U.S. school students benefit from voucher programmes

After re-analysing their data from dozens of angles, Paul Petersen and William Howell defend the conclusions of their recent study, which showed positive effects for African-American students enrolled in a voucher programme in New York City.

The original study tracked some 1,200 public school students that were given vouchers worth $1,400 to help pay the cost of private school. A research team collected baseline test scores and followed the student's progress for three years. According to their findings:

African-American students in private schools, after three years, scored roughly eight percentile points higher on reading and math portions of standardized tests than did their peers in public school.

The authors looked at the evidence in 120 different ways, and in 108 of the estimations used they found significantly positive effects for African-Americans.

To answer critics who said that the method for determining ethnicity was misleading, Petersen and Howell used four different classification schemes in their re-analysis.

A student was first classified as African-American if his or her mother was African-American; second, when both parents were; third, when the parental caretaker was; and fourth, when either the mother or father was.

No matter the definition of ethnicity, the results remained the same: private schooling had a positive influence on African-American student performance in all three years the study was conducted.

Furthermore, students benefited from the private schooling regardless of what grade they were in when they entered the programme.

Source: Paul E. Petersen and William G. Howell, Again, Our Study Shows the Value of Vouchers, Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2003; and Jay P. Greene, An Unfair Grade for Vouchers, Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2003.

For text (WSJ subscription required) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10557312137885300-search,00.html

For more information on Public School Choice http://www.ncpa.org/iss/edu/

FMF Policy Bulletin\19 August 2003