Vouchers, choice, and public policy: An overview (original) (raw)
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Vouchers, elección y política pública
The educational voucher system builds on the pillars of informed choice and competition to improve the quality of the education provided. This document summarizes some of the results of recent literature on the subject, and discusses their public policy implications.
Vouchers, School Choice and the Access to Higher Education
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I would like to thank the comments made by Jose Miguel Benavente, Janine Berg, Francois Bourguignon, Manuel Pedro Carneiro, Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler, Andrés Gomez-Lobo, Victor Macías, Cem Mete, Joseph Ramos, Máximo Torero and Miguel ...
Are Vouchers a Panacea?: Data from International Implementation
The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, 2012
Vouchers, an old idea, are once again gaining prominence in the U.S. educational policy discourse. Numerous countries have extensively experimented with vouchers and a market-based system, and, as a result, a multitude of approaches have emerged. As a result, other countries’ implementation of vouchers can help inform U.S. educational policymakers regarding outcomes for students.
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.
School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature
2015
We thank Roger Gordon for his encouragement to undertake this paper, and Janet Currie and Steven Durlauf for their invaluable support. We are indebted to Thomas Nechyba and four anonymous referees for their numerous comments. In addition, we received useful comments from Chelsea Coffin and Jesse Levin. Of course, these individuals bear no responsibility for errors or opinions herein. We are grateful to Abby Linn for excellent research assistance, and Romano thanks the Institute for Education Sciences for support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The Potential Impact of Vouchers
Peabody Journal of Education, 2004
This article provides an updated review of recent empirical research on the potential impact of private school vouchers. It addresses 3 questions: (a) do students that use vouchers to attend a private school obtain better outcomes than would be obtained in a public school? (b) Do vouchers encourage student sorting and how does sorting affect student outcomes? (c) Does the offer of vouchers promote competition, improving outcomes of students who remain in public schools? Conclusions are that African American students who are offered vouchers experience small achievement gains. The results are highly sensitive to analytical assumptions and are not evident for other racial or ethnic groups. The evidence further indicates that large-scale voucher plans encourage sorting that could lower the achievement of public school students. There is no compelling evidence that such losses are outweighed by competitive gains in public schools. The conclusions on sorting and competition are most applicable to unrestricted choice plans in which flat-rate vouchers are offered to a large number of students with few eligibility restrictions. Some emerging evidence indicates that alternate approaches to policy design could yield more promising results.
School vouchers: a critical view
2002
mong the many reforms proposed for K-12 education are changes in governance that would increase the power of parents to choose schools and thereby make the education system function more like a market. Within this set of reforms, which also includes offering greater choice among public schools and the opportunity to establish public "charter" schools, school voucher programs are particularly controversial because they would permit parents to use public funds to secure education not only at public schools, but also at private schools. Proponents and opponents disagree about the effects of voucher programs on student achievement, on the social and racial segregation of students and on disadvantaged students. In addition, they differ on the importance of maintaining the separation between religious private schools and the state. School voucher programs currently exist only on a small scale in the United States. The main publicly funded voucher programs are in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Florida. In addition, small privately funded programs provide vouchers for lowand moderate-income students in cities such as New York City, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Another privately funded program, the Children's Scholarship Fund, operates at the national level. Recent studies based primarily on U.S. evidence typically conclude that the data are insuf cient to draw clear conclusions about the net effects of vouchers on academic achievement, access to schools, racial integration and civic education (for example,