Report: Milwaukee voucher program doesn't spur competition

A new study of Milwaukee schools finds that competition generated by vouchers does not lead to higher student test scores. Milwaukee has the longest-running voucher plan in the nation.

The findings contradict claims that the availability of vouchers pushes public schools to compete for students, thus improving student performance in low-income, urban areas. The lack of consistent academic improvement in Milwaukee’s public schools even after a proliferation of alternative options for students is profiled in “Vouchers and Public School Performance,” published Wednesday (October 3, 2007) by the Economic Policy Institute, an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank.

The book examines public elementary school performance through extensive data analysis – including test scores in language and math – over nearly a decade as the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program introduced vouchers on a widening scale.

The voucher program expansion to religious schools was implemented in 1998, after which there was a slight rise in public school performance for two years. Researchers found little or no further improvement in later years, even as competition from private and eventually charter schools increased substantially.

In fact, the study notes Milwaukee has been closing neighborhood schools because of declining enrollment and continued poor scores, but this has not had an observable effect on overall student performance.

“Schools are not like the marketplace: competition doesn’t automatically make things better,” said Martin Carnoy of Stanford University, who wrote the book with several other authors including John Witte, professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The evidence does not support advocates’ claims that voucher schools raise academic achievement,” Carnoy continued. “Just a one-time uptick in scores or grades is not enough to make the case.”

Among the major findings:

• Other variables apart from voucher availability, such as staying in the same school from year to year, have more consistent (although small) positive impact on student performance, especially in regard to language arts test score gains.
• Competition was generally not a factor in gains made by students. The number of private schools within a mile of a public school, the concentration of voucher schools nearby, the number of voucher applications from a public school, and the decline in public school enrollment had no significant effect on the math and language arts gains public school students made in the 4th and 5th grades.
• There is substantial turnover in Milwaukee’s public and voucher schools. The mobility rate in voucher schools (students not renewing their vouchers from one year to the next) was about 26% from 1998-99 to 2001-02. The public elementary school mobility rate (students not in the same school from one year to the next) was about 30% during the same time period.
• Milwaukee’s test score gains from 1998 to 2000, when vouchers began to expand, cannot be attributed to competition, as those results waned afterward even as Milwaukee’s voucher program expanded greatly and charter schools also became available as an alternative to traditional public schools. Carnoy asserts those temporary gains – one of the few cases in the country where even a fleeting effect was found – likely were produced by other factors, such as schools paying greater attention to state tests.

“This study of the nation’s largest voucher program adds to a complex and very important debate,” Witte said. “Do private school vouchers ultimately have a positive effect on public schools? Our general answer is that it’s too difficult to tell, but it certainly isn’t an obvious ‘yes.’”