School Vouchers and School Equity

Economist Milton Friedman claims school vouchers, by stirring market competition, will create more efficient schools. Whether or not he's right, there's every reason to think vouchers will produce more equity in public education.

This is not the conventional wisdom, of course. Mainly the issue is debated as a trade-off between efficiency and equity. Many begin with the premise that public schools, though not very good, are at least "common schools," serving all citizens alike. Of course, no one, not even the most militant public school advocate, actually believes this.

Consider, for example, the current system of funding public education, in which half the revenue comes from the local property tax. Under this arrangement fancy residential suburbs such as Concord and Scarsdale enjoy lavish facilities, while Revere and Yonkers struggle to hang on. Nor can one dismiss fiscal inequities as temporary problems soon to be resolved by equity cases brought in state courts. The Supreme Court years ago said fiscal inequity was not contrary to the federal constitution, and-careful studies show -state courts have had in most cases only marginal impacts on legislative policy.

Or consider the growing rate of racial segregation within the public system. In 1997, 69 percent of African-Americans were attending predominantly minority schools, up from 64 percent in 1973. For Latinos the upward trend is much steeper, from 54 to 75 percent over the past 25 years.

Above all, the test score gap between central city and suburb, between Black and White, remains disturbingly large despite a wide range of federal interventions, from Head Start to compensatory education, designed to bring it to an end. According to a 1996 survey, only 43 percent of urban students read at a basic level, compared with 63 percent of students in nonurban areas.

But if inequities abound in public education, won't vouchers simply make them worse? Most ordinary African-Americans and Latinos think otherwise. Support for vouchers is greatest among minority families-especially those living in central cities, who suffer the greatest disadvantages from the current system.According to a survey undertaken at Stanford, 90 percent of the inner-city poor favor a voucher plan, compared with 60 percent of Whites who live in more advantaged suburban areas. When asked if they "strongly" favor a voucher plan, the percentages are 61 percent for poor urbanites, compared to just a third of upper-middle-class suburbanites-the winners under the current system.

With strong support among minority Americans fed up with central-city schools, vouchers are gaining ground. Some developments include:

Signing by Governor Jeb Bush of a voucher bill that in a couple of years could potentially affect more than 200,000 children in Florida.

Supreme Court refusal to rule unconstitutional Milwaukee's expanded voucher program involving up to 15,000 students and all of the city's private schools, religious and secular.

Ohio legislature's repassage of the Cleveland voucher program, with broad bipartisan support, after the state supreme court ruled the program not to be in violation of the church-state clause of either the federal or state constitution.

Initiation of a privately funded voucher program offering 40,000 scholarships to winners of a nationwide lottery.

Vouchers to all students from low-income families living in the Edgewood Independent School District (EISD) in San Antonio.

Will vouchers add to inequity? Much depends on the particulars of a specific voucher program, but consider the following findings from national data as well as several evaluations my colleagues and I are conducting:

Consider the question of racial segregation. Nationwide, private schools are more integrated than public schools, and, of the voucher programs for which we have ethnic data, all were reducing racial segregation. Two factors produce this result: ( 1) private schools are less tied to residential boundaries, making it less likely that the ethnic composition of the school simply replicates the rigid racial lines of most neighborhoods; (2) private schools are often religious, providing a common tie that cuts across racial lines.

Minority students seem to learn more in private schools, especially after the early grades. In a carefully controlled experiment in New York City, voucher students-almost all minority-were found to have achieved, after one year, three points more in reading, six points more in math than did an essentially identical group of public school students. If these gains accumulate in subsequent years, much of the racial gap in test scores can be eliminated.

The church-state question is sometimes set up as an equity issue, but in fact it is not. Every other industrial country in the world, many of them a good deal more egalitarian than the United States, is funding religious schools. Some think the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment forbids vouchers; others wonder how a program that places all schools, religious and secular, on an equal footing "establishes" anything.

In my view, the most serious equity issue is not the constitutionality question but the possibility that private schools may cream off the better students. Like the separator in the shed by the farmhouse door, schools have for centuries found ways to swirl the milk until they can skim the best off the top. The elite suburban schools have even found a way of letting the housing market serve as their cream separators.

So when vouchers for poor families are proposed, the accusation most generally believed is that they will cream, cherry-pick, separate and divide. According to President Bob Chase at the National Education Association's annual convention, vouchers are like "applying leeches and bleeding a patient to death." North Carolina's governor, Jim Hunt, recently made the same analogy: "Vouchers are like leeches. They drain the lifeblood-public support from our schools. . . . They are creating separate and unequal school systems."

The creaming issue was among the first to surface in the debate over the voucher program in San Antonio. Students from all low-income families in Edgewood were offered a handsome ,600 scholarship for elementary school and ,000 for high school, more than enough to cover tuition at most San Antonio private schools. The voucher's duration covers the child's remaining school years; new vouchers have been promised for the next nine years.

The Texas Federation of Teachers claimed that the private schools would "cherry-pick" which students they want, saying the program would "shorten the honor roll" in public schools. "Right now I don't have the profile of every child," said Edgewood's school superintendent, Delores Munoz, but "I guarantee you that at least 80 percent will be the high-achieving students. They will be. The private schools are having the choice of the best students around: their doors are not open for every child."

Edgewood's school board was outraged at the possibility that "private schools may legally discriminate on the basis of academic performance and disciplinary background." The Edgewood school board president personalized the process with the following tale. He said he had received a call from "a mother for help because their application to the [Horizon program] had been denied. I asked why she was denied. The mother said she was a single mom, had two jobs, and was told she was unacceptable because she could not dedicate time for extracurricular requirements, like helping out with homework and fundraising."

To find out whether these allegations were correct, my colleagues and I collected information on the voucher families as well as a cross section of the families left behind in the Edgewood public schools. We found some selection, but the best dairy analogy is 2 percent milking, not creaming.

One cannot deny that creaming is unknown in Edgewood. In a focus-group session one savvy parent, a resident within EISD, reported that she had previously avoided the Edgewood schools by placing her seventh-grade daughter in a neighboring school district. With the arrival of the voucher program it was now possible to place her in a private school closer to home: "She is an honor student, she's real good, she's real smart. She talks about going to college, she already picked out a college. She wants to go to Notre Dame." However, this same mother decided to leave her son in an EISD school because he did not have the same personal resources her daughter had. "I don't think that the private schools have a lot of programs-the Edgewood district has a lot of programs for kids that need extra help. After- school care. They have a lot of tutoring where you don't have to pay. [At the private school] you have to pay for tutoring."

The anecdote is the exception however. When we looked at the full set of information that students and parents provided us, we found only modest differences. On the math component of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) no separation at all could be detected. Voucher students scored at the 40th percentile, while Edgewood public school students scored at the 38th, a difference that is not statistically significant. On the reading component voucher students scored at the 39th percentile, public school students scored at the 35th. The difference hardly justifies all the shouting.

Did the voucher kids flee from Edgewood's programs for the gifted and talented, Edgewood's own cream separator? Not at all. On the contrary, only 21 percent of voucher students had been in programs for gifted students, while 27 percent of public school students had been. (This difference does not pass the significance test.) On the other hand, only 8 percent of voucher students had participated in special education programs, as compared to 16 percent of public school students.

But if the cream separator does poorly with students, perhaps it does better with their parents. But if one looks at the hard demographic data, one finds an inefficient cream separator any self-respecting farmer would have discarded long ago. Both groups of families had almost identical incomes-around ,000. Ethnic background was virtually the same-for more than 90 percent Latino. The two groups were equally likely to be on welfare and to have lived in the same residence for two years.

On the other hand, mothers of voucher students had completed, on average, 12 years of education, as compared to 11 years for public school mothers. Fifty percent of voucher mothers were employed full-time, as compared to 37 percent of public school mothers. Only 19 percent of voucher mothers were receiving food stamps, as compared to 33 percent of public school mothers.

So, demographically, voucher parents were modestly better off in some ways. At most, vouchers in Edgewood appear to be serving the working class, those families of low income in which moms are somewhat better educated and, presumably, more concerned about what is happening to their child, families that are connected to the labor force and making it on their own. Vouchers in Edgewood resemble such government programs as Upward Bound for low-income families, Pell grants for low-income college students, and the Earned Income Tax Credit program-all of which tend to serve the working poor, less so the most severely disadvantaged that are barely connected to the country's economic and educational systems. Do liberals want to abandon all these worthwhile programs in the name of creaming?

If Pell grants are OK, why not vouchers-especially when we listen to what Horizon families say about their new schools. Consider their answers to the following questions:

Do voucher parents like their school? Seventy-eight percent of voucher parents are very satisfied with the academic quality of the school, as compared to 52 percent of public school parents. In the words of one focus-group parent:

"The kids are gonna be acting silly, jumping around in class, you know, if teachers are not in charge of the children. And these are children. And I had a problem with that because these kids did not learn. She [her daughter] didn't bring any homework, I didn't see nothing. When I changed her to here [the private school], she was not used to the discipline. [Now,] I see a lot of change in my daughter. She likes to read, she likes to talk, she's more caring."

How does the educational climate differ between public and private schools? Fifty-two percent of Edgewood public school parents report fighting as a serious problem, as compared to 27 percent of voucher parents.

Do voucher parents get a school they want their child to attend? Only 7 percent say no, as compared to 25 percent of public school parents.

Are voucher students suspended? Suspension rates were equal for the voucher students and the Edgewood public school students-a round 5 percent for both groups. But perhaps what is in fact an expulsion from private school is reported by the parent as a mere change in school. Do we find voucher kids changing schools in the middle of the year? Hardly. Changes are less likely among voucher students than public school students. Only 6 percent of voucher students had changed schools since the beginning of the school year, as compared to 16 percent of public school students. Nor were there any differences between voucher parents and public school parents with respect to schooling next year. Similar percentages were reporting no change of school.

Class size. The teacher unions claim the problems of the big city school can be more easily addressed simply by lowering class size. But in Edgewood voucher parents, on average, report their child is in a class of 20 students, as compared to a class of 21 students in Edgewood public schools.

It would be nice if the problems in urban education could be solved by more dollars and cents. It would be a small price to pay, indeed. But Americans are spending more per pupil today than ever before. Average per-pupil expenditures in big cities lag only slightly behind expenditures in suburban areas, and well exceed those in rural communities. Private schools spend only about half as much-not enough, in my opinion, but enough to be doing a better job than many public schools, especially in urban areas.

What the problem is exactly is not yet entirely clear, though my own sense, after talking with many parents and combing through lots of facts and figures from several cities, is that effective education in big city schools cannot take place, given the disorder that currently prevails in inner-city public schools. But if we do not know the answer, then we certainly should be exploring alternatives. Why rule out vouchers? Why not give them a chance, somewhere, somehow, in some place? Let's see what happens.

Almost 60 years ago the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fought for federal funds for Catholic schools. Ignoring teacher organization objections, the AFL, listening to its members, asked Congress in 1943 to distribute federal aid to "all children, including parochial school students." In recent years the labor movement has switched sides on this issue. It now claims that vouchers for students attending religious schools are unconstitutional, a change in position that owes more to the newfound power of teacher unions within the labor movement than to any revision of the Constitution, to say nothing of equity considerations. If anything, working-class children are getting a worse deal from public schools today than ever before.

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By the time this article is printed, the Supreme Court of the United States may have given its determination on the constitutionality of school vouchers. It seems to many that it is likely to rule in favor, although it is also foolish to stake too much on double-guessing the Court. This article takes a very well-reasoned scientific approach to the issue and minimizes the risk to the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Liberty has consistently raised an alarm on the possible hazards in that direction. However, we must make it clear that we are not opposed to the educational improvements hoped for through vouchers, and if approved, they may well work without obvious threat to religious autonomy. As always, we must guard against the intent of any plan that involves church-state issues. And indeed, there are two tracks to the pro-voucher argument. A very logical one-in the reasoning given here: and another that tends to include vouchers in a larger agenda to fund established churches more broadly. That we will always regard with constitutional caution.-Editor

Paul E. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck professor of government and director for the Program on Education Policy and Governance, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Article Author: Paul E. Peterson