Provo Daily Herald Editorial

In Our View:  Close look shows voucher benefits

October 25, 2007

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/241173/

One of the many issues that have clouded the Referendum 1 debate is the question whether a voucher program will help public schools.

Competition, advocates say, may help spur the public system to greater achievement. Opponents say no, citing some research.

It's difficult to measure such effects. Researchers must determine how well two different sets of students, progressing through separate systems, are doing -- no easy task in itself. Then they try to measure how the two sets of schools affected one another in producing those results.

A solid majority of such studies conclude that voucher programs do indeed help public schools, according to professor Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas, a researcher who has specialized in such comparisons. For example, a Columbia University study of the effects of competition concluded: "Evidence from over 200 tests in 25 separate studies shows that competition does often have a modest beneficial effect on the academic outcomes of students in public schools. In many cases, test scores were higher where there was more competition."

Even the Economic Policy Institute's study of the Milwaukee voucher program, which voucher foes tout as showing conclusively that vouchers don't work, is revealing. We read that report from the liberal think tank and it gives a nuanced picture, not a conclusive one.

One of the study's findings is that a comparison of test scores by public school students after the state's voucher program was expanded to other Wisconsin schools "confirms the earlier results showing a large improvement in Milwaukee in the two years following the 1998 expansion of the voucher plan to religious schools."

Now consider the most recent study, one ignored by voucher opponents and most of the media. Rajashri Chakrabarti, a researcher for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, found that expansion of the Milwaukee program "led to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program."

Again, most studies, even one cited by voucher opponents, find that the public schools benefit from competition, according to professor Greene. Such benefits are more likely where the voucher program offers students a wide array of options and where the public schools must truly compete.

This raises an interesting question: Utah lawmakers have allotted millions of dollars to cushion the public school system from possible ill effects of vouchers. Did they provide so much money that the public system will be insulated from the salutary effects of competition? Or, put another way, is there any real pressure on the public system to do better, since it's getting the money anyway?

We would hope so. It would be a shame if public school defenders, demanding protection from competition, end up rejecting a good way of really helping.

Voucher opponents have scoured the United States to find evidence that competition hurts public schools. They have found, at most, that some voucher programs don't seem to help -- though they may not hurt, either.

In the final analysis, though, any beneficial effect of competition on the public school system is merely a fringe benefit. The core benefit of vouchers remains the positive result on the intellectual life of an individual child, the chance to rise higher and go further than he might otherwise. And the program puts the decision for that child squarely in the hands of parents, where it belongs.

This is no criticism of the public school system, which does a good job overall in Utah. It should surprise no one that in a system so large some students will fall through the cracks. Others can move faster than the system allows.

It is for such students that the voucher system was designed.

Vouchers provide a small financial boost to the parents of these students to help them accomplish their role as parents. It's really no different from a tax deduction for each child. The paperwork varies, but the state's interest is the same: fostering strong families and productive future citizens.

You don't need a Ph.D. to see that vouchers will help individual children. If they also help to spur the public schools to higher levels of excellence, so much the better. Given the minuscule cost -- a microscopic 4-tenths of 1 percent of Utah's total outlay for K-12 education -- we see no reason to object and many reasons to move forward.

If the law needs amending in certain areas of accountability, then the Legislature should amend it. But that shouldn't hold up the show.