North Carolina's anti-voucher professorsHelen Ladd, William A. Darity, Rosyln Mickel, Charles Clotfelter, Sherick Hughes, and Jenni Owen are professors and program directors at various universities in North Carolina including Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Earlier this week they filed an Amicus brief in favor of overturning North Carolina’s new voucher program.
In the brief, they argue research doesn’t support vouchers and that voucher proponents cherry-pick statistics and fail to control for demographic differences.
The professors begin their case by citing a controversial study, by Chris and Sarah Lubienski. That study doesn't even look at the impact of vouchers but simply compares public and private school students on math (but not reading, though that data is available and similar studies have found higher reading scores for private school students).
While the professors accuse voucher proponents of failing to control for demographics in research supportive of vouchers, the evidence they present against Milwaukee’s voucher program is a Journal Sentinel article on the apples-to-oranges comparison between all public school students and the low-income voucher students. Interestingly, the professors must have missed the one sentence in the article noting the voucher students outperformed their low-income public school peers.
The professors also selectively quote research. Take for example Patrick Wolf’s often misunderstood study on the D.C. voucher program. For the first several years the study showed higher achievement for students offered a voucher, but the statistically significant difference disappeared in the final-year report. The professors fail to mention the famous reason why. Nearly half of the control group (non-voucher students) ended up in private schools or charter schools anyway. They also didn’t note the substantial improvement in graduation rates for D.C. voucher students.
Finally, the professors worry about the harm a “parallel” system of education might cause traditional district schools, but they make no mention of the 22 studies on the competitive effects of voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs on public schools. Of those studies, 21 found that, though the improvements are usually slight, public schools actually do better when faced with competition from nearby voucher schools.
Cherry picking, failing to control for demographics, and selectively quoting research and data, the Duke and UNC professors end up committing many of the same faults they find with voucher supporters.
