Evidence Mounts Against Louisiana Voucher Program
More research shows the Bayou State's voucher program harms students' academic performance.
Louisiana's private school voucher program – the fifth-largest in the country – is having a negative impact on students who use the vouchers to enroll in private school, a mounting body of evidence shows.
"Most striking, we find strong and consistent evidence that students using a [voucher] performed significantly worse in math after using their scholarship to attend private schools," said Patrick Wolf, the lead author for a series of studies published Monday by the university's School Choice Demonstration Project and Tulane University's Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.
The findings bolster those from a working paper published two months ago by a separate team of researchers that found students who used a voucher to attend a private school experienced lowered math, reading, science and social studies scores. In particular, their likelihood of a failing score increased by 24 to 50 percent.
Taken altogether, the studies come as states across the country mull similar programs and the private school choice sector is hitting a stride: Since 2008-2009, the number of students using vouchers increased by 130 percent, according to advocates'figures.
"One of the central debates about school reform is whether or not school choice improves student outcomes," the reports' authors noted. "School choice reforms, which comprise a broad category of policies aimed at improving public education through the introduction of market forces that may stimulate customer choice and competition between schools, have grown particularly popular since the 1990s."
Louisiana's voucher system provides about 6,700 students with about $5,300 per student, which they can use to pay for tuition at a private school. Only students from families with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty line – meaning $60,625 for a family of four, for example – and those whose public school has been labeled by the state as low-performing qualify for the voucher.
More than half of the Bayou State's roughly 1,500 public schools are low-performing.
The vouchers are awarded through a lottery system, and private schools that participate in the voucher program must accept them as full tuition payment, even if the sticker price is higher than a voucher's amount.
Specifically, the new research found that students who were performing at roughly the 50th percentile in their public schools – meaning their performance was average – fell 24 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading below their public school counterparts after one year in private school.
During their second year in private school, the downward trend continued in math, but rebounded some in reading.Research: Louisiana's School Voucher Program Harms Student Performance - US News: