The Latest Research on Private School Choice: Public Opinion, Participation, and Program Effects

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Private school choice is one of the fastest growing education policies in the U.S. As recently as 2003, there were only three modern school choice programs, in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the state of Florida. All three programs took the form of government funded school vouchers. Twenty-three years later, 34 states plus DC and Puerto are home to 75 private school choice programs, taking the form of vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), tax-credit ESAs, and refundable tax credits. Collectively, the programs serve over 1.5 million K-12 students. Increasingly, school choice programs have taken the flexible form of ESAs, which can be spent on a variety of educational products and services from multiple vendors, and are universal in student eligibility. No ESA program has been subjected to an effectiveness evaluation, until now.           

Who supports these programs? Who participates in them? What effects do they have on the achievement of public school students? What effects do they have on the achievement of school choice participants? These four papers provide evidence-based initial answers to these crucial policy questions. The first paper provides longitudinal survey data from Morning Consult regarding how Americans view private school choice policies in K-12 education, over time and across the main program types of ESAs, vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships and ESAs. Among the rich set of findings in the paper, the authors report that national support is generally positive and relatively stable over time across choice policies, with ESAs and tax-credit-funded policies appearing to receive the highest and strongest support.           

The second paper uses state-of-the-art empirical approaches to estimate the competitive effects of the Arkansas universal ESA program, called Education Freedom Accounts, on the achievement of students who remain in affected public schools. The competitive threat to public schools of the ESA program varied, especially during the first two years of implementation, giving researchers leverage over the causal question. In initial findings, they report that more competition from the school choice program is associated with statistically significant increases in English Language Arts scores. The competitive effects of the program on math scores are null.           

Staying with the Arkansas ESA program, the third paper examines who has participated in the program through it’s three-year build up to universality. For a large subgroup of ESA students who were administered the NWEA MAP test by their education provider, the researchers are able to an advanced propensity score matching approach to conduct a quasi-experimental analysis of the initial effect of the ESA on the test score growth of students in ELA and math.           

The fourth paper similarly describes the participation patterns and test score effects of the Missouri Empowerment Scholarship Program, the first tax-credit ESA program established in 2021. Collectively, these four papers contribute greatly to our understanding of a major education policy reform: private school choice in its most flexible and popular form.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University

Discussant

• Shaun M Dougherty, Boston College

Organizer

• Collin Hitt, Saint Louis University

Individual Presentations

• How Americans View K-12 School Choice Policies: Trends and Comparisons Across ESAs, Vouchers, and Tax Credits - Presenting Author: John Mason Kristof, EdChoice

• Do Public Schools Improve Academic Performance in Anticipation of Universal School Choice? - Presenting Author: Temurbek R Rakhmatov, University of Arkansas

• Do Universal School Choice Programs Affect Student Achievement: Initial Evidence from Arkansas Education Freedom Accounts - Presenting Author: Misty Gallo, University of Arkansas

• MO Scholars: Initial Demographics and Early Achievement in Missouri’s ESA Program - Presenting Author: Collin Hitt, Saint Louis University