The Rise and Fall of School Vouchers: A Story of Religion, Race, and Politics

This Article examines why school vouchers have failed to garner the support that so many assumed would follow the Court\u27s decision in Zelman. The explanation, I suggest, concerns religion, race, and politics. The original rationale for vouchers was what I call the values claim -vouchers protected the right of parents to send their child to a school that reinforced their values. Originally promoted by Catholics, the values claim was adopted by evangelical Christians concerned about the secularization of public schools after the 1960s. Although the values claim was central for most of the history of the voucher movement, in the decade leading up to Zelman, voucher advocates replaced the values claim with what I call the racial-justice claim. This rationale emphasized vouchers as part of a civil rights struggle to obtain academically rigorous private education for low-income and minority parents. Redefining vouchers in this manner had political and legal advantages, and paved the way for the Court\u27s decision in Zelman upholding vouchers. Since Zelman, however, two trends have emerged that spell trouble for the future of the voucher movement. First, there are tensions between the values and racial-justice claims for vouchers, as the two claims lead to very different types of voucher programs that appeal to divergent political constituencies. Second, the voucher movement has been hurt by the rise of the accountability movement in education. No Child Left Behind was enacted the same year that Zelman was decided, meaning that the Court gave the green light to the voucher movement at exactly the same time that state and national education policy began to demand greater oversight of all schools, including private schools accepting vouchers. For schools today, accountability means less local control, more tests, and stricter government standards. Conservative Christians, who once led the voucher movement, reject these intrusions into school autonomy. As a result, they are less likely to support modern voucher programs. My approach in this Article is historical, predictive, and normative. It is historical in that I trace the development of the values and racial-justice claims for school vouchers, exploring the tensions between the two claims. It is predictive because I suggest that the future of this educational reform is much less rosy than voucher supporters thought when Zelman was decided. Thus, I predict that Zelman may end up mattering much less than so many had thought it would. Finally, my approach is normative for I argue that it would be unfortunate if I am right about the demise of vouchers. While voucher defenders have vastly overstated the racial-justice claim, there is some prospect that vouchers might improve educational outcomes for low-income African American children. I argue that vouchers should be permitted at least until they can be more thoroughly evaluated to determine their impact on a group so in need of better educational opportunities

Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the new law restructuring the nation's workforce development system, marks a significant change for job seekers and the practitioners who serve them. Under WIA, eligible job seekers will be issued Individual Training Accounts (ITAs), or vouchers, that can be used to enter training programs from a state-approved list. Whether vouchers will meet the goal of improving the quality of training will not be known for some time. However, the impact on organizations that serve job seekers will be immediate. Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers offers workforce development practitioners critical lessons about how they can adapt to this new environment, based on the experiences of organizations in jurisdictions that are already relying on vouchers

Program design, incentives, and response: evidence from educational interventions

In an effort to reform K-12 education, policymakers have introduced school vouchers—scholarships that make students eligible to transfer from public to private schools—in some U.S. school districts. This article analyzes two such educational interventions in the United States: the Milwaukee and Florida voucher programs. Under the Milwaukee program, vouchers were imposed from the outset, so that all low-income public school students became eligible for vouchers to transfer to private schools. In contrast, schools in the Florida program were only threatened with vouchers, with students of a particular school becoming eligible for vouchers only if the school received two “F” grades in a period of four years. Unlike the Milwaukee schools, Florida schools therefore had an incentive to avoid vouchers. Using school-level data from Florida and Wisconsin, this study shows that the performance effects of the threatened public schools under the Florida program have exceeded those of corresponding schools in Milwaukee. The lessons of the study are broadly applicable to New York City's educational reform efforts.Educational vouchers ; Private schools ; Reward (Psychology) ; Public schools ; Education - Economic aspects

School vouchers and student achievement: recent evidence, remaining questions

In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system. The evidence from other forms of school choice is also consistent with this conclusion. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages, and whether vouchers might nevertheless provide a cost-neutral alternative to our current system of public education provision at the elementary and secondary school level.Educational vouchers

The Effects of Vouchers on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Chile’s Conditional Voucher Program Juan A. Correa David Inostroza Francisco Parro Loreto Reyes Gabriel Ugarte Universidad Andrés Bello Marzo

Indexación: UNAB JEL Classi cation: H4; I2Abstract We use data from Chile's conditional voucher program to test the e ects of vouchers on academic achievement. Conditional vouchers have delivered extra resources to low-income, vulnerable students since 2008. Moreover, under this scheme, additional resources are contingent on the completion of speci c scholastic goals. Using a di erence-in-di erences approach, we nd a positive and signi cant e ect of vouchers on standardized test scores. Additionally, our results highlight the importance of conditioning the delivery of resources to some speci c academic goals when frictions exist in the education market

The Economics of Vouchers

This paper aims to provide a swift tour of the economic issues presented by vouchers and thus to fill an apparent gap in the literature for a basic survey of the subject. Among the issues it considers are: factors determining a voucher's cash-equivalence; reasons (such as paternalism, externalities, and distribution) for giving beneficiaries non-cash-equivalent vouchers rather than cash; optimal tax issues involved in the design of vouchers and the choice between vouchers and other delivery mechanisms, including factors determining the optimal marginal reimbursement rate (MRR) in a voucher program, and the similarity between this question and that of determining optimal marginal tax rates (MTRs) under the income tax; the incentive effects of voucher eligibility criteria, such as income or asset tests; factors determining the allocative and price effects of vouchers, both in the short run when unexpectedly enacted and at equilibrium; and factors relevant to the choice between private and public supply that may often overlap with the decision whether to adopt a voucher program.

A Voucher Supplement To Existing Anti-Discrimination Programs In The Job Market

This paper draws on literatures on vouchers and discrimination, and derives an optimal voucher scheme as a supplement to standard anti-discrimination policies, including affirmative action. Surveying current policy methods, it compares efficiency and distributional effects of vouchers to those of the standard enforcement policies. The motivation for vouchers is based on efficiency, equity, and on observed divergence of racial unemployment rates combined with convergence of wage rates.

Old problems in the new solutions?

Despite their disappointing performance in the recent past, fertilizer subsidies have re-emerged as a tool in the agricultural strategies of many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The new paradigm for fertilizer subsidies calls for use of such mechanisms as vouchers to target benefits to poor smallholders and public–private partnerships to develop private markets. There is some belief that with these innovations, fertilizer subsidy programs will circumvent the deleterious consequences of the programs of the past. However, there has been a glaring lack of innovation in how to prevent politics from dominating the allocation of subsidy program benefits and exacerbating inefficiencies as was the experience in earlier programs. This paper studies how vouchers, which could be used towards the purchase of fertilizer, were distributed amongst districts in Ghana’s 2008 fertilizer subsidy program. We find that politics played a significant role in the allocation of vouchers. Higher numbers of vouchers were targeted to districts that the ruling party had lost in the previous presidential elections and more so in districts that had been lost by a higher margin. A district received 2 percent more vouchers for each percentage point by which the ruling party had lost the previous presidential election - this amount is both statistically and numerically significant. The analysis also shows that district poverty levels, which should have been an important consideration in an economic efficiency motivated distribution, were not a statistically significant determinant of districts’ voucher allocation. The evidence that vouchers were targeted to areas in which the opposition party received strong support is suggestive of the vouchers being used for vote-buying. This finding raises the caution that despite innovations in implementing fertilizer subsidies, politically motivated allocation of subsidy benefits remains a major potential source of inefficiency.Fertilizer, politics, Subsidies,

Public Housing Units vs. Housing Vouchers: Accessibility, Local Public Goods, and Welfare

A perennial debate worldwide over housing aid policy focuses on whether the government should provide housing vouchers or subsidized public housing units. To complement the empirically- dominated literature, this paper builds a general equilibrium model that merges urban land use (monocentric city) and Tiebout frameworks. In our model, public housing units or housing vouchers are rationed and some lower-income people have to compete with those with higher incomes in the private rental market. We discuss how location of public housing units is an essential policy variable in addition to the numbers and sizes of units, and argue why housing vouchers may be preferable to public housing.Conditional CAPM

A Gift is not Always a Gift: Gift Exchange in a Voucher Experiment

Different from traditional gift exchange experiments, we study a field experiment where a random subsample of participants in the Swiss Labor Force Survey was sent vouchers to be used in adult training courses. Importantly for our purposes, actual voucher redemption can be traced. This gives the unique opportunity to study whether gift exchange in the form of participation in future rounds of the survey depends on the perceived usefulness of the gift. We find that the group of voucher recipients as a whole has significantly higher response rates in the survey six months after the vouchers were sent out. There is considerable heterogeneity, though. Our results point to a long-lasting gift exchange relationship for the sub-group that had redeemed their vouchers. Contrary to this group, the individuals who did not redeem their vouchers, had a response pattern that was not significantly different from the voucher non-recipients.gift exchange, reciprocity, field experiment, long-run effects