New Research: Vouchers Increase Segregation and Offer Benefits to the Few
We already know that vouchers increase segregation and offer benefits to the few. We don’t need to implement decades of vouchers to just turn back later.
Findings from a newly released peer-reviewed study entitled Understanding How Universal Vouchers Have Impacted Urban School Districts’ Enrollment in Chile published in Education Policy Analysis Archives show that educational and mobility opportunities for families and students participating in a universal (everyone has access to them) voucher system are not equally distributed. Some families and students use and benefit from the system, while others will remain marginalized. Who benefits? The statistical results in this study demonstrate that students of relatively higher SES living in mid-high or mid-low poverty districts receive the benefit from vouchers. These students may move from one public school to another, from a public school to private-voucher school in the same area, from one district to another, or from a public school in an area to a private-voucher school in another district. Meanwhile, low-income counterparts living in high-poverty areas are excluded from the lionshare of the benefits in the voucher system and tend to remain at their public neighborhood school.
Voucher programs, which provide public funding for students to attend private schools, have become more popular in the United States in the last several decades. Currently there are 22 traditional voucher programs in operation across 14 states (including D.C.), and another 16 neo-voucher programs across six additional states for a total of 38 voucher programs in 20 states.[i] While most existing voucher programs in the U.S. are small-scale and targeted at low-income students (e.g. the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, and the Washington DC program), there has recently been a push to expand programs to include students from middle-income families. For example, Florida, Indiana and Pennsylvania have considered legislation recently to either create new or expand existing school voucher programs for the middle class by loosening income requirements to apply and expanding state funding.
The push to extend voucher programs rests on the assumption that they will spur competition between public and private campuses, make schools more responsive to families and students, increase student achievement, and improve the effectiveness of all schools (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Friedman, 1962; Gallego, 2002; Gallego, 2004; Peterson, 2009; Sapelli & Vial, 2002). In addition, some researchers (e.g. Ladner & Brouillette, 2000) have argued that vouchers will improve school effectiveness by promoting competition between districts and between districts and private schools. A second assumption for supporting vouchers consists of the belief that vouchers will improve the educational opportunities of disadvantaged students (Sugarman, 1999), as well as contribute to their social integration with middle- and upper-class students. The argument is as follows: Since school choice is already available to upper-class families through residential mobility or through enrollment in private schools, expanding this right to low-income families through vouchers reduces stratification as parental income becomes less important in determining who attends private schools (Neal 2002, Nechyba, 2000).
Contrarily, voucher opponents posit that scaling-up vouchers will result in “cream skimming” and greater stratification between and within the public and private education sectors (Bellei, 2009; Goldhaber, 1999; Ladd, 2003, Hsieh & Urquiola, 2004; Hsieh & Urquiola, 2006; Torche, 2005). As a result, some schools (those that enroll New Research: Vouchers Increase Segregation and Offer Benefits to the Few | Cloaking Inequity:
