The School Voucher Research Wars

When researchers released new studies on the effectiveness of private school voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana this week, advocates and opponents of such policies were quick to parse the findings and plant a victory flag for their respective causes.

The president of the 1.5-million member American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said the findings from Indiana showed “negative or negligible results for student outcomes.”

“This latest study of vouchers,” she said, “should be yet another red flag to [Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos that she is going down the wrong path and it will hurt all students in the end.”

Of the same study, the Center for Education Reform – a private school choice-friendly organization – had this to say: “Not only do the [voucher] kids do better over time than their comparison groups but the kids who didn't take the vouchers also do better.”

In reality, the studies do little to bolster arguments for either side: Overall, they showed little difference in academic achievement between students enrolled in private schools through a voucher program and their public school counterparts. But that didn’t stop advocacy organizations, politicians and policymakers from cherry-picking their preferred results, as has become the gold standard in recent years.

“We all know that in the policy fray, sometimes people pull the evidence that they find most aligned with the arguments they were already pre-inclined to support,” Sarah Rosen Wartell, president of the Urban Institute, said Monday during a panel discussion in Washington. “Part of what we try to do is help people sort through the significance of aligned but sometimes conflicting research and help them figure out what are the conclusions that one can rightly draw.”

Enter research on voucher programs, which has catapulted into the national spotlight in recent months as the Trump administration – itself a highly polarizing entity – has made private school choice a hallmark of its education agenda. On the campaign trail, Trump called for directing $20 billion toward allowing low-income students to attend the private or public school of their choice, and his recent budget proposal requests $250 million geared toward boosting voucher programs.

“On high-profile debates, particularly debates that are partisan and ideological in nature, research is often used more as a political weapon than as a tool of illumination,” Jeffrey Henig, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said during a presentation last year to the American Educational Research Association. “When the debates are polarized, the research is often pulled out to the poles, and the researchers themselves are sometimes pulled out to the poles, and the result is that a sophisticated and nuanced discussion is often rather a fairly nasty and personalized one.”

Henig has focused much of his own academic research on charter schools, but also has looked specifically at how such research moves from academia into the public sphere. His book, “Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates – The Case of Charter Schools,” delves into how research is easily shaped, simplified or exaggerated to bolster various arguments.

To be sure, the voucher research wars are nothing new. They’ve been raging since 1990, when Wisconsin first instituted a pilot program to allow low-income students in Milwaukee to use publicly funded vouchers to pay for private school.

“The political stakes on this have been high from the very beginning, and that’s partly because it extends beyond school choice to the broader debate about market strategies versus government as an instrument for social reform,” Henig tells U.S. News. “That argument isn’t constrained within the education world, and at the national level in particular, it is highly partisan.

"So you have non-researchers, mostly, on both sides that see each study as potential ammunition in a battle that they think is hugely important and extends beyond all the kinds of caveats that researchers put on their studies.”

When it comes to vouchers, previous research has showed state programs having large negative effects on student outcomes in both English and math after one year. That’s especially true in Louisiana, where about 6,900 students take part in what's been the fifth-largest voucher program in the country.

But research also has showed those negative results diminishing after successive years of operation, with the latest slate of studies reflecting no statistically significant difference in the performance of students using a voucher to attend a private school and their public school counterparts, among other findings.

John White, Louisiana's state superintendent of education, said he’s hopeful the most recent findings will quell the talking heads on both sides of the aisle.

“Liberal ideologues paraded around the idea that somehow Catholic schools that have been educating kids in Louisiana for centuries somehow are abject failures,” White said during a speech prior to the panel discussion at the Urban Institute, recalling some of the reaction to earlier studies. “And conservative ideologues paraded around the idea that regulation is somehow anathema to choice, and is driving away the elite schools that otherwise would have magically served these kids better than the schools that participated.”

Louisiana’s voucher program is one of the most regulated in the country, as private schools that choose to participate in the program must accept any student the state matches it with, and must administer the same tests public schools use as part of the state’s accountability system.

White argued that the newest findings – which he deemed significant in their insignificance – put “truth to the lies on both sides of the aisle.”

“It says to the liberals – who will often use admissions and accountability as their rationale for objecting to private school choice – you can have a very viable system where schools accept all kids without screen, and where they take the same tests and they’re rated in exactly the same system as the public system,” he said.

“And it says to the conservatives,” White continued, “it may very well be the regulation itself – the accountability system – that is the thing that has promoted the performance.”

White’s argument underscores the debate the entire school choice tent – encompassing policies that allow students to attend either a private or a public school – is grappling with: how to ensure access and quality.

Alongside that is the question of whether advocates can look past their own self-interests to pursue policies that provide the best educational opportunities for the greatest number of historically disadvantaged students.

Henig says history proves this type of balancing act is not an easy task, and that the pragmatic view White takes is easier said than done.

“We probably would do a lot better on these things,” Henig says, “if we were able to talk about what have we learned about the best way to integrate public and private markets and government, rather than who’s winning.”