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Letters 96
EPP November 1996 Letter on Tax-Supported Private-School Vouchers

November 5, 1996

To: Chancellor Carl Hayden
New York State Board of Regents

Dear Chancellor Hayden:

We are writing to you on behalf of the members of the Educational Priorities Panel to state our opposition to proposals to provide tax-supported, private-school vouchers, including a limited experiment to provide private-school vouchers to students attending SURR schools.

As State Education Department reviews of studies of comparisons between private education and public education have concluded, if the socioeconomic status of students is part of the evaluation, private schools do not produce better student outcomes than public schools. Even the controversial new study of the five-year old Milwaukee voucher experiment by Greene, Peterson, and Du show extremely limited academic gains for students after four years of their enrollment in private schools. Since this program has an annual attrition rate of 30%, this is a highly motivated group of students who are only showing a 5% increase in achievement rates in reading and 11% increase in achievement rates in math.

What is particularly discouraging about the proposal to provide vouchers to students attending SURR schools is that this proposal tends to ignore data on much higher rates of student academic improvement in schools that improve and manage to get off the SURR list after district and SED intervention efforts. In EPP’s limited study of ten schools that were removed from the SURR list by the spring of 1995, the average gains in the percentage of students scoring above the SRP on the PEP 3 Reading tests were 27.5% and on the PEP 3 Math test were 12.6%. In the high schools, 23.8% more students passed the RCT’s in reading and 9.5% more students passed the RCT’s in math. Though we did not study student achievement data for schools that were removed from the SURR list by the spring of 1996, we were nevertheless encouraged by the fact that 29% of schools, after at least two years on the SURR list, have improved their performance levels sufficiently to be removed from the list. Especially after the Regents have reformulated the SURR program to increase its effectiveness, it seems too early to undermine SED intervention efforts for low-performing schools that have been working.

We would like to directly challenge the logic in an argument frequently made for introducing vouchers that they will create "pressure" for the reform of public schools because they introduce "competition." Actually, the reverse is true: vouchers tend to lessen efforts to reform the public school system. If there is a private sector "solution" to the problem of low-performing public schools (and, indeed, this is highly questionable), why bother trying to improve public schools? Why not just offer the private sector "solution"? Martin Carnoy, Professor of Education and Economics at Stanford University, has reviewed the long-term effects of voucher programs in Chile, Holland, and Columbia and concluded that educational opportunities and achievement rates of low-income students declined under voucher systems because market place competition for students does not by itself create better public schools. In fact, in Milwaukee, Chile, Holland, and Columbia, voucher systems created lower-quality private schools. The high-quality private schools do not have the capacity to accept large numbers of low-income, low-achieving students. The private schools that spring up to take advantage of vouchers are often of such low quality that education officials have had to intervene to close them down, most notably in Milwaukee and in Columbia.

EPP has taken note that there are over 80,000 students attending low-performing schools in this state, mostly in New York City, and that there is some urgency in providing these children with acceptable learning environments. But 80,000 spaces do not exist in private schools. EPP’s worry is that were 1,000 to 2,000 students to be given vouchers, the Regents would be providing a false hope to these students’ families, when the real long range solution is for the Regents to continue to build on the strengths of its SURR program.

Sincerely,
Jan Atwell, Chairperson
Noreen Connell, Executive Director

CC: Members of the Board of Regents

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