Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Almost a decade ago I posed a Moynihan Challenge to choice opponents: I could produce a pile of random assignment voucher studies with significant positive results, but if you could produce two random assignment studies with statistically significant and negative results I’d buy you a steak dinner. I started here with skeptics in Arizona and when I got cricket noises extended it nationwide and got more cricket noises. Before your gut gets too greedy, yes it had a time limit. If you keep doing these studies long enough you will eventually get false negatives by random chance.

What we have now does not look like a false negative but rather a very poorly designed program in Louisiana with the release of a new study on the first year results. They look **ahem** decidedly negative.

We’ve covered this ground before on JPGB so I will avoid beating the equine corpse, but over the years there have always been concerns that voucher programs would become overly regulated. The response has always been that if this were to occur, that private schools would choose not to participate. Well lo and behold Louisiana’s heavily regulated voucher program comes along, 70% of private schools choose to sit it out, including a large majority of Catholic schools in Orleans Parish. Catholic schools have a long history of putting up with a lot of red tape around the country and around the world, so their choice to pass on the Louisiana Scholarship Program speaks volumes about the program.

What do we know about the 30% of private schools who did participate? Well now we know that their students had a very rough first year and we also know from the study:

Survey data show that LSP-eligible private schools experience rapid enrollment declines prior to entering the program, indicating that the LSP may attract private schools struggling to maintain enrollment. These results suggest caution in the design of voucher systems aimed at expanding school choice for disadvantaged students.

So…..many of the desperate on their way to folding schools decided to grit their teeth and participate in the program. We can also infer from the contrast between this evaluation and all the others that a disproportionate number of stable and successful Louisiana private schools read over the red-tape of the program and decided “thanks but no thanks.”

The ironic dagger cutting deep here- this program was designed to help some of the most disadvantaged students in the country. If you are a low-income student attending low-rated schools in one of the lowest performing states, you got the short end of the stick in life. The very good people who designed this program had every intention of this program being a path out. Tragically in designing to keep bad schools out, they ironically kept the good schools out and invited the bad schools in. The road to this hell was built out of the cobblestones of good intentions, but it still led straight to this debacle.

Those students, among the lowest of the low academically, have been victimized by the design of this program. The high quality private schools among the non-participating schools stand every bit as out of their reach as they had been before the creation of the program. In theory it could have worked out differently, but now we must rid ourselves of all illusions: every system is perfectly designed to produce the results associated with it.

You live and learn. This is a very bitter lesson but one we choice supporters need to take to heart in order to correct our mistake and to prevent future missteps.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2016 at 9:21 am and is filed under vouchers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.