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Monday, June 26, was either a great day for school vouchers or a great day for their opponents, depending on how you look at it.
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A Supreme Court ruling in favor of a church that wanted to use state funds to resurface its school playground may pave the way for more school voucher programs, but it is still unclear how broadly applicable that ruling could turn out to be. Meanwhile, also on that Monday, studies of two existing voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana were released showing that after an initial backslide, students receiving vouchers make up ground and perform roughly as well as their public school peers after a few years.
“People come to these studies and ask, do voucher programs work? I view that as the wrong question to ask,” Louisiana State Superintendent of Education John White said Monday at an event hosted by the Urban Institute. “The question is, are there good schools of all governance types available to low-income children?”
School voucher programs work by providing students, usually from low-income families, a government-funded scholarship to attend a participating private school, rather than a public school. The Louisiana Scholarship Program, which began in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2008, awarded 7,110 scholarships to students statewide in 2015–16. Students who receive these scholarships are low income and low performing; 87 percent of students are black. The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program is the largest statewide program in the country, serving more than 30,000 students, all of them low income.
The two studies released Monday show similar patterns. In Indiana, researchers found that students lost ground in math—as measured by test scores—in the first two years after leaving public school, but began to improve after four years if they stayed with the program. Similarly, in Louisiana, research after the first and second years of the program found voucher students performed worse than their public school counterparts, but after three years, performance was roughly similar across both groups.