Posted by Jay Livingston
The Washington DC voucher program gave kids from poor families up to $7500 to cover the costs of attending private schools. The program, OSP (for Opportunity Scholarship Program) was started in the recent Bush administration, and it’s based on an idea much cherished by conservatives: private is good, public is bad. Programs run by the government (like public schools) are not as good as similar programs run by private entities (like private schools).
The results three years out have now been published (here). In reading, the voucher kids were 3.7 months ahead of their public school counterparts. In math, there was no difference.
Click on the table to see a larger version.The Washington Post story ran with the headline
Study Supports School Vouchers
In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests
In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests
But does this mean that private schools do a better job of educating poor kids? If so, they should do a better job at teaching math as well. But they don’t.
I don’t really know what’s going on, but I have a guess. Reading is not just about decoding strings of letters. It is part of a general verbal ability. Kids learn verbal skills in school from teachers, but they also learn them from everyone they hear. For most of our time on this planet, we humans did not read or write or go to school, yet we learned to speak the language of our respective cultures. We learned from those around us. We still do.
If you send a kid to a school with children whose parents are willing and able to spend $6600 a year or more (sometimes much more*), that kid will be talking with kids whose verbal skills – vocabulary, grammar, syntax – are more sophisticated than what kids might hear in the public schools of Washington DC. That affects reading scores because among schoolchildren, at least when the teacher isn’t insisting they be quiet, verbal interaction is constant. Mathematical interaction, not so much.
So, at least when it comes to verbal skills, it’s not the kind of school that you go to that makes a difference. It’s the kind of kids who attend that school.
* The tuition at Sasha and Malia’s school, Sidwell Friends, is $28,000. Most of the OSP students went to much less costly schools. Over half the OSP kids (59%) went to Catholic schools, another fifth (22%) went to other faith-based schools (a category that may include Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school). The average income was about $22,7000, slightly above the poverty line; virtually all the kids were black or Hispanic.
I think you are right... but part of the experience of going to a private school is the community of people around you (other kids, teachers, engaged parents, etc). That IS part of the value that voucher kids are receiving.
ReplyDelete"The evidence indicates that the treatmentthe
ReplyDeleteoffer of a scholarshipgenerated a positive and statistically significant impact on the average reading test
scores of the students in the study. The size of the overall reading impact is .13 standard deviations or 3.1
months of additional schooling for the offer of the scholarship and .15 standard deviations or 3.7 months
of additional schooling for the use of a scholarship"
So if understanding correct mere offer of scholarship improves reading skills by 3.1 months. Using the scholarship (either for full three years of program or being in and out of program for any lenght of time) results in an improvement of 3.7 months. Not sure you can conclude much about the enviroment of private education and its effects on verbal skills.
-TKG
TKG, As I understand it, the student never assessed separately the ones who were offered the OSP but never used it ("never users"). Of 100 who were offered the OSP, 14 refused. If you look at the improvement of all 100, the average is 3.1 months. If you remove the 14 never users, the average goes up to 3.7 months. But you cannot conclude from this that the never users improved at all.
ReplyDeletepart of the experience of going to a private school is the community of people around you (other kids, teachers, engaged parents, etc). That IS part of the value that voucher kids are receiving.Yeah, as long as voucher programs remain programs to put a small minority of poor kids into private schools filled mostly with rich kids. But if the idea is that these small-scale voucher programs are test cases for what would happen if all kids got vouchers... that's not a very good test case.
ReplyDeleteWhich puts us back to the question of how we improve education for everyone. I think there's no way around the need to improve public schools to do this.