Expanded Liberty, Informed Parents Said to Be Results of School Choice

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Test scores are not the only factor to consider in determining whether school voucher programs are worth keeping, said the leading researcher evaluating the nation's first federally funded K-12 scholarship program.

Patrick Wolf directs the School Choice Demonstration Project and holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in School Choice in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas. He recently published two papers using experimental data from his team's evaluations of K-12 scholarship programs in Washington, D.C., in which he examined whether voucher programs can be considered socially just and whether parents of children using a voucher are better informed about the schools their children attend than parents of children not using a voucher. The papers were published in the journals Educational Research and Evaluation and American Politics Research, respectively.

Wolf applied philosopher John Rawls' principles of justice to the achievement data his team has collected in three years of evaluating the current District of Columbia voucher program. The D.C. program has increased the reading test scores of participating students, although the most disadvantaged subgroups of participating students have not yet demonstrated statistically significant test-score gains. The U.S. Department of Education funds Wolf's quantitative evaluation of the D.C. program.

His research indicates no evidence that any group of students has been harmed by the program, Wolf wrote, and the program itself represents an expansion of liberty, one of the three justice criteria proposed by Rawls.

Students who qualify for the vouchers receive up to $7,500 to attend the school of their choice. Last December, Congress voted to end the program with the exception that students already attending school with a voucher would continue to receive support until they graduated.

Wolf's paper contends the continued operation of the program can be defended on social justice grounds.

A study described in the other paper, written with senior research associate Brian Kisida, used survey data from an earlier evaluation of a privately funded scholarship program in
Washington. Again using experimental research methods, Kisida and Wolf found those whose children were offered vouchers were better informed about such information as school size and class size than the parents of children not offered vouchers. The authors apply an argument often used in politics about whether the average citizen is sufficiently knowledgeable to make informed decisions or whether experts and other elites should guide public policy.

"School choice, in a sense, brings elements of participatory democracy into the world of compulsory education and, thus, can shed light on our understanding of the potential benefits and problems that have long challenged democratic theorists of political participation," they wrote.

For more information, see the online abstract of the "School Vouchers in Washington, DC: Achievement Impacts and Their Implications for Social Justice" or the online abstract of "School Governance and Information: Does Choice Lead to Better-Informed Parents?"