High-Stakes Choice

Abstract

This article considers the impact of a high-stakes testing and reporting requirement on students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. We describe how such a policy was implemented during the course of a previously authorized multi-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided us with data on voucher students before and after the reform, as well as on public school students who received no new policy treatment. Our results indicate substantial growth for voucher students in the first high-stakes testing year, particularly in mathematics, and for students with higher levels of earlier academic achievement. We discuss these results in the context of both the school choice and accountability literatures.

School Vouchers and Student Neighborhoods: Evidence from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

“…1 The law also required a new evaluation, conducted by independent researchers, to report on program outcomes. The data for this paper are drawn from that official evaluation of the MPCP, which occurred between 2006 and 2011 (Witte et al, 2008(Witte et al, , 2014.…”

“…However, while the original Witte et al (2008) study indicated that more than 70 percent of MPCP students had at some point been in the public sector (see also Cowen et al, 2012), such transfers occurred prior to the beginning of data collection in 2006-07, and we observe in this paper only the panelists who were already in the voucher sector. Fleming et al (2014) consider regression-adjusted differences between voucher students and the panel of public school students, but these were based on otherwise "similarly situated" students on the basis of 2006 test scores, racial demographics and, critically for our purposes here, between public/private school students within the same neighborhoods (this study found that religious behavior was among the key predictors of voucher take-up within the same neighborhoods).…”

“…These studies have collectively provided evidence for both positive and null voucher impacts on achievement, a finding mirrored by secondary analysis of data such as those from New York City (Barnard et al, 2003;Krueger & Zhu, 2004). Additional nuance was added in the most recent evaluation of Milwaukee's program, where after five years analysts found few differences in publicprivate test scores until the last year of study, when a new public-style accountability system directed at the city's voucher schools appeared to have stimulated test score growth in that sector considerably (Witte et al, 2014). The literature is also considering non-test measures of school productivity, most notably student attainment, which new studies have shown to respond positively to voucher usage even where test score impacts are marginal or non-existent (Cowen et al, 2013;Wolf et al, 2013).…”

“…This paper joins these various strands of literature to suggest a dynamic relationship between student participation in a fully-scaled voucher program, student success in these programs (as measured by test scores and sustained participation) and the neighborhood conditions to which students are exposed or -in some cases -move into. Although the earlier evidence suggests that students in more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to avail themselves of different school choice options, such a pattern may not hold within a carefully targeted governmental choice program like means-tested vouchers (e.g., Figlio, Hart, & Metzger, 2010;Fleming et al, 2014;Hart, 2013), and different studies of charter school selection have yielded more nuanced results, as charters often locate in areas with direct access to target populations.…”

School Sector Mobility in an Urban School Choice Environment

“…Berends (2014) states that private school voucher programs are growing in urban areas, yet their effects on urban education systems are inconsistent. For example, in Milwaukee vouchers were shown to have a positive impact on high school graduation rates, but little to no significant impact on student test scores (Cowen et al, 2013; Witte et al, 2014). More recent studies in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., find that vouchers actually have a negative impact on student test scores (Dynarski, 2016; Dynarski et al, 2017; Mills & Wolf, 2017).…”