Recent Scholarly Review of Reports Deemed Claims of Fiscal Benefits to be Unsubstantiated and Inaccurate

Contact: Luis A. Huerta, (212) 678-4199; lah2013@columbia.edu
Kevin Welner, kevin.welner@gmail.com

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo. (July 2, 2009) -- A new report issued this week by the Friedman Foundation is part of a series of reports purporting to demonstrate that programs awarding tax credits to donors funding private school vouchers will reduce government expenditures and make the finance system more efficient. A scholarly review of the reports, however, was released two weeks ago and sharply criticized the reports, pointing out that they present unsubstantiated claims and fail to adequately consider short- and long-term costs of such tax-credit schemes.

The earlier reports were reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by professor Luis Huerta of Teachers College, Columbia University

Tax-credit voucher programs--dubbed "neovouchers" in a recent book by the University of Colorado's Kevin Welner--provide a non-refundable tax credit to individuals or corporations contributing to non-profit corporations, which then distribute the money to students attending private schools. These neovouchers (often called "scholarships" in the state laws) now exist in six states--Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Rhode Island, Iowa, and Georgia--and a neovoucher law Indiana was signed by the governor just this week. Also this week, the first careful analysis of neovoucher outcomes was released--the official evaluation in Florida--and found that the students receiving the neovouchers performed no better (and perhaps worse) than comparable public school students.

The Friedman reports reviewed by Huerta claimed that implementing these programs would result in a net financial saving to the states. They base their conclusions, Huerta observes, on assumptions about the sensitivity of public school revenues and expenditures to enrollment declines, as well as assumptions about a pent-up demand for publicly funded private school choice and the nature and degree of supply and demand pressures. Professor Huerta tests all these assumptions and finds them to be largely groundless and frequently at odds with established research. In fact, Huerta notes that the reports' use of research is largely confined to work from advocacy groups like the Friedman Foundation itself. He observes that this "insular approach further calls into question the validity of the new reports' conclusions."

Professor Huerta's review hits particularly hard on the reports' assumptions about the prospect of private school supply and demand alike if a neovoucher program were to be implemented. These assumptions are crucial to the reports' analyses, and the review shows them to be highly problematic. Similarly, the reports fail to adequately account for the additional expenditures of a tax-credit program when it subsidizes families who were going to choose a private school anyway, making their expenditure calculations almost worthless.

"Policymakers should be cautioned to look beyond the seductive promises of increased fiscal savings and efficiency, which are unsubstantiated and inaccurately estimated in these reports," Huerta concludes. "Instead, policymakers should seek more balanced and empirically robust assessments that would allow them to make informed decisions about how to proceed with effective school reform polices."

Find the review by Luis Huerta on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-tuition-tax-credits

Find the Friedman Foundation's Oklahoma report at:
http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/downloadFile.do?id=373

CONTACT:
Luis A. Huerta
Associate Professor of Education and Public Policy
Teachers College, Columbia University
(212) 678-4199
lah2013@columbia.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
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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