William G. Howell and Paul Peterson
2002
As the voucher argument moves out of the judiciary and into the hands of policymakers, politicians and educators, there's never been greater need for clear data about how vouchers work and what effects they have. Just about everyone acknowledges that the perfect experiment or pilot program remains to be conducted. But today's best data come from a set of studies conducted by Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson and his colleagues. This important new Brookings book, co-authored by Peterson and William Howell, reports on five such studies. Three of them were "randomized field trials" in New York, Washington and Dayton. The fourth is the largish privately financed voucher program in San Antonio's Edgewood school district; and the fifth is an evaluation of the national Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) program. All involve privately financed "scholarships" or vouchers, not the publicly funded kind at issue in the Cleveland case. Nor did they include the high and sustained student funding levels that are needed as part of a full-fledged voucher experiment (to determine, for example, whether there's a "supply response"). Nor did these programs (as yet) last more than 2-3 years before being appraised. But partly because they were privately financed, it was possible to structure them (other than Edgewood) with proper "control groups" of similar youngsters who did not receive and use vouchers. Hence the data are clearer here than in any other voucher research. The bottom line, as previously reported, is that using vouchers to change from public to private schools appears to reduce the black-white achievement gap although it does not have that effect on the education attainments of low income white and Hispanic students. (The authors thoughtfully explore why.) Though this is certainly not the last word on voucher research, and although it will be (wrongly) dismissed by readers who don't like its results-they will probably allege that the authors are voucher proponents and then ignore the data!-it is, as Dean John Brandl of the University of Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey Institute remarks on the jacket cover, "the most important book ever written on the subject of vouchers." It should be must reading for everyone interested in school choice or pondering the implications of the Supreme Court's recent decision. You can learn more from http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/education_gap.htm.
