Study Bolsters Case For Tuition Vouchers

February 11, 2010 by Anonymous

Milwaukee Graduation Rates Cited
By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page A12

Students using vouchers to attend private schools in Milwaukee graduate at a higher rate than students enrolled in Milwaukee public schools, according to a study released yesterday by supporters of that city's voucher program.

The report was funded by School Choice Wisconsin, a group formed in April to advocate for Milwaukee's program, which has used public funds to pay private school tuition since 1990. The Milwaukee initiative has been followed by voucher programs in Cleveland, the state of Florida and the District.

About 64 percent of Milwaukee students who used vouchers to enter ninth grade at 10 private schools in 1999 graduated from high school four years later, compared with 36 percent of students in public schools, the study found. The study's author, Jay P. Greene, said it adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that school vouchers have led to improved academic outcomes for students, particularly low-income and minority students in failing school systems.

"Nationwide, roughly half of students in urban high schools fail to receive a regular high school diploma," said Greene, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative organization based in New York. "In Milwaukee and Cleveland, it's well under half. Any program that offers a big improvement in the probability of urban students graduating is something that we should be very interested in."

However, two researchers who have studied voucher programs questioned aspects of Greene's study after reviewing it at the request of The Washington Post.

Terry M. Moe, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a leading proponent of vouchers, said he found Greene's study important. But he noted that it relies on data from 10 of about 100 private schools accepting vouchers in Milwaukee. Moe said random samples of public school and voucher students would be necessary to determine the effects of vouchers.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a policy group based in the District, said the report "leaves unanswered the most important question: What is the effect of the voucher program on the large number of students left behind in the regular public schools?"

"It's hardly surprising that a very small number of students from families motivated enough to apply to a voucher program do well when placed in a private school environment -- one where students are surrounded by a community of highly motivated peers and their tuition-paying parents," he said.

Kahlenberg said he supports making public schools compete by allowing students to transfer within and between districts but generally opposes publicly funded scholarships for private schools.

Greene, in an interview, acknowledged that students receiving vouchers may come from more highly motivated families, which could account in part for their higher graduation rates. But he said two studies in the 1990s found that voucher recipients in Milwaukee were more likely to be poor and to come from single-parent families than their peers in the regular public schools and that they were likely to start high school with lower test scores.

Greene's study also found that the graduation rate of 64 percent for voucher recipients was higher than the graduation rate of 41 percent among students at six Milwaukee public high schools with selective admission requirements.

The Washington Scholarship Fund, the group that runs the District's new voucher program, applauded the study as evidence that vouchers will improve student performance. The District's program "also will celebrate impressive graduation rates as our scholars advance through school," said Sally J. Sachar, president of the scholarship fund.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58082-2004Sep28.html

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NOW, CONTRAST THE ABOVE STORY (EVEN OUT OF THE WASHINGTON POST) WITH THIS STORY IN EDWEEK MAGAZINE. NOTICE THE DIFFERENT SLANT. iF YOU VISIT THE ONLINE ARTICLE, YOU WILL ALSO NOTE THAT THEIR HYPERLINKS DO NOT CORRESPOND WITH THE WRITING IN THE BODY, INSTEAD, ADDRESSING STUDIES IN OTHER STATES THAN MENTIONED.
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Study: Milwaukee Voucher Students Have Diploma Edge
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/01/30/21voucher.h27.html
By Catherine Gewertz

Students who participate in Milwaukee’s private-school-voucher program graduate from high school at significantly higher rates than those who attend regular secondary schools in the city, a new study contends.

The report, which was scheduled to be released Jan. 28 by SchoolChoice Wisconsin, a group that supports the voucher program, concludes that an estimated 57 percent of the freshmen enrolled in private high schools in the choice program in 2002-03 had completed high school four years later, compared with an estimated 43 percent of those in the same 2006 graduating class in regular Milwaukee public high schools.

Analysis of the three previous graduating classes showed regular Milwaukee public high school students with significantly lower completion rates than those who chose to use the state tuition subsidies to attend private high schools.

Factoring in the effects of retention of some students in 9th grade, and of students’ movement into and out of the district, reduces the difference in graduation rates between the two sets of schools to about 10 percentage points for three of the four years, the report says. With those adjustments, it says, the Milwaukee public schools’ 2005-06 graduation rate was 53 percent, compared with 64 percent in the voucher-program schools.

The 17-year-old voucher program, enacted by the Wisconsin legislature, serves about 18,500 students in 122 private schools. About 87,000 students are enrolled in Milwaukee’s public schools this year.
More Graduates?

John Robert Warren, the author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, concludes that if students in Milwaukee’s public high schools had graduated at the same rate as those in the voucher program, the city’s schools would have turned out 1,870—14.3 percent—more graduates during the four years studied, 2002-03 to 2005-06.

The study expands on a 2004 SchoolChoice Wisconsin report that found higher graduation rates in voucher-program schools than in Milwaukee public high schools for the class of 2003.
Comparing Graduation Rates

The study estimated graduation rates for schools attended by students receiving vouchers and Milwaukee public schools. The rates can’t be compared across the years, because the number of schools included differs each year.
SOURCE: SchoolChoice Wisconsin

Milwaukee schools Superintendent William G. Andrekopoulos rejected the new report’s findings in an interview last week. His district’s graduation rate has gone from 61 percent in 2002-03 to 68 percent in 2005-06, he said, and is projected to reach 70 percent for the 2006-07 year.

Wisconsin’s graduation rate involves calculating how many students drop out of a given graduating class during a four-year period, how many receive completion credentials other than diplomas, and how many get regular diplomas. Mr. Andrekopoulos argued that the four-year tracking method used in the new study undercounts graduates by not accounting for student mobility.

“Certainly, we have a way to go to improve the performance of our students. I’m not questioning that,” he said in an interview. “But when I see these reports, it bothers me because they are designed for political reasons, … to send a political message that the public school system is failing.”

Mr. Warren defended his study, noting that he used special calculations to adjust for factors including student mobility, and that the voucher-program schools still performed better.

“It’s perfectly legitimate to argue about methodology,” he said. “But we’re using fairly sound data-collection techniques and fairly transparent analytic techniques. Everything is in the report.”

Susan Mitchell, the president of SchoolChoice Wisconsin, said politics played no part in the study.

“One of the aspects of debate about public school choice is whether it produces school improvement,” she said in an interview. “Part of our mission is to look at that and add information to the debate.”

Reasons Unclear

According to the report, the data show that students in the voucher-program high schools are more likely to graduate than those in Milwaukee public schools, but do not rule out the possibility that other factors, such as a potentially higher level of family motivation implicit in selecting a private school experience, could account for the graduation-rate differences.

“Whether this association is causal in nature—that is, whether these higher graduation rates are due to selection bias or to something real that is going on in [voucher-program] schools—is a question that can only be addressed using a stronger research design,” Mr. Warren writes.

He cites a longitudinal study at the University of Arkansas, the School Choice Demonstration Project, as promising a better understanding of what causes different outcomes at the two types of schools. That project plans to issue the first of five annual reports Feb. 25.

“With the longitudinal tracking of choice and [Milwaukee public schools] students as part of the School Choice Demonstration Project’s evaluation, we will have even greater confidence in graduation rates,” Jay P. Greene, a University of Arkansas at Fayetteville professor who conducted the 2004 SchoolChoice Wisconsin study of graduation rates and is a co-investigator on the longitudinal study, wrote in an e-mail to Education Week about Mr. Warren’s report.

“Until those results are available, I view Warren’s numbers as our best understanding of the rates at which choice and MPS students are graduating high school.”

Vol. 27, Issue 21, Page 6

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Also see:
Graduation Rates for Choice and Public School Students in Milwaukee, 2003-2008
http://www.schoolchoicewi.org/currdev/detail.cfm?id=309

More Evidence of 'What Works'.
http://www.schoolchoicewi.org/currdev/detail.cfm?id=310