School Vouchers and Educational Choice: Evidence From the Research

School voucher programs, which provide public funds for families to use at private schools, have expanded significantly in the United States over the past decade, with several states adopting education savings account programs that extend public funding to private educational choices more broadly than traditional voucher programs. The debate over school vouchers involves fundamental questions about the purpose of public education, the appropriate role of choice in educational policy, and the effects of choice programs on students in both private and public schools. Research on these questions is more nuanced than political advocacy on either side typically acknowledges. The theoretical case for school vouchers rests on arguments about competition and parental choice. If parents can choose the school their children attend, including private schools funded with public vouchers, schools must compete for students and the resulting competitive pressure is expected to improve quality. Parents with more choices will be able to match their children to schools that fit their needs better than a one-size-fits-all assignment system. The theoretical predictions have been studied empirically with mixed results. Research on the effects of voucher programs on participating students' outcomes is inconsistent and depends on program design, context, and outcome measure. Some studies find positive effects of voucher use on test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance; others find neutral or negative effects, particularly for recent large-scale programs. A notable evaluation of Louisiana's voucher program found negative effects on test scores in the program's early years before recovering to neutrality. Studies of Milwaukee's long-running program find some positive effects on high school graduation and college enrollment but not on test scores. Research on the effect of competition from vouchers on public school quality is similarly inconsistent. Theory predicts that competition should improve public schools, and some research finds modest improvements in public school outcomes in areas with more voucher competition. Other research finds no significant effects of voucher-induced competition on public school quality, and concerns about the fiscal effects on public schools of losing per-pupil funding to private alternatives have been raised. The fiscal impacts depend on how voucher funding is structured and whether it represents a net reduction in public school resources. Education savings accounts represent an expansion of the voucher concept. Rather than providing a voucher redeemable at a specific private school, ESA programs deposit funds into accounts that families can use for a broader range of educational expenses including private school tuition, homeschooling materials, tutoring, online courses, and educational therapies. Several states have enacted broad ESA programs that extend eligibility to most or all students, not just those from low-income families or those in low-performing schools as earlier targeted programs required. The populations served by large-scale ESA programs have raised equity concerns. Early evaluations of broad ESA programs find that they are disproportionately used by families who were already paying for private school, rather than primarily providing new choices for lower-income families. Research on Florida's and Arizona's broad programs finds that higher-income families participate at higher rates than lower-income families in some analyses. The distributional implications of large public subsidies going primarily to families who were already exercising private school choice are a significant policy concern. Religious school participation in voucher and ESA programs raises constitutional questions that have been addressed in a sequence of Supreme Court decisions. The Court's 2002 Zelman decision upheld the constitutionality of voucher programs that include religious schools as options, finding that the aid flows to parents who make choices rather than directly to religious institutions. Subsequent decisions including Espinoza v. Montana and Carson v. Makin have held that states cannot exclude religious schools from scholarship programs available to private schools more broadly, establishing that religious schools must be eligible for voucher and scholarship programs if other private schools are. The research evidence on school vouchers is genuinely mixed, and the appropriate policy conclusion depends partly on empirical questions about effects and partly on normative questions about the purpose of public education and the appropriate scope of parental choice. Advocates and opponents who present the evidence as uniformly supporting their positions are misrepresenting a complex and context-dependent literature.