Louisiana's voucher program is unique. It has more, and more comprehensive, regulations than most private school choice programs. It has fewer schools participating. And it's the first program of its kind to show such strong, negative academic results.

During a Friday forum on school vouchers and regulation hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute, Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas researcher who helped author a series of recent studies on private school choice in Louisiana, said there's not yet enough evidence to tell whether the Louisiana Scholarship Program's unique design helps explain the unprecedented finding that it harmed student achievement in its first two years.

Those results renewed a major philosophical debate in school choice circles. Does regulation of private schools that accept vouchers hamstring their performance and keep the best schools from participating? Or can it spur private schools to serve disadvantaged students, and to get substantially better over time?

A number of factors cloud the findings in Louisiana. Its voucher program is fairly new, first expanded statewide during the 2012-13 school year. Some students might have seen their academic performance drop as they adjusted to new schools. Some schools might have needed more time to adjust their curriculum and instruction to the state standardized tests, which voucher students are required to take. There are signs of improvement in Louisiana public schools, which served as a comparison for voucher schools.

But Wolf said those factors together explain less than half of the negative results. Some of the participating private schools may be been low-quality, or unequipped to educate low-income students who use vouchers.

The bad results in year one looked a bit better in year two, and John White, Lousiana's state schools superintendent, has told lawmakers that as the lowest-performing schools face sanctions and others get better at serving disadvantaged students, results will keep improving. He has also issued a challenge to those who criticize his state's approach to regulating school vouchers: Come up with a model for ensuring private schools can serve all students well, at scale. (more…)

This week, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research on Lousisiana vouchers became the first high-quality study to find negative academic results for a private school choice program.

Informed observers have sounded important notes of caution. New Orleans-based researcher Doug Harris notes the results cover only the first year after the program's 2012 expansion. Student achievement might improve as schools adjust.  The use of the state test could also explain some of the negative results, since it might not be well-aligned to private-school standards.

Some school choice advocates say they've found an explanation for the dismal findings: Louisiana's heavy regulation of voucher programs, which has kept many private schools — perhaps some high-performing ones — from participating. Regulation, in other words, appears to have backfired, and may prove to be, in the words of Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute, "folly."

Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute say that explanation doesn't hold much water.

Neerav Kingsland says the anti-regulation argument presents a challenge to school choice supporters:

I understand the risks involved with this type of deregulation, but I think it’s worth trying and seeing what we learn. I don’t know if it would work, but it might, and the potential the upside seems high.

I also think there are things you can do to solve for equity (significantly weighting vouchers for at-risk students), that will lead to higher performing private schools enrolling hard to serve kids.

But, ultimately, I’m not ok with taking the public out of public education.

Lurking the background in Louisiana: Uncertain political support for its voucher program, despite high ratings from parents.

Meanwhile... (more…)

Most parents try to protect their child from dangers, to nourish their child's development, and to instill values and a sense of purpose in their child so that, as he or she matures, each child will be able to make sensible choices for his or her own life path.

Yet, most parents need government assistance in order to promote their children's best interests. For one thing, if left unchecked outside forces may overwhelm parental efforts. These include the child's peers, undesirable cultural and commercial influences, and so on. In addition, family poverty and ignorance may prevent parents from effectively carrying out their roles.

To be clear, parents need help, not only from extended family members and the community at large, but also from government. For example, public regulation can increase parental power and authority over their children by preventing others (like retail cigarette sellers) from tempting children into self-destructive behaviors. The state can also provide information (or require others to provide information, like movie ratings) that parents need to enable them to make good decisions for their children. Moreover, government can provide resources (like food stamps) that some parents lack. In all of these power-enhancing ways, government can help parents better fulfill their responsibilities to their children.

Sometimes, in the name of "child protection," government reduces rather than enhances parental power. To be sure, as a last resort it may be necessary to substitute collective or professional decisions as to what is best for children. Yet policymakers may be too quick to override parental control when further empowering parents would, overall, be best for children.

Other times, government actions are misleadingly framed as "child protection" measures that, on closer analysis, may be better understood as actually parent-empowering (like issuing teenage driving licenses that limit when youths may drive and who may be in the car with them).

Add to that this key point: it may often be politically easier to win the adoption of a policy when it is understood as helping people be good parents than when it is understood as curtailing parental authority. Isn't helping people be good parents something on which conservatives (the "family values" groups) and liberals (who talk of "personal empowerment") agree? By contrast, the constituency may be narrower for "child protection" measures, especially those that are seen to push a large share of parents around because "legislators or experts know better."

Take the problem of childhood obesity, for example. Getting colas out of middle school vending machines and junk food commercials off TV programs aimed at children ages eight and younger removes temptations that parents generally would like to be out of sight. Policies that would achieve those ends empower parents to have more control over what their children eat. This is not the nanny state. Parents who still want to feed their kids Froot Loops and have them drink Cokes are free to do that.

Finally, then, consider the debate over school vouchers (or scholarships) for children from households of modest means. They should not be defended on the ground that this mechanism will improve the test scores of America’s children or that it will destroy teachers’ unions and unleash the wondrous innovations of capitalism. Those are collective objectives that some people favor (and others oppose, doubt, or care little about). Rather, subsidized school choice is best promoted on the ground that it empowers additional families to make decisions for their children that nearly all parents want to be able to make. Just like food stamps, school scholarships for needy families can help parents be better parents.

A new report from Andrew Coulson helps bring context to one of the most bedeviling issues we face when sending public school students to otherwise private schools: What’s the right way to hold these schools accountable?

Let’s respect that Coulson, the astute director of Cato Institute’s Educational Freedom Center and a free-market advocate, is focused on what he views as the potential for “regulatory suffocation” of tax credit scholarship and voucher schools in 15 states. His report nonetheless presents an intriguing contrast between the levels of regulation. He finds that voucher regulations in places such as Ohio, Louisiana, and D.C., are multiple orders of magnitude more strenuous than those for tax credit scholarship programs in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Coulson controlled for enough variables that he can plausibly make the case that “tax credits seem significantly less likely than vouchers to suffer the Catch-22 described in the introduction – less likely to suffocate the markets to which they aim to expand access.” But let’s leave aside the question of whether there is a genuinely different political impulse for accountability between these two programs, and address the responsibility for advocates of private choice.

Coulson is right that regulating private schools in precisely the same way as public schools tends to undermine their uniqueness and defeat the purpose of offering them as alternatives. But it is simply untenable in a public education world that is being measured and forced to account for student outcomes to suggest that private options are exempt. If tax money is being spent, directly or indirectly, then the schools need to answer for it. (more…)