One critique of school vouchers and tax credit scholarships that persists is that they direct public money to private schools that cherry-pick the best students, even if the vouchers target a low-income population. Now the redefinED blog has given us a sneak peek into a soon-to-be-published study that examines which students select a means-tested private school option, and why.
Cassandra Hart, an education professor at the University of California, Davis, conducted a study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students to take a deeper look at the characteristics of the participants and the public schools they left. With help from Northwestern University economist David Figlio, Hart finds that scholarship recipients not only are among the lowest performing students who are economically disadvantaged, they came from public schools that are, she writes, “troubled along a number of dimensions.” (Full disclosure: From 2009 to 2011, I helped to develop the policy and communications initiatives for the nonprofit that administers the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship.)
Significantly, Hart says the students might have been less likely to use the voucher if they had better public school options to begin with: “Where they have a greater ability to exercise public choice, they are more likely to do so even if they are also offered a private school voucher.”
As for the cherry-picking, the students who enrolled in private schools on the scholarship tended to have lower standardized test scores than other students on free or subsidized lunches in public schools before entering the program. And, according to surveys and Hart’s analysis, the public schools they left were challenged in the following ways:
- They had lower aggregate student performance on standardized tests;
- They had higher rates of violent incidents and out-of-school suspensions;
- And principals were more likely to say that “parents worry about violence in this school” while teachers were more likely to say they spent more of their time on discipline.
Parents of these students were driven to exercise a choice for their child that was unavailable in the public school system.
So parents of these students were driven to exercise a choice for their child that was unavailable in the public school system. They had limited options for open enrollment and charter schools, Hart writes, but they were more likely to live near a wide variety of private schools.
But a greater array of private options doesn’t imply they’re all are ideal choices. The most convenient private school options available to scholarship participants received lower parent ratings, Hart explains, “suggesting that their private school options engender somewhat less client satisfaction than do the private schools proximate to Non-participants.”
In other words, these parents are desperate for options. Their children are the worst-performing students among their peers at public schools that are disproportionately poor-performing with outsized incidents of violence and disruption. They are more likely to be black and poorer than other students on free or reduced-price lunch. And there are limited public choices in their district other than their assigned school, which motivates their families to apply for the tax credit scholarship regardless of whether all their private school options are particularly attractive.
Hart concedes there are limitations to her study that make the results difficult to generalize to programs in other states. Scholarship students in Florida are concentrated in major urban areas. Further research is warranted, she writes, on access to public options. But one conclusion is clear in this case: The question of cherry-picking has become irrelevant.
