School Choice: Money, Race, and Congressional Voting on Vouchers (original) (raw)
School Choice: Money, Race And Congressional Voting Behavior
This paper discovers that a campaign contribution to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives by the National Education Association (the major teacher's union) in the 2000 election cycle reduces the probability that a Representative will vote for a pro-choice amendment to the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." It also discovers that a Representative who represents a district with a large African American population or who is Republican is more likely to vote for vouchers. Finally, it notes that subsequent NEA contributions reward anti-voucher representatives and punish pro-voucher Representatives.
Race and School Vouchers: Legal, Historical, and Political Contexts
Peabody Journal of Education, 2016
This article investigates legal and political issues as they relate to school vouchers serving students of color. Specifically, we draw on the empirical, historical, and legal research to examine whether school vouchers will create a more equitable system of education for poor students of color. First, we present a history of vouchers, including how they were used to support segregation. We then discuss how vouchers as a broad opportunity for educational equity for poor children (of color) might present particular challenges in light of, first, the race-neutral approach in contemporary case law and state statutes and, second, the relatively small percentage of U.S. children taking advantage of such programs. Finally, we present empirical results regarding African American families' support and use of vouchers and a discussion of the racial politics of school vouchers. We argue that unless voucher programs and proponents address race directly, operate on a larger scale, and attend to the broader social justice issues facing urban communities, it will be difficult for such policies to support the greater good for African American children or society as a whole. After heated debates in the 1990s, school vouchers have been less frequently addressed in policy conversations in the past decade, perhaps due to the rise of charter school policies (Gorski & Landsman, 2013). Under a voucher policy, parents can use a predetermined amount of funding, which is redeemed from the state or a local school district, to attend a private or parochial school of choice (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002 [hereinafter, Zelman, 2002]). In the past several years, there has been a resurgence of voucher policies, which have passed in key states. Many state voucher programs are small, but together they served 141,326 students with expenditures of approximately $790 million during the 2014-2015 school year (Frendewey et al., 2015). Voucher policies have been controversial, and some efforts have failed despite being key items on state agendas. For example, a Texas voucher bill that would have allowed 16,000 public school students, mostly from urban districts, to transfer to private schools using tax dollars failed (Stutz, 2015). Proponents argue that school vouchers allow low-income families of color to escape failing schools for better options. In recent years, advocates have reframed the argument for vouchers
On The Political Economy Of Educational Vouchers
2012
Two significant challenges hamper analyses of the collective choice of educational vouchers. One is the multi-dimensional choice set arising from the interdependence of the voucher, public education spending, and taxation. Second, even absent a voucher, preferences over public spending are not single-peaked; a middling level of public school spending may be less attractive to a household than either high public school spending or private education coupled with low public spending. We show that representative democracy model provides a viable approach to overcome these hurdles. We provide a complete characterization of equilibria with an endogenous voucher. A voucher is adopted in political equilibrium provided the coefficient of variation of income is sufficiently small. We undertake a parallel quantitative analysis. We find that no voucher arises in equilibrium for the U.S. income distribution, which exhibits too much heterogeneity. For tighter income distributions, including those in Douglas County, Colorado (where a voucher was recently adopted) and in Denmark (which has a national voucher program) our model predicts a positive voucher. Public support for a not-too-large voucher arises because the cross subsidy to public school expenditure from those switching to private schools outweighs the subsidy to those who attend private school in the absence of a voucher.
Who chooses? Who uses? Participation in a national school voucher program
Among the most controversial issues in the heated public debate over school vouchers is the question of which families are most likely to leave the public sector and enroll their children in private schools if given the opportunity. Critics assert that the parents most likely to opt for vouchers will be those who are already most involved in their children's educationwhich, on average, will mean the parents of the most motivated and gifted students. They also argue that the introduction of a voucher system would increase the separation of students by race and social class, with minority and low-income students relegated to underfunded and increasingly neglected public schools. Proponents, on the other hand, contend that any "creaming" from the public school system that would occur as a result of most potential voucher systems would be The authors wish to thank the operators of the Children's Scholarship Fund for their cooperation in this evaluation. Caroline Minter Hoxby and Jay Greene served as consultants to the evaluation. Funding for this study has been provided by the BASIC Fund Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, the Gordon and Laura Gund Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation. The findings and interpretations reported herein are the sole responsibility of the authors and are not subject to the approval of the program operators or sources of financial support.
Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers
Peabody Journal of Education, 2016
Some private, religious schools that accept vouchers have been accused of discriminating against certain populations of students through their admissions processes. Discriminating against disfavored groups (e.g., racial minorities, LGBT students, students with disabilities, religious minorities) in voucher programs raises both legal and policy concerns that have not been extensively examined in recent research. Employing legal research methods, this article examines state voucher statutes and discusses the potential for voucher programs to discriminate against marginalized groups. We argue that each state has an obligation to ensure that any benefit it creates must be available to all students on a nondiscriminatory basis-including the benefit of a publicly funded voucher for attendance at a private school. As this review of existing voucher statutes will demonstrate, legislators appear to have neglected to construct policies that safeguard student access and ensure that public funds do not support discriminatory practices. Without additional safeguards, states risk providing public money that can be used to promote discriminatory policies and practices. Media reports suggest that some private, religious schools that accept vouchers might be discriminating against certain populations of students through their admissions process. For example, the New York Times reported that schools participating in Georgia's voucher program are able to expel openly gay students (Severson, 2013). The article notes that as many as a third of the schools in the scholarship program have strict antigay policies or adhere to a religious philosophy that holds homosexuality as immoral or sinful. Sher (2013) also contends that there are over 100 private schools that are eligible for public money in Georgia that may discriminate against LGBT students. Likewise, a newspaper in Indiana explained that some of the religious schools participating in the voucher program may not openly welcome LGBT families (LeFave, 2014). When asked whether LGBT students and their families would be welcome at a private Christian
On the political economy of means-tested education vouchers
European Economic Review, 2000
We use computational experiments to study the impact of means-tested education vouchers on the level and distribution of educational expenditures. Our benchmark is a regime where public and private schools coexist. Our means-tested voucher regime is one where households with lower incomes receive a larger voucher. Both the level of funding and the allocation of vouchers by income are endogenously determined by sequential majority voting. We examine the e!ect on educational expenditures of switching from a mixed public/private education regime to a means-tested voucher regime or to a uniform voucher regime where all households receive the same voucher. We "nd that: (i) Under means-tested vouchers, public funding for education is the smallest but average educational expenditure is the largest; (ii) inequality of educational resources is smaller under means-tested than that under uniform vouchers or the mixed regime; (iii) the &poor' and the &rich' households prefer means testing to either the mixed or uniform regime.
We examine what factors predict why some parents enroll their children in voucher schools while other parents with similar types of children and from similar neighborhoods do not. Furthermore, we investigate how aware parents are of their educational options, where they get their information, and what school characteristics they deem the most important. To answer these questions, we analyze the school choice patterns in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Using survey data, we compare responses from a representative sample of voucher parents and a matched sample of public school parents. While public school parents have higher incomes than voucher parents do, voucher parents have more years of education on average. We find that parents in both sectors rely heavily on their social networks to gain information about school options. Finally, we conclude that religion plays an important role in explaining why some parents use vouchers while others do not.
The political economy of school choice: linking theory and evidence
Journal of Urban Economics, 2003
We derive an improved methodology for linking theoretical parameters of a political economy model of school choice to empirical values estimated by regressing local private enrolment shares on mean income, the median to mean ratio, religious and ethnic composition, and other variables. This leads us to reject the commonly maintained assumption that a coalition of "ends against the middle" determines local school funding, and to conclude instead that the median income voter is decisive. It also allows us to estimate the perceived relative efficiency advantage of private schooling, which we find to be about 30% at the margin.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1991
Conservative educational reformers have advocated a simple but radical system of school finance since the 1950s. Under educational vouchers, all schools would essentially be private, generating revenue only from the students they enroll. State and federal governments would issue vouchers to families with children. To ensure equality of educational opportunity, the size of the voucher would be dependent upon the family's income. Families would give the vouchers to the school of their choice, as part of their payment for tuition, and the school would redeem the voucher for cash from the government. The old, conservative case for vouchers stressed the benefits of competition among schools. According to this argument, each school district under the present system has a virtual monopoly on the market for education, thus reducing the incentive to deliver high-quality, cost-effective services. By allowing families the right to "shop" for their education among a large number and wide variety of providers, schools would be forced to eliminate waste and to implement innovative programs [see Lee, 19861. Liberals, on the other hand, worry that vouchers would mean state support for parochial schools; that vouchers might allow the segregation of students into separate schools by income, academic ability, and race; and that the funding levels for vouchers might be too low to permit low-income families to afford high-quality education. Without denying the importance of these concerns, this paper points out that there is an important equity argument for vouchers that should also be considered. The paper outlines a new case for vouchers, based on the effect of existing state aid on housing values.
Title of Document TAXING OURSELVES: UNDERSTANDING SCHOOL TAX ELECTIONS
2015
Title of Document TAXING OURSELVES: UNDERSTANDING SCHOOL TAX ELECTIONS Martin Kobren, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Irwin L. Morris, Department of Government and Politics Americans have increasingly segregated themselves over the last 40 years by wealth and political orientation. I argue that this segregation affects the way communities react to school tax ballot issues, which are ostensibly nonpartisan matters. Using a database containing 232 school tax elections that took place during 2011 in 10 states, I show that in affluent communities that favor Democrats, high levels of educational attainment make it more likely that a community will adopt a tax increase. By contrast, in downscale communities that favor Democrats, economic concerns play an important role in election outcome; large percentages of homeowners decrease the likelihood of passage while large percentages of renters and poor people make tax increases more likely. In downscale Republican leaning co...
School Vouchers in the Trump Era: How Political Ideology and Religion Shape Public Opinion
2018
Expanding school vouchers is a central component of the Trump Administration’s education agenda.1 However, the extent to which the Administration can fully realize this policy goal may hinge, in part, on the level of public support or opposition for the voucher method of reform and on the particular components of any proposed voucher system. In this policy brief, we report on a randomized survey experiment we conducted to identify how two key dimensions of school voucher systems—source of funding and scope of coverage—affect public opinion across various sectors of the American public.
Vouchers, Public School Response, and the Role of Incentives. Staff Report No. 306
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2010
This paper analyzes the incentives and responses of public schools in the context of an educational reform. The literature on the effect of voucher programs on public schools typically focuses on student and mean school scores. This paper tries to go inside the black box to investigate some of the ways in which schools facing the Florida voucher program behaved. The program embedded vouchers in an accountability regime. Schools getting an "F" grade for the first time were exposed to the threat of vouchers, but did not face vouchers unless and until they got a second "F" within the next three years. In addition, "F," being the lowest grade, exposed the threatened schools to stigma. Exploiting the institutional details of this program, I analyze the incentives built into the system and investigate the behavior of the threatened public schools facing these incentives. There is strong evidence that they did respond to incentives. Using highly disaggregated school-level data, a difference-indifferences estimation strategy, and a regression discontinuity analysis, I find that the threatened schools tended to focus more on students below the minimum criteria cutoffs rather than reading and math. These results are robust to controlling for differential preprogram trends, changes in demographic compositions, mean reversion, and sorting. The findings have important policy implications.