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News Release
FOR RELEASE
December 6, 2001
RAND STUDY EXAMINES THE EVIDENCE ON VOUCHERS AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
Exhaustive Analysis Backs Neither Camp in Contentious Debate
Finds Jury Is Still Out But Some Outcomes Show Promise
WASHINGTON, D.C. December 6 - Does school choice improve education? In Rhetoric Versus Reality: What We Know and What We Need to Know About Vouchers and Charter Schools, a team of RAND analysts reports on the most comprehensive examination of the nation's experience with these efforts to date and concludes that so many key questions remain unanswered that neither the hopes of choice supporters nor the fears of its opponents can currently be confirmed.
Team members Brian P. Gill, P. Michael Timpane, Karen E. Ross and Dominic J. Brewer emphasize that even the strongest evidence available is based on voucher and charter school programs that have been operating for only a short period of time, involve only a small number of participants, and display effects that are generally small or uncertain. Nevertheless, some choice programs are showing promise in terms of some important outcomes. Perhaps the most clear-cut lesson that emerges from their analysis is that the details of a program's design can have a major impact on its outcomes.
Vouchers and charter schools are considered together because they represent the leading edge of the school-choice movement and offer major alternatives to the conventional system of public education. They challenge traditional notions of "public" and "private" in education by establishing public funding, and usually public regulation, of schools that are privately operated rather than under the direct control of a local school board.
Drawing on the existing research literature, the authors evaluate the empirical evidence on vouchers and charters in terms of effects on five major policy goals - academic achievement, choice, equitable access, integration, and preparation for civic responsibilities. Here are their findings about the knowns and the unknowns within each category:
- Data regarding small experimental, privately funded voucher programs targeted to low-income students suggest a modest achievement benefit for African-American children after one to two years (as compared with local public schools). The mechanisms producing this apparent benefit are unknown, which means that larger-scale voucher programs may or may not have a comparable effect. Evidence involving children of other racial/ethnic groups in such voucher schools shows neither academic benefit nor harm.
- Charter school achievement results range from slight advantages to slight disadvantages compared with conventional public schools. Although the results are mixed, they do suggest that charter school performance improves after the first year of operation.
- The most important unknown is whether and how voucher and charter programs will affect the achievement of the large majority of students who remain in conventional public schools; either positive or negative effects are possible. The long-term effects of choice programs are also unknown.
- Parental satisfaction levels are high in virtually all voucher programs studied. Satisfaction levels decline slightly in the second year, but remain substantially higher than those of public-school comparison groups.
- Less evidence is available from charter programs, but it too generally suggests fairly high parental satisfaction levels.
- The quality and quantity of the supply of schools that various voucher and charter programs could produce is highly speculative. The major unknown is whether such programs can be scaled up to produce a range of desirable choices for large numbers of families.
- Some programs that were explicitly designed with income qualifications have succeeded in placing low-income, low-achieving and minority students in voucher schools. However, most choice programs - voucher and charter alike - have done less well in extending access to students with disabilities.
- Programs that subsidize private-school tuition via income-tax benefits to parents (rather than direct grants) are rarely targeted to low-income or at-risk students, and usually serve a disproportionate number of middle- and upper-income students.
- In highly segregated communities, targeted voucher programs may modestly increase racial integration by putting minority children into voucher schools that are less uniformly minority.
- Limited evidence indicates that most charter schools across the nation have racial/ethnic distributions similar to those of local public schools.
- Evidence from other nations suggests that large-scale unregulated choice programs generally lead to greater stratification.
- Integration effects are likely to remain largely unknown until researchers conduct dynamic analyses that consider both the voucher and charter schools students attend and the schools they would likely attend in the absence of such programs.
- Next to nothing is known about whether voucher and charter programs help students to become responsible, tolerant, democratically active citizens. For that matter, little is known about the effectiveness of the conventional public schools in this regard either, even though civic preparation has been regarded as a critical purpose of the public schools since their founding.
What are the implications of these findings for relatively small-scale choice programs such as those currently in place? "In some contexts - such as high-poverty cities with substantial African-American populations, or communities that have dysfunctional public schools - targeted voucher programs may produce discrete benefits," the authors declare. "Such programs will not be a silver bullet that will rescue urban education, but they are unlikely to produce the negative consequences that voucher opponents fear." Charters are more difficult to summarize, they warn, both because most charter schools are very new and because the variation across states is substantial. Still, the existing schools "frequently satisfy a parental demand, and are producing academic results that are mixed but show signs of promise." The implications for larger programs are considerably murkier, they caution. Expansion might exacerbate the weaknesses and fail to produce the benefits seen in smaller settings. High-quality providers may lack the capacity and incentive to add more students and schools.
Whether the programs are large or small, the analysts stress, the specifics of policy design can have major consequences in maximizing the benefits that flow from vouchers and charters and minimizing harms. Their conditional recommendations to policymakers include the following:
- To promote academic effectiveness: permit existing schools (public, private and parochial) to participate in choice programs, enforce testing requirements for all students, provide parents and public with plenty of information, and don't skimp on resources.
- To benefit those who remain in conventional public schools: require that all participating schools practice open admissions to prevent elite schools from "cream skimming" the best students, and give regular public schools the autonomy they need to perform in a newly competitive educational market.
- To ensure that voucher and charter schools serve low-income and special-needs students: fund choice programs through direct grants rather than income-tax subsidies, require open admissions, provide generous funding, and target specific students.
The authors conclude that further experimentation with carefully designed voucher and charter programs is called for as a central feature of a broad research and demonstration strategy aimed at answering the critical unresolved questions.
The study was funded by the Gund Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Rhetoric Versus Reality: What We Know and What We Need to Know About Vouchers and Charter Schools (ISBN 0-8330-2765-4) is available on RAND's website at http:/www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1118. A printed copy can be ordered for $15 from RAND's distribution department (order@rand.org or call toll-free 877-584-8642).
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