Existing research found insufficient to support advocacy claims, new review finds

Contact: Christopher Lubienski, (217) 333-4382; club@illinois.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (April 27, 2009) -- A recent report from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice purports to present a comprehensive summary of previous research about voucher programs' competitive effects on public schools. The report concludes the competition improves public schools. But a new review of that report finds it is based on weak underlying research and that it misrepresents findings.

Titled "A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on How Vouchers Affect Public Schools," the report was written by Greg Forster. Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation, which was founded to advance Milton Friedman's belief in a privatized education system. The report was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by Professor Christopher Lubienski of the University of Illinois, a nationally recognized expert on school choice research.

The Friedman report describes 17 studies of voucher programs and contends that these studies show a consensus that the competitive threat of vouchers causes public schools to improve. It rejects the concern that voucher policies cream good students (and valuable funding) from public schools, which then face a downward spiral as a result. And it asserts that individual public schools improve as a result of voucher programs, even though no such improvement is found overall in the affected community or school district.

In his review, Lubienski finds numerous flaws with the report's evidence, assumptions, and reasoning. Among them:

• While it claims to reflect "all available empirical studies on how vouchers affect academic achievement in public schools," the majority of the studies cited in the report were produced by explicitly pro-voucher advocacy organizations, and almost all did not undergo peer review.
• Lubienski describes a study that was misrepresented in the report. The report summarizes only the first part of the study, which merely replicated other research. But it was in the second part that the researchers explained why a different approach would be more rigorous. That more rigorous approach found no improvement in public schools from voucher programs; it was dismissed by the Friedman report as "unnecessary."
• The report makes no serious attempt, where vouchers are found to be associated with improved public school performance, to test for alternative explanations, as would be required in credible research. Instead, it relies on a "black box" analysis that blindly attributes improved achievement to the presence of a voucher policy.

In connection with this last point, the report "can't decide whether or not to acknowledge the impact of factors other than vouchers on public schools," Lubienski writes. "It attempts to show that public school gains were caused by the presence of vouchers alone, but then argues that the lack of overall gains for districts with vouchers should be ignored because too many other factors are at play."

Moreover, the report is premised on the assertion that private schools are superior to public ones, but it offers no evidence and in fact ignores "a growing body of research--much of it peer-reviewed--suggesting that they are not."

Finally, Lubienski notes an internal contradiction: While the report assumes that market competition from vouchers will make public schools perform better, it also claims that voucher systems don't financially penalize public schools--a claim that "defies the basic logic of competition advanced by the Friedman Foundation."

The result, Lubienski concludes, is not a report that offers any useful guidance to measuring the benefits or harm voucher programs. It is, rather, "an overview [that] seems designed to build a pro-voucher argument rather than an evenhanded presentation of research."

Find Christopher Lubienski's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-win-win-solution

CONTACT:
Professor Christopher Lubienski
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(217) 333-4382
club@illinois.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate."

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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org).

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