When private-school voucher programs first began, they generally relied on parental choice as the sole quality control mechanism. As these programs have grown in popularity and scope, scrutiny of their use of public funds has increased and test-based accountability measures are being added. That is the case for Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, which added high-stakes testing requirements to its voucher program in 2009. Starting with the 2010–11 school year, private schools participating in the voucher program were required to administer the reading and math portions of state tests to voucher students and to make the results publicly available. Prior to the policy, the schools were required to test students but not report the results and could use a standardized test of their choosing. To estimate the policy’s impact on student-achievement outcomes, authors looked at the test scores of 437 seventh- and eighth-grade voucher students over a three-year period—two years before the reform and one year after—and compared this group to a similar group of Milwaukee public school students. (They were able to compare the pre- and post-policy scores because although voucher students’ scores were not publicly available prior to the 2010–11 school year, the researchers were already conducting a legislatively mandated evaluation of the voucher program). The authors found that voucher students made significant gains in their math and reading scores during the policy’s inaugural year, as compared to their district peers. The policy change had a positive impact on African American students in both reading and math; Hispanic, white, and Asian students, however, only made gains in math. Citing multiple robustness tests, the authors convincingly argue that the improvements were caused by the policy, rather than by other factors such as concurrent reforms or students exiting the voucher program. But they also offer a few caveats: The results have limited applicability to students in other grades, other cities, and other voucher programs. And, because the researchers could only look at one year of data post-reform, the improvement could be a mere one-year bump, not the beginning of a sustained improvement.
SOURCE: John F. Witte, et al., “High-Stakes Choice Achievement and Accountability in the Nation’s Oldest Urban Voucher Program,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 9, 2014.
