NPR article on transferring low-resource public school students to private schools through voucher programs
It is the education debate of the Trump era. With the president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos using policy and the bully pulpit to champion private school vouchers, supporters and critics have tangled over the question:
Do low-income, public school students perform better when they're given a voucher to attend a private school?
For years, the answer from researchers has been a muddle, while a handful of recent studies have clearly shown voucher students backsliding academically. Today, much-anticipated reviews of not one but two of the nation's largest voucher programs add some depth and a few twists to the voucher narrative.
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The researchers conducted dozens of interviews with principals, teachers, parents and students in 13 voucher-accepting private schools and found a common theme: Children who came from public schools often struggled to meet new homework expectations and found the first year in a private school particularly challenging. The fact that voucher students' academic performance gradually improved over multiple years suggests that they had to adjust to those demands and that their private schools had to adjust as well.
Waddington believes many private schools struggled to adapt quickly to Indiana's voucher program and that teachers and administrators had to scramble to meet the needs of students who were "largely low-achieving and more demographically diverse than the students already enrolled in these private schools ... It's important to be able to have the time and systematically think about how these students can be best served," Waddington says.
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The lower performance in math vs. reading, however, is consistent with many other voucher studies, including Indiana, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Florida, and Ohio. One reason for that consistency, Mills says, may be math's dependence on sequencing, which can make changing schools particularly disruptive.
One final headline from the Louisiana report: Students who switched to private schools were less likely to be later identified as having special needs, and, if they arrived with the disability label, they were more likely to shed it in a voucher school. The authors, Mills and Wolf, say they're unsure whether having fewer kids designated as special-needs is a good thing or a bad thing. It could be bad if these children don't get the services they need. It could be good if the label is a stigma and students are doing so well that they no longer need it.
