It's time to cut through the rhetoric on "School Vouchers" and face some facts...

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Proponents and critics alike of voucher proposals make a number of claims.

Claim #1. Vouchers will improve student achievement. By allowing students to opt out of failing schools, students can attend schools that serve them better.

To date, the evidence for this has been mixed at best. The outcomes in Milwaukee, for instance, have been hotly debated. One researcher found no difference between the performance of Milwaukee Public School children and those using vouchers.2 Others found differences favoring vouchers in both reading and mathematics,3 while a third found an advantage only in math.4 This last researcher also observed that the voucher children were in small schools andsmall classes, conditions known to improve achievement.5 Moreover, in evaluating each of these divergent conclusions, it should be noted that, even if the choice and public school students were the same at the start of the experiment, they certainly were not after four years: the choice students included in the survey had been in one school all four years, something quite unusual for poor, inner-city children.6

In another recent, widely reported study that purported to show students who used vouchers to enroll in private schools did better than a control group of public school students, the company that gathered and analyzed the data disputed the researchers’ public statements about the conclusions. Analysts at Mathematica Research said the researchers’ announcement of such results was premature and exaggerated the findings.7

In the study, which examined privately funded voucher programs in New York, Washington, and Dayton, data were extremely mixed. In New York, African-American students showed gains in both years of the study, but other ethnicities showed small, but insignificant, losses. In Washington, D.C., African-Americans in grades 2 through 5 showed a significant gain in year one in math and a significant loss in reading. They showed gains in both subjects in year two. No other ethnic groups gained in either year. In grades 6 through 8, African-Americans showed no change in math and a significant loss in reading in year one, but significant gains in math and no significant gain in reading in year two. In Dayton, African-Americans showed no significant gains in either subject in year one, but did show a significant gain in reading in year two. No other ethnicities showed gains in either subject in either year.8

The researchers have failed so far to explain why vouchers appeared to benefit only African American students and not those of other ethnic groups.

Different researchers have obtained differing results because they have made different assumptions about the data. That, in turn, led to different analyses. For instance, one researcher who analyzed data from voucher programs in Milwaukee and New York City concluded that if the voucher students scored higher, it might well be because they attended smaller schools with smaller classes.9
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The number of existing private schools in the nation could handle only about 4% of the existing public school children in the nation. Free-market theorists would likely contend that new schools would spring up to handle the demands, but this is questionable. For one thing, the existing for-profits such as Edison and TesseracT have yet to be profitable.16 TesseracT, staggering under $50 million in debt in spite of $8,000 tuition, barely avoided total collapse heading into the 2000-2001 school year, but by October had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.17 Nobel Learning Communities is profitable -- and charges $6,500.00 tuition.18

Moreover, as those who wished to start charter schools have found, it is extremely difficult to obtain space or funding to build space for a new school. And while Catholic schools, which have been hemorrhaging pupils in recent years, would no doubt welcome the vouchers, many other private schools have shown little or no inclination to expand.
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/do...erai-00-31.htm