Know the Facts About School Vouchers:

Competition and Choice
The growing number of experimental schools, magnet schools and public charter schools are giving parents many choices for their children within the public school system.

So-called "choice" programs let private schools, not parents, do the choosing. Private schools can have selective admission policies and can reject or dismiss students who don't fit in. In Milwaukee, which has had a voucher program since 1990, 40% of the children who sought to participate could not find a single school that would take them and 80% of all voucher students attended just three private schools.

Vouchers do not level the playing field. While both the Milwaukee and the two-year-old Cleveland voucher programs accepted only children from low-income families, those children were already advantaged. Voucher parents in Milwaukee were better educated, more involved in their children's education and had higher expectations. In Cleveland, 75% of voucher students were in a private school already or were starting kindergarten. Only 25% of voucher students transferred from public schools and they were among the better achieving students in the public schools.

Student Achievement
Studies in Tennessee, Wisconsin and nationwide show that class size plays a big role in raising student achievement. Comparisons of voucher schools and various public schools by Rouse, Molnar and others find that reducing class size increases student achievement while vouchers do not.

In Milwaukee, evaluations after three years conclude that voucher students show no greater improvement and often less improvement academically than a randomly selected group of public school students. Cleveland's voucher recipients in parochial schools did not do any better academically than their public school counterparts.

Many schools sprang up in Cleveland just to take advantage of voucher money. Example: the Hope Academies, whose students performed worse in all subjects tested than Cleveland public school students, according to a 1998 study by Indiana University.

A 1998 paper by Stanford University Professor Henry Levin that reviews assessments of voucher programs concludes that private and public schools perform about the same when student background is taken into account.

Peterson's study of New York City's "Opportunity Scholarship Program," a privately funded voucher program, shows only slight increases in student achievement which, he says, can be attributed to smaller class sizes and other support factors. Greater parental satisfaction in the same study probably resulted from the fact that the "control" group consisted of parents who had applied for but had not received a voucher. By self-selection, they were parents who were dissatisfied with the public schools.

Nationwide, the U.S. Dept. of Education has found that when they follow the same course of study, public school students score as well or better than private school students.

Public Attitudes
A 1998 Peter Hart survey shows that Americans strongly favor improving the quality of education in public schools (69%) over vouchers (25%).

A 1996 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows 62% prefer public school choice over 25% who favor government vouchers.

A recent national poll, The Essential Profession, shows 84% favor "doing what it takes to get a fully qualified teacher in every classroom" vs. 14% who favor allowing parents to take public money for private school education.

Accountability
Several recent polls strongly suggest that the public wants private schools to be held accountable for the use of any public dollars they accept. Yet private and parochial schools have almost complete autonomy and a recent U.S. Department of Education report indicates that they are unlikely to participate in a voucher program that would require accountability for admissions, curriculum, student testing, teacher qualifications, finances, religious instruction or compliance with special education requirements.

A regulated voucher system, while satisfying the public's rightful demand for accountability, would have undesirable consequences. For example, it would compel government interference in the operation of religious schools, erode the tradition of private school autonomy and add to the costs of regulation -- estimated by one top voucher expert at $48 billion annually for the nation.

Experience with unregulated government funding programs should warn us of the problems likely to occur. Scandals surrounded many post-secondary for-profit trade schools where directors looted school budgets to support extravagant lifestyles. In Milwaukee, four of the 18 participating voucher schools closed their doors, three of them mid-year amidst charges of fraud and mismanagement, leaving voucher students to scramble for seats in other schools. And in Cleveland, two brand-new private schools that opened to take advantage of voucher dollars did significantly worse in academics than public school counterparts.