Louisiana school vouchers cripple academic achievement, national report says
Advocate staff file photo by BRYAN TUCK -- School buses parked outside a school in Lafayette.
One of former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s signature education laws is actually hurting student achievement, according to a national report that is sparking controversy.
Louisiana students who get state-financed vouchers to attend private schools suffer more academically than if they had remained in a troubled public school, says a review done for the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The one-year study says achievement drops showed up in math, reading, science and social studies for students enrolled in what is officially called the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
“Our results show that LSP vouchers reduce academic achievement,” the review says.
The NREB is a 96-year-old private, nonpartisan group that does research for academics, public policymakers and business. Twenty-five Nobel prizewinners have worked as researchers for the organization.
Longtime critics of vouchers, including leaders of traditional public school groups that opposed the expansion of vouchers in 2012, seized on the report.
Debbie Meaux, president of the Louisiana Association of Educators, said Thursday the findings confirm what her group has long suspected, and that voucher students often go without the level of curriculum and teachers common in other schools.
“We are seeing a difference in the quality of education provided to those kids,” Meaux said.
But state Superintendent of Education John White, a longtime backer of vouchers, said in a paper published last month that the NREB report is limited to just the first school year that vouchers were expanded statewide — 2012-13 — and that students have shown steady gains since then.
White, in a paper done for the Thomas Fordham Institute, wrote that the authors of the report were offered two additional years of data on how voucher students fared “but turned them down because of urgency to meet their own deadlines for publishing.”
Vouchers are state aid that allow low-income students to attend private and parochial schools rather than troubled public schools.
The state has more than 7,100 voucher students, mostly minorities, and 54 percent of recipients attend schools in East Baton Rouge and Orleans parishes.
The average family income for enrollees during the year studied was $17,389.
The average voucher totals $5,311 compared with $8,605 for students in the public school district previously used.
The state tab is $42 million this year.
Four years ago, Jindal made expanding vouchers statewide a key part of his push to overhaul the state’s long-troubled Louisiana school vouchers cripple academic achievement, national report says | The New Orleans Advocate — New Orleans, Louisiana: