second major study of the Cleveland program, this one covering three school years (ending in 2000) and focusing on younger children who entered (and didn't enter) the program as kindergartners or first graders. The study looked at their achievement (and various other factors) at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade and the end of second grade. The study is complex because it seeks to compare four groups of youngsters and to draw conclusions about the scholarship program's impact on them over two or three years. Aficionados of voucher research will want to see for themselves. The main conclusions are ambiguous. It turns out that the student populations were very similar (though the scholarship users were somewhat less apt to be minorities), that their teachers were very similar (on the few dimensions that were examined), and that their academic achievement shows no clear pattern. All groups improved as they went through school. Scholarship youngsters who began in kindergarten did better than non-scholarship (i.e. public school) students as of first grade but by the end of second grade the differences were statistically insignificant. Nobody can say with certainty (at least not based on these data) whether the program is "working", but it's not hurting (and the cost per student is considerably less than that of the Cleveland public schools). As one often hears, more research would seem to be called for. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court may take the First Amendment case this fall. If so, we may learn more about the program's constitutionality even as we await further data on its efficacy. You can get an 11-page summary and/or the 63-page technical report from the Indiana Center for Evaluation, Smith Research Center, 2805 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47408. Phone (800) 511-6575. Fax (812) 856-5890. E-mail [email protected]. Surf to http://www.indiana.edu/~iuice.
