Identify the likeliest actual effect of a voucher system on the quality of public schools.
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Executive Summary
Since the 1980s, as part of a broader market-oriented agenda, school choice and vouchers have become an increasingly important part of America?s educational reform policy debate. At stake are the possibility of greatly improving American education and fundamental issues of who has responsibility for the quality of educational provision and of the governance of the educational system.
The debate is rooted in ideological differences between market proponents, who attach greater importance to individual choice, and supporters of a publicly run educational system, who place greater importance on equity, commonality, and public accountability. Yet, the debate is also conducted in the empirical arena, where data are used to test the claims of proponents on both sides.
This study is an attempt to contribute to that empirical debate by revisiting the issue of whether competition improves student achievement in traditional public schools, a key argument for educational markets. Our study uses data from an extensive choice reform in Milwaukee?s Public School District (MPS), a district with the typical educational problems of an American urban center, but unusual in that it has had a voucher plan, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), targeted at low-income students since 1990.
After the experimental phase of the voucher plan ended in 1995, Wisconsin?s legislature approved the expansion of the plan, capping it at 15% of public school enrollment, or about 15,000 students. In 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the legislative action allowing vouchers to be used in religious schools. This immediately led to rapid growth of Milwaukee voucher takers and increased the number of schools accepting vouchers. By the 2002-03 school year, more than 11,000 students were using vouchers to attend private schools, and more than 100 schools were accepting voucher students. Twenty-six were new schools that had entered the market specifically to take advantage of voucher students. In 2006, after a compromise between the legislature and the governor, the cap was raised to 22,500 voucher students. At the same time, enrollment in Milwaukee public schools has declined by more than 7%.
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Neoliberalism is a theory of political economy which holds that the well-being of individuals is best served by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom in a framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of government is limited to keeping people safe and preserving the rules of the market and leaving to the markets services, including education, that it is assumed will be more efficiently delivered by the private sector. Educational policies in the US and in other countries around the world have been strongly influenced by market- based reforms including accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision- making, charter schools, deregulation, and competition among schools. This paper summarizes current theory and research on the effects of market- based schooling practices on students with disabilities. The available evidence indicates that students with disabilities are not well served by market-based reforms and, further, free-market reforms may be fundamentally incompatible with the needs of students with disabilities.
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