The Effect of a Statewide School Voucher Program on School Enrollment Change Using Difference-in-Differences Methods

Free-market economists should be in hiding, considering the havoc their theories caused when put into practice. What is really ironic is that the education sector could have been the canary in the mine, if anyone had cared to notice. Beginning in the 1950s, the guru of free-market economics, the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, warned against a government-run education system. Government should have a minimal role in a free market, he maintained. His ideas about privatization and deregulation influenced economies around the world, including those of President Ronald Reagan and England's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In education, this meant that parents should have absolute choice of where to send their children to school. Individual choice, not common good, was the mantra for the market economy applied to schools. The voucher was the epitome of free choice in schools. Moreover, free marketers said vouchers would improve all schools because traditional public schools would have to compete for students. Then-Secretary of Education William Bennett once proposed turning Title I into a voucher program. No one beyond a few hyper-fanatics took the proposal seriously. Yet, vouchers for parents--and lesser versions of parent choice, such as charters--have been a background theme in policy discussions for at least 25 years. When the market theorists turned to laws as a stand-in for vouchers, they sometimes characterized legislation as either good or bad. The good laws allowed schools to spring up with little or no regulation or guarantees for parents or the taxpayers who were funding the schools. State officials in Arizona bragged about being the charter state because dozens of schools had been started, some in open fields and none with safety regulations or accountability. Many failed completely, and today many are still failing their students. Arizona has one-sixth of the nation's schools, but according to Gene Glass, professor at Arizona State University, they are labeled underperforming on tests at almost twice the rate of regular public schools. Parental choice was written into the No Child Left Behind Act. Its first intervention allows parents to flee underperforming schools; the second gives parents a choice of supplementary tutoring services. Neither has been very successful. Options for parents under the first intervention are limited, and feedback from hearings on NCLB in 10 states indicated that parents and students wanted their own schools to improve, not to move to other schools. As far as supplementary education services are concerned, for-profit companies have offered ineffectual tutoring that is not integrated with classroom work. Definitive studies of supplementary education services, which I hope are under way, ought to tell us more. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the voucher idea at a national level in 2004 when it created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which awards scholarships of up to $7,500 a year to low-income children for tuition and other fees at participating private schools. In 2003, Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association, pointed out the hypocrisy of the action. NCLB is full of accountability measures, she said, but not so the voucher plan. …

Program Design, Incentives, and Response: Evidence from Educational Interventions

Recent evidence makes clear that states public high school graduation rates are well measured using information from the Common Core of Data (CCD). This article investigates the substantive consequences for the results of empirical analyses of using different CCD-based measures of states’ public high school graduation rates. The authors show that substantive conclusions about the levels, correlates, and predictors of states’ public high school graduation rates are dependent on how those rates are measured using the CCD data. Warren’s (2005) estimated completion rate is the most conceptually and technically sound CCD-based measure, and that measure is improved in this study. The public high school graduation rate for the class of 2004 was about 76 percent, although that rate varied considerably by race/ethnicity and across states.

This study examines county-level variation in participation in North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program. Using regression models, we find that counties with higher support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election have lower rates of voucher use, particularly among high-income recipients. These patterns persist after accounting for income, population size, and school quality. The findings point out that the communities where school choice may be most popular are the communities where its benefits are least available, perhaps indicating political shifts on the issue in the future.

Using a phenomenological approach, this qualitative study examined the perspectives of Latino parents and their involvement in the decision of their child to enroll in an advanced mathematics course in sixth grade. Since enrollment in Algebra I in high school is said to be a strong predictor of college attainment and with the growing number of Latino students across the nation, this study has the potential to help district and campus leaders establish whole-school systems for communicating with Latino parents to encourage their children to enroll in advanced mathematics courses at earlier grades. Participants in this study included four sixth-grade students enrolled in an advanced mathematics course, four enrolled in regular mathematics, their mother or father, two mathematics teachers, a school counselor, and two district administrators. Data analyzed included audio recordings of semi-structured interviews of each of the participants. The findings suggested that the district has proactively developed a systematic process of creating that includes six data points to create a student profile of students that will do well in advanced mathematics. This process is helping the district close the gap between total Latino school enrollment and the enrollment of Latino students in advanced mathematics. The findings also suggested that specific communication with parents about the importance of enrollment trajectories might influence the enrollment of students into advanced mathematics courses at earlier grades.

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the movement to privatization and contracting out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally. However, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. By using a content analysis, the authors explore the extent to which school choice voucher programs are mandated by state statutes to integrate civics education into their curriculum. Findings reveal that across the 14 states (and the District of Columbia) that have enacted school choice voucher programs, statutes exempt these programs from curriculum oversight, including civics requirements, and grant them considerable autonomy in designing their curricula. This study concludes by discussing the implications for ethical and accountable governance when primary and secondary schools fail to cultivate civic competence and civic literacy.

This study examines how U.S. medical school revenue diversification has changed over time, particularly growth of practice plan, hospital, and research revenue sources, and explores how these revenue changes have occurred alongside changes to the number of full-time faculty, student enrollment, and tuition and fees revenues. Aggregate census data for fiscal years (FYs) 2012 to 2021 are from fully accredited U.S. medical schools and affiliated organizations. Most revenue source data are from December 2022. Tuition and student fees analysis was conducted in June 2023. The numbers of full-time faculty for FY 2012 to FY 2018 are from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Faculty Roster and for full-time faculty for FY 2019 onward from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education Annual Medical School Questionnaire Part II. Student enrollment data are from the AAMC Student Records System. Faculty and student enrollment data are from June 2023. Between FY 2012 and FY 2021, total U.S. medical school revenue increased by 48%, from $95.8 billion to $142.0 billion (in constant 2012 dollars). Most (78%) of this growth came from practice plans and hospitals, whereas revenues from federal research grants and contracts saw attenuated growth (12%). The number of full-time clinical faculty increased by 35% compared with a 9% increase in basic science faculty. Total undergraduate medical education student enrollment increased 17%, with average enrollment per school increasing 2%, from 602.6 to 616.3 students. Practice plan and hospital revenue accounted for the largest portion of total U.S. medical school revenue. The number of total full-time clinical faculty increased, potentially reflecting robust clinical service-related medical education activity. Although U.S. medical school revenue has continued to increase despite environmental fluctuations, concern remains that current trends in the diversification of U.S. medical school revenue could hinder education, research, and clinical missions.

The use of free or reduced price lunch (FRL), as a measure of socioeconomic status (SES), has received mixed reviews in the literature. This study expands on the limited research on the validity of FRL as a measure of SES by examining the relationship between FRL and a series of community-based SES measures to determine whether FRL is an adequate proxy for adolescent SES. Data are from a nationally representative sample of 154 public high schools in 2010 from Bridging the Gap with corresponding school level data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) to obtain a measure of percent of students receiving FRL and using ArcGIS 9 software with the ACS 05–09, matched at the census block group level to construct measures of community SES. School zone level SES measures obtained include: median household income, percent of families in poverty, percent of families with children younger than 18 years in poverty, and the percent of all households in poverty. Data collected through community observations were used to construct a physical disorder scale. Percent FRL was strongly and significantly associated with the percent of families in poverty (r=0.67), percent of families with children younger than 18 years (r=0.67), percent of households in poverty (r=0.66), median household income (r=−0.60), and physical disorder (r=0.56) in the expected directions. Additionally, all community based measures of socioeconomic status were highly correlated with each other. The validity and limitations of FRL as a proxy for adolescent SES are discussed.

In this article, we examine how demographic changes in Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota between 2000 and 2017, including the resettlement of refugees, have impacted equitable educational arrangements in Fargo Public Schools (FPS) and West Fargo Public Schools (WFPS). Drawing on multiple data sources, including North Dakota’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI), Common Core of Data (CCD) available from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and block group data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to examine city and district level changes in the years 2000 and 2017. We also conduct descriptive statistics and a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to assess the relationships among Black student enrollment, performance on state tests and enrollment characteristics that include race and free and reduced lunch. Findings underscore the increasing isolation of students over time by race, socioeconomic background and language.

While the merits of vouchers have been the subject of intense public debate in recent years, there has been very little available evidence upon which to gauge their efficacy. The first publicly funded voucher plan involving private schools wasn't established until 1990 in Milwaukee; before then, the only data on school choice came from a small, poorly designed program in California. Voucher programs grew dramatically in the latter half of the 1990s. In 2000, about 60,000 students participated in seventy-one programs, most privately funded. This growth is now providing researchers with the ability to measure the impact of vouchers for the first time in multiple cities. The Education Gap is the first book to gather a significant body of data on vouchers in multiple locations, and it reveals startling new evidence that voucher programs benefit African-American students more than participants from other ethnic groups. To explain this phenomenon, the authors point out that residential selection is the most common form of school choice available in American public education today. Since this process is likely to leave African Americans in the worst public schools, new forms of choice directed toward low-income families are most likely to benefit black students. The authors examine the effects of school vouchers on test scores, parental satisfaction, parent-school communications, and political tolerance among students and parents participating in four pilot programs in New York City; Dayton, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; the Edgewood school district in San Antonio; and a program that offered vouchers to 40,000 low-income families nationwide. Though the programs operated in a wide variety of settings, the findings were surprisingly consistent. After two years, African-American students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools scored substantially better on math and reading tests. By contrast, no significant positive effects on the test scores of other ethnic groups were detected. While parents in all ethnic groups were generally more supportive of private education, African-American parents expressed particularly high enthusiasm for the private schools their children attended. The authors also report information on the kinds of students and families who take advantage of a voucher opportunity, allowing them to seewhether only the i??degreebest and brightesti??i?? public school students were able to take advantage of school voucher programs. The results documented in The Education Gap shed new light on the effects of school vouchers on students in poor, urban environments. This information will be important to policymakers, scholars, and citizens are they continue to search for ways to improve education in urban areas.

No abstract available

The University of Texas at Austin (UT) is a large, research level I university. For the fall semester of 2009 the total UT enrollment increased to 51,032 students, an increase of 1,048 students (2.1%). At the same time the undergraduate enrollment increased by 2.2% to 38,168 (74.8% of the total student enrollment). Unquestionably, undergraduate education is important to the mission of the university. In September 2004, following two years of strategic planning, the UT Commission of 125 submitted a 25-year planning document to the president of the university. (See more information on the commission at www.utexas.edu/com125/.) Among the strategies proposed in the final report was the mandate to develop a new undergraduate core curriculum. Another response to the initiative was to form a School of Undergraduate Studies, created in 2006, to function at the official college-level unit. Fourteen of UT's colleges offer 333 degree plans, 123 of which are bachelor's degrees. In sum, the above initiatives underscore UT's commitment to the education of undergraduate students. So when did undergraduate library and information studies begin at the University of Texas at Austin? The first undergraduate service course focused on librarianship and information seeking was recorded in 1931, when the course, “School Library Work for Teacher Librarians” was added to the UT course inventory. Subsequently, the iSchool, formerly the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, offered multiple sections of a very popular, UT undergraduate staple, “Children's Literature.” The large lecture-style class (100–300 students per section) has been taught since the 1970s and has drawn undergraduates from the entire spectrum of academic disciplines. More recently, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the school offered courses introducing students to “library and information use” strategies, as well as a course on “Internet resources and services.” While the “library use” class was discontinued due to under-enrollment, the Internet course (first offered in 1993) has evolved into another popular lower-division undergraduate course, now called “Information in Cyberspace.” In 2002 the UT Office of the Provost formed the Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP), which offers concentrations that represent areas of innovative faculty research, teaching and collaboration at UT. A cross-college panel of faculty members guides each program concentration. (See more information at www.utexas.edu/ugs/bdp.) After completing 19 credit hours of coursework, research and internship experiences, students earn a certificate demonstrating a secondary area of specialization that complements the major. By studying an issue from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, they become more flexible, versatile thinkers, prepared for a professional world that values collaboration and innovation. Students in the BDP also gain access to unique research and internship experiences at UT and around the world, giving them hands-on experience applying what they have learned in the classroom. From 2003–2006 I taught two lower-division undergraduate courses of the BDP program. In Technology and the Global Community, team taught with a colleague from the College of Engineering, guest faculty from around campus discussed how technology had changed their fields and the way they conducted their research. The second class, Tech Tools for Academic Success, was a small seminar-style course for first-generation college students, all undergraduate women, from a range of study disciplines. The course encouraged students to bring their own experiences and backgrounds to explore a range of proprietary software applications, Internet tools and online information resources to refine technology skills that would contribute to both continued academic success during their academic studies, as well as hone skills for application in their postgraduate professional lives. Specifically, the class aimed to develop computer and network skills to contribute to each student's high level of success through the use and understanding of technology tools and resources throughout their studies. The project received grant funding to provide a laptop to each of the 12–15 women who enrolled in the class. Children's Literature Introduction to Information Studies Information in Cyberspace Information and Culture Information and People Information and Technology The titles of the last three courses intentionally lend themselves to a broad range of subjects enabling instructors to propose and develop different topics that align to individual research interests and expertise, as well as the flexibly to respond to new information and technology trends and topics. Today the majority of the UT iSchool's undergraduate courses are taught by PhD students who seek to develop teaching experience and to subsidize their studies with a modest salary and an in-state tuition waiver. To be appointed an assistant instructor, doctoral students must complete a course entitled, “Supervised Practice of Teaching.” The class can be repeated for credit with one section taught either as a seminar on higher education pedagogical theory and strategies or an individual study where the student reads about college level teaching, develops and offers one or two lectures, progressing to developing and teaching an entire course with supervision from an experienced faculty member. Introduction to Information Studies (required for a minor in information studies). Overview of the information field as it relates to the technology-based world culture. Topics may include the idea of information, information in relation to technology and culture, information technology in education, information literacy and the “digital divide,” information and communication technology, information and gender, public information literacy, and information organization and preservation. Information in Cyberspace. Basic skills in using the Internet as a medium for information, research, communication and multi-media resources. Covers basic skills such as email, ftp, World Wide Web, file compression, use of search engines and web publishing; introduction to larger issues such as governance, ethics and freedom of expression. (Four to six sections of this web-based class are team taught.) Working in Virtual Worlds: Using Second Life. Examines information as a cultural phenomenon. Topics may include e-commerce, privacy and secrecy, censorship, information as a commodity, Internet culture, access to cultural heritage and control of the cultural record. May be repeated for credit when the topics vary. We Like to Watch: Surveillance & Society. Examines the role of surveillance practices and technologies in our everyday lives. Most of us think of surveillance as something the police or spies do, and so it is. But there's a lot more to it than that. Marketing, social control, immigration, fashion, identity and voyeurism are just some of the things covered during the course. Through lectures, discussions of the literature and the exploration of surveillance themes in pop culture (movies, songs, etc.) the course seeks to expand the way that students look at the benefits and challenges of modern day surveillance systems. (See Lance Hayden's article in this issue for more details on this course.) Security & Safety in Cyberspace. Focuses on information and data security, particularly within networked communications systems. As more and more of our lives are regulated, mediated or enhanced by computers running software that may or may not contain vulnerabilities that could compromise their functionality, it is increasingly important that citizens in a technology-saturated society understand how security works. Students get an introduction to the issues and explore ways in which they can protect themselves and help fight the problems that exist. (Lance Hayden's article also provides more detail about this course.) During academic years 2008–2010 School of Information tenured and tenure track faculty have taught two undergraduate signature classes offered from the School of Undergraduate Studies. In return the School of Information received some additional funding: part allocated for use by the instructor and part to support an adjunct faculty member to teach one of each instructors' courses. Quoting UT President Bill Powers, “These [signature] courses are designed to expose freshmen to experienced faculty and provide them with a rigorous and engaging intellectual experience. They are an important element in UT's undergraduate curriculum reform. To date the courses have not been considered as part of the iSchool's undergraduate minor offerings. The UT iSchool's undergraduate minor in information studies was proposed with the idea that the courses would be taught by full-time faculty, as well as qualified doctoral students. To date there has only been one occasion when a full-time, tenured faculty member taught a course in this suite of courses. The demands on full-time iSchool faculty to focus their teaching efforts on iSchool graduate students (master's and doctoral) creates a logistical challenge to pull full-time faculty from graduate level courses. The second challenge to supporting the minor in information studies is funding. Initially, additional funding was received to expand the number of sections of Information and Cyberspace offered each semester. Since then there has been no additional funding to support the additional sections of other undergraduate courses. Salaries for assistant instructors to teach undergraduate courses are drawn from the same accounts that fund all instructional initiatives. Continuing to grow the undergraduate offerings is dependent upon the existence of unfilled full-time faculty lines. During the 2009–2010 academic year the iSchool's undergraduate courses are generating approximately 48% of the school's total semester credit hours for the year. A fiscal note for those unfamiliar with public university funding in Texas: In fiscal year 2009–10 the state's contribution to the UT budget represents 16% of UT's overall budget. It is impossible to explicate the direct correlation of the state's “formula for funding” to the iSchool's annual budget for the purposes of this discussion. I can say, however, that in Texas there are three formula-funded areas: education and general space support; instruction and operations; and teaching experience supplement. All three formulas are driven totally or partly by weighted semester credit hours (SCH) taught. The weights are assigned according to the level of instruction (lower and upper division undergraduate and graduate-master's and PhD). This complexity makes it difficult to see if efforts in expanding undergraduate course offerings have actually had positive financial ramifications on the UT School of Information's funding. A third challenge is the University of Texas Graduate School policy that only permits graduate students to teach lower-division undergraduate courses. Before the iSchool offered a suite of undergraduate courses, doctoral students seeking to prepare for a career in academia had no venue to gain solo, in-class teaching experience. The addition of lower division undergraduate courses to the iSchool course inventory provided an excellent opportunity for these students to propose and develop courses that fit within the three general course subject areas: information and culture; information and people; and information and technology. A fourth challenge is a bureaucratic information management problem. Because the UT iSchool does not award an undergraduate degree, tracking students who have chosen to minor in information studies continues to be a challenge. Although the university has sophisticated data warehousing and statistical systems from which colleges and schools can extract enrollment and other statistical information, currently, there is no systematic way to collect this information. To date we estimate that since beginning the program in 2005, 16 students have completed a minor in information studies. According to a Pew Research Center report (http:/pewresearch.org/pubs/1391/college-enrollment-all-time-high-community-college-surge) college enrollment continues on its two- decade upswing, with an all time high of 18–24 year olds registered in college (either two- or four-year) in fall of 2008. The report goes on to observe an increase of “4.9% per year beyond general inflation from 1999–2000 to 2009–10 at public four-year colleges and universities… A record 84.9% of 18- to 24-year-olds had completed high school as of October 2008, up from 75.5% in 1967 and 83.9% in 2007.” Dropout rates declined during the same period. What does this increase mean? Universities such as UT-Austin will continue to feel the pressure of increased demand for undergraduate admissions. UT's President Powers reports that 31,000 have applied for admission to UT for the 2010–2011 academic year, and only 14,000 will be admitted to yield a freshman class of 7,200. The demand for more seats in undergraduate classes is not going to decline. The question remains, “Will graduate programs such as the UT School of Information be able to sustain support for their popular undergraduate courses?” In light of current financial constraints facing Texas universities, we may have to wait and see if future funding will allow the iSchool to sustain or even grow the 1,600 seats it currently offers in undergraduate information studies classes.

Black Mountain College operated in the USA from 1933 to 1957 as a nonaccredited progressive educational experiment that focused on the visual arts as the center of a liberal arts education. Over the span of the college's 23‐year existence, the total enrollment was approximately 1,200 students. The college was in constant flux with each semester differing from the previous depending on the faculty and students who were there. What remained constant throughout was the college's mission to teach art through hands‐on experimentation, a pedagogy that has had a pronounced influence on contemporary art and art education. Black Mountain College closed by court order in 1957 due to its mounting debt and decreasing student enrollment.

This study attempts to determine empirically the factors that influence enrolments in economics and business based on data from a panel of Australian universities. Using a two‐equation dynamic reduced‐form system, our results indicate the following: past year enrolments in a certain field of study have the highest impact on that field of study; in periods of recession enrolments favour economics; female enrolments favour business studies over economics; an increase in total enrolments has a small negative effect on economics enrolments; and finally, there is a positive impact of the eight leading Australian universities (‘Group of Eight’) on economics enrolments.

This study aimed to examine school structural factors (i.e., free/reduced lunch percentage, proportion of minority student enrollment, and student–teacher ratio) that may contribute to employment outcomes for transitioning youth with disabilities beyond individual student factors through hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses. The secondary data for 3,289 students were obtained from the Bridges From School to Work Program, and the school structural data for 121 schools were drawn from the Common Core of Data. The major types of disabilities for the student participants included learning disabilities (73.1%), emotional and behavioral disabilities (4.7%), sensory disabilities (2%), and others (20.2%). Around 41% of participants were female. The study found that employment outcomes (i.e., whether a participant secured a paid job and weekly job earnings) were primarily attributed to student individual factors rather than school structural factors, particularly prior paid work experience. The finding suggests the potential importance of effective transition interventions to improve employment outcomes for all youth with disabilities. Implications for rehabilitation professionals are discussed.