Ohio voucher program never shown to boost performance of public schools
Contact: Christopher Lubienski, (217) 333-4382; (email) club@illinois.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; (email) kevin.welner@gmail.com
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. (Sept. 8, 2008) - A new report from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice purports to find evidence that Ohio's private-school voucher program spurs public schools to improve achievement. A new review of the report finds multiple flaws that seriously undermine the research.
The report is "Promising Start: An Empirical Analysis of How EdChoice Vouchers Affect Ohio Public Schools," by Greg Forster. It 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.
"Promising Start" examines Ohio's EdChoice program, which offers vouchers of $4,375 or more to allow up to 14,000 students enrolled in "chronically under-performing" public schools to instead attend private schools at taxpayer expense. The report asserts that there is empirical support that the voucher program, by fostering competition with public schools, improves those public schools' performance, thereby providing an indirect benefit to those students who remain in the public schools. In particular, it claims that in EdChoice's first year, students experienced substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the possibility of losing students to vouchers.
"Despite being presented as scientifically rigorous, the report suffers from serious methodological shortcomings," Lubienski writes. "The analysis uses weak variables and an incorrect approach to measuring academic gains, and it tries to make claims based on cherry-picking uneven results." Underlying the report, he explains, are "several assumptions, not all of which are supported or even considered in the analysis."
For instance, while the report asserts that vouchers help parents "to hold schools accountable for teaching their students," backed up by the threat of moving to another district or school, that claim assumes that parents have information about different schools' academic effectiveness, and that they also have the time, motivation and other resources to learn about different schools. Similarly, the report assumes that where parents are able to choose other schools for their children, "schools that don't adequately teach their students will lose them"-and thus be driven to improve. "Yet the report provides no evidence that this is happening, and research does not necessarily bear out this assumption," Lubienski writes.
"Instead of being empirically based, the report's assumptions appear to be more statements of belief based in a rudimentary and simplistic view of economic behavior in markets for education," Lubienski writes. "The Friedman report selectively focuses on studies--no matter what the quality--that appear to support its agenda. In doing so, it leaves out much high-quality research, much of it peer-reviewed, that seriously questions the assertion that the threat of losing students has a positive impact on public
schools."
The result, he concludes, is that the report on EdChoice falls short even of the "standards of scientific rigor" that the Friedman Foundation claims govern its research agenda.
"In view of the announced advocacy mission of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice regarding vouchers, and the notable flaws on this report, it is better read as a statement of belief than as an empirical analysis," Lubienski writes.
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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