(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)
On July 14, Diane Ravitch wrote this:
La. students with vouchers do worse than peers in regular schools: http://tinyurl.com/347yht5. The panacea that never works, never dies.
Leave aside the uninformed claim that vouchers never work (in fact, they improve graduation rates, force public schools to improve, and improve test scores at least some of the time).
Has Ravitch found any actual evidence that Louisiana students are being harmed by vouchers? No.
Consider who receives vouchers in Louisiana. The program is limited to families with incomes under 250% of the poverty line — that is, students who tend to be poorer. On top of that, students must have attended “a public school during the 2009-2010 school year that is labeled academically unacceptable by the State.”
In other words, the voucher program is limited to students with lower incomes who attended failing public schools.
Now, as described in the EdWeek article that Ravitch so credulously cites, a former insurance executive and state board of education member named Leslie Jacobs came up with a comparison of voucher students and public school students. As far as I can tell, that comparison is available only in a blog post:
In the 2009-10 school year, 1113 children in grades K-4 received vouchers to attend one of the 32 participating non-public schools. Unfortunately, looking at the spring 2010 test scores, voucher students performed much worse than students in the New Orleans RSD – both its traditionally run public schools and public charter schools.
. . . .
Analysis
The performance of students enrolled in the voucher program raises serious concerns. While Louisiana’s proficiency goal is for all students to be Basic and above, in the voucher schools, only 35% of 3rd graders and 29% of 4th graders earned scores indicating they are grade level proficient in reading. Compare that to the RSD charters, where 54% of 3rd graders and 58% of 4th graders scored Basic and above. In fact, in English 4th grade students enrolled in the RSD charter schools outperformed students attending voucher schools by 2 to 1.
That’s the full extent of the “analysis” section. Evidently, all that Ms. Jacobs did was compare the raw average scores of voucher students to those of New Orleans public school students as a whole. Needless to say, this “analysis” is worthless — she’s comparing poorer students from failing public schools to everyone else. It’s unsurprising that the former might not be doing quite as well. Such an apples-to-oranges comparison tells us nothing about the performance of voucher-receiving private schools.
It’s a shame that Ravitch would treat this comparison with such gullibility while refusing to acknowledge the highly rigorous research done on vouchers.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Jay,
Thank you for analyzing Ravitch’s approach. Her book has done damage. After eight years of starting and running a charter school in Indianapolis, the “apples-to-oranges” approach of so many people in judging schools was wearing.
Regards,
Tim Ehrgott
Now, now, Jay – don’t make unwarranted assumptions about your opponents’ motives. You assume Ravitch is gullible. Maybe, but she also could be dishonest! Wouldn’t it be more scholarly just to stick to pointing out that she’s saying things that are very clearly untrue and can be discovered to be so with barely five minutes of work?
Thank you!! Need more people to do this…
Quite frankly it would just be nice for parents to have control over their child’s education. If vouchers JUST did that, and they do, they are well worth it to me.
Vouchers simply give parents back the control they don’t have thanks to the Feds taking over education. The more we can decentralize this disaster the better.
I would love to take credit for this post but it was actually written by stuart buck.
In a recent search for an analyst to help me lay the groundwork for a new Unified Field Theory, I’m embarrassed to admit that I never considered the former insurance executive / state board of education member route. I’ll have to thank Ravitch for the tip.
Mr. Buck is going places….just not NYU. 🙂
I think all the Recovery School District schools were considered failing when it was set up. The school board runs only the handful of selective-admission schools that were doing well before Katrina.
That said, it would be useful to know if voucher students are identical to RSD students or face greater challenges.
The only way to know that you are comparing voucher students to similar students is with a rigorous research design, such as random assignment. Just comparing averages of large groups of students who are similar in some ways but different in others is a completely invalid way to assess the voucher program.
Joanne — there are more than 3 times as many RSD schools as there are schools on the “academically unacceptable” list that makes their students eligible for vouchers. So an overwhelming majority of RSD schools aren’t failing at the same level as the voucher-eligible schools.