Do private school voucher programs work?
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For Michelle Salazar, a school voucher was a life changer. The mother of two lives in Florida, and she says when her son was in first grade in public school, he struggled. And I would sit with him for hours, hours, every night after school, trying to get him to do one page of homework. And it was like torture. In school, she says, he could be fidgety and distracted. All the kids would sit at tables. They would put him in a desk. And the desk was black in the corner. Yeah.

Like, it was crazy. They just didn't really know how to deal with him. He struggled. He fell behind in reading. Eventually, her son was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, and Salazar tapped into a Florida-based voucher program that gave her nearly $10,000 a year to help cover tuition at a small, private Christian school that focuses on students with disabilities. Her son is now 12, and she says it has been a

perfect fit. He loves it there and the teachers all love him. The little kiddos love him because he helps them. He'll help the teachers sometimes when the kids...

can't calm down. What's more, Salazar says she never could have afforded the school without the voucher. Soon, families across the country, even in states that have opposed vouchers, could get help from the federal government to pay for private school. It's part of the huge Republican tax bill. Not everyone is happy about it. This is a Trojan horse. Looks good on the outside, and once you open your gates and let them in, the end is destruction.

Consider this. Vouchers have been around for decades at the state and local levels. Now we have a lot of research on the effects these programs have had on kids, families, and the public schools they leave behind. We'll dig into it after the break. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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It's Consider This from NPR. So Michelle Salazar loved her experience with a Florida voucher program, but not everyone is a fan of vouchers. Take Curtis Finch, who we heard from just before the break. It's not school choice. It's the school's choice whether we can take your kid or not.

Finch runs the Deer Valley Public School District in Phoenix, Arizona, where lawmakers created a statewide voucher program, even though voters opposed the idea. Finch says private schools in his district are allowed to reject voucher students for all sorts of reasons, essentially cherry-picking the kids they admit.

So that's really where we're getting this segregation mentality of we don't want your kid. He's too special needs. He has too much discipline, doesn't have academic prowess for our school, you know, fill in the blank. Finch singles out one private school group in his district that likes to say it has the best academic program around. When they're bragging, you know, they'll have 200 kids in their high schools and they're only kids that they select. And it's the application process, blah, blah, blah. I have more kids in my band program.

than they have in their whole high school. And if I took the top 200 kids out of my high school against their top 200, I'd smoke them every time. And they know that. Finch says his district has never been better academically than it is right now. And he says many families learn that the hard way by using vouchers to leave and then coming back. But

But when kids do return to public schools? They're either behind. They're not following the state curriculum. I've got to use resources to go back and get them caught up. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a mess. So with the mother in Florida and the superintendent in Arizona, what we have here really is, call it, anecdata. And this is how the fierce debate about vouchers often goes, animated by stories about how they change things for one particular student or one particular school district.

But the scale of the national program that Republicans have included in their reconciliation bill that has already passed the House, it's potentially huge, roughly $5 billion a year.

So NPR education correspondent Corey Turner has been digging beyond the anecdata into the data data to answer some basic questions about how and whether vouchers work. Hey, Corey. Hey, Mary Louise. OK, so let me start. Basic question, this program that Republicans are proposing, how would it work?

So it would fund vouchers indirectly using the tax code. So basically, if this bill passes, anyone who wants to could make a charitable donation to a special nonprofit middleman. Then that middleman would then bundle all these donations into vouchers and distribute them to families. Where the federal government comes in is it would use a really generous tax credit to essentially pay these donors back.

dollar for dollar for these voucher donations. And one more thing to know here is not only do they get the dollar for dollar tax credit, but also if they donate stock instead of cash, they get to avoid capital gains taxes, which would ultimately make this voucher proposal profitable for many wealthy donors. As the bill's written, House Republicans are willing to give up $5 billion a year in tax revenue to pay for it. That

That would pay for a lot of vouchers. Who would be able to use these vouchers? A lot of kids. It would be available to kids in households earning no more than three times an area's median gross income. What in the world does that mean? So let's just say where you live, Mary Louise, the median income is $70,000. All right.

So that would mean that any household earning less than $210,000 could qualify. Obviously, that's going to make it open to most kids. There are a few caveats here, though. You have to live near a private school willing to accept a voucher. So there are millions of kids in rural areas for whom this is going to be a non-starter. Also, because the tax credit, as I said, is capped at $5 billion, not everyone who qualifies would actually be able to get a voucher.

Okay, so back to this question of private schools and whether they would be willing to accept these vouchers. Circle back to that fear we just heard raised by the superintendent in Arizona. Would this bill, this Republican bill, allow private schools to accept and also reject students? Absolutely. Absolutely.

There's a sentence in the bill that essentially says the government has no ability to dictate terms to these private schools, to tell them what to do or how to do it or whom to admit. So while Michelle Salazar, the mother we heard from earlier, she found a voucher school specifically designed to help students with disabilities. I have heard a lot of concern from the disability rights community.

Jacqueline Rodriguez is CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities. You don't have to accept them. And if you do, there is no mechanism in this piece of legislation that encourages oversight, enforcement, review. Kids with disabilities are often turned away by voucher schools because the schools will say, rightly, they don't have the resources, they don't have the trained staff or the expertise.

But also, they're not bound by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

that requires public schools to provide all kids with disabilities a free and appropriate public education. I did a deep dive many years ago into Indiana's big statewide voucher program. I heard from a lot of parents of kids with disabilities who told me they had tried to use the vouchers, but there were no schools who would take their children. One sentence, I should say, was added to this new House bill saying,

that suggests some modicum of protection for students with disabilities. But I ran this sentence by a bunch of the researchers and experts I was interviewing for this project. And every one of them told me it's a fig leaf, that it's poorly written and would be impossible to enforce. Is there evidence that vouchers...

actually help students academically? It's a central question. Yeah. The evidence is mixed at best. And it really depends on how you measure success, Mary Louise. So we tend to hold public schools accountable using test scores. So let's start there. Here's Josh Cowan. He's a researcher at Michigan State who publicly opposes vouchers. It's true that in the 90s and in the early 2000s, when I first started working on this as a young data analyst...

You did see a handful of voucher systems marginally improving academic performance. But, Cowan told me, these really early programs all had a few things in common. They were quite small. They were targeted. The private schools that were included were pretty good. And the kids generally came from struggling public schools in low-income neighborhoods.

That is just not the way many voucher programs work today. State lawmakers have tried over the years to go bigger and bigger to get less targeted. In many states, the ideal has been to make them universally available. And Cowan says, as a result, those early test score benefits have essentially evaporated. The bigger and the more recent the voucher system, the worse the results have been for kids. In fact...

Studies of large programs in Louisiana and Indiana found students who left public schools to attend private voucher schools did worse. They declined. And the learning loss...

The researcher, Josh Cowan, says was akin to the losses we saw from COVID and Hurricane Katrina. Akin to the losses from COVID, which, as we know, was unprecedented off the charts. Do we know why? This is a really complicated answer. So Cowan says, you know, when voucher programs get really big, which is when the results get really dicey,

They pump a lot of dollars into the market. There's very little oversight. And so what often happens is these little low-quality private schools just tend to pop up, and they don't stick around very long. But another researcher I spoke to, Patrick Wolf at the University of Arkansas, he publicly supports vouchers. And he told me, look, judging the quality of private school by test scores is just wrong. Private schools just don't emphasize vouchers.

Goosing test scores as much as public schools do. Public schools have to because they're held accountable. Private voucher schools, Wolf told me, in many places don't have to take state tests.

They don't have to follow public school curriculum. So you're not comparing apples to apples. So how do you measure success? So Wolf points to a few other metrics and other research studies that suggest some benefit for voucher students. He says one study found students who do persist in their voucher programs may ultimately make up some of the ground they lost and even pull ahead.

Now, obviously, Mary Louise, that does not help the large numbers of kids we know don't persist, you know, for whom there is churn and they end up cycling back to the public schools. Wolf also pointed out some evidence that voucher students may be more likely to graduate high school and even college. Again, those are the kids who persist.

And there is consistent evidence that competition, some researchers don't like that word, but competition from vouchers can lead to small improvements in public schools. Though I will say when I run that by public school advocates, they get really bristly and point out that those benefits are so small.

that they don't outweigh the risks that vouchers pose to public schools, including the loss of students and with them, obviously, the loss of money, since public schools funding depends in part on how many kids they serve. Well, that's my question. I was going to query you on what scale we're talking here. And again, back to the data, back to the evidence. Is there evidence that voucher programs are really leading to huge mass exodus of students from public schools?

Not really. So first, what we see in the research is a pretty sizable chunk of students leave public schools for voucher schools, but end up cycling back in a relatively short period of time.

Sometimes it's because they want to. They just decide the public school is a better fit. Sometimes it's because the private schools push them out because maybe they're low performers. And again, this is part of the deal in many private school voucher programs. The schools have the ability to do that.

There's one other thing that pops out in the data that I think is worth mentioning here, and that is when a voucher program goes really big. And I mean like universal or near universal, lifting any sort of income thresholds or limits. One of the things you see in state after state after state is most of the families who end up using a voucher in the early years of a universal program, their kids were already in private schools.

So, for example, you look at Oklahoma. When it enacted its recent voucher program, state data revealed fewer than 10% of applicants were coming from public schools. When I did my 2017 investigation in Indiana, I found the same thing. The government is essentially paying private school families to do what they were already doing with their own money.

And Pierre's Corey Turner, thanks for sharing your reporting on vouchers and what Republicans would like to do about them. You're welcome.

This episode was produced by Connor Donovan. It was edited by John Ketchum. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. And we want to take a moment to thank our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Thank you. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. ♪

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