Who Uses Vouchers? Not the Communities That Support Trump

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. …

The influence of family background on educational attainment in the Czech Republic is strong compared to other countries internationally and there is great variation in the composition and academic performance of students between schools. Research to date has focused primarily on this issue in reference to multi-year gymnasia. This article concentrates on variation at the primary-school level, on which there are only limited empirical data available on the distribution of students. It looks at how important the choice of primary school by parents of preschool-age children is, how that choice is realized over time, and what parental characteristics influence their choice of school. The answers to these questions are obtained from an analysis of data from a questionnaire survey conducted in 2014 amongst a representative sample of 2008 parents of preschool-age children. The authors employ a logistic regression analysis and compare data for 2014 with data obtained in 2009 in a survey of parents with children who were of compulsory school age. These analyses reveal that there is currently universal support amongst parents for the right to choose between schools. The possibility to choose puts at an advantage those children whose parents have at least upper secondary education and live in large towns, who are able to effectively obtain information on the quality of schools, the potential effect of which is to reinforce existing educational inequalities.

This study examines the impact of the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a school-based voucher program, on change in total enrollment and share of disadvantaged students by measuring the effect on timing of treatment: immediate effect, lagged effect, and cumulative effect. By collecting school- and district-level time-varying controls from the Census, Common Core of Data, and Florida Department of Education, this study constructed a panel dataset consisting of 1,945 Florida public elementary schools across 67 districts, spanning 2011 through 2016. In general, this study found a negative impact on total school enrollment change, but positive change on free-reduced lunch (FRL) share in enrollment. The negative effect of OSP was only significant within one more year when additional time indicators were included in the analysis. On the other hand, the FRL share shows no significant change from the immediate and lagged effects. All in all, OSP eligibility has a negative impact on total enrollment change which implies that underperforming schools experienced greater student displacement than other schools.

The Political Economy of School Choice

This chapter asks how socio-spatial segregation, school choices and residential choices are related in the relatively egalitarian Finnish education system. In many countries, school choice policies have been viewed as a means of desegregating schools by removing the immediate link between home address and school allocation through allowing pupils to select schools in different locations. However, international research points to school choice increasing school segregation, and our long-term research on the Helsinki metropolitan area demonstrates this in the Finnish context as well. The tendency towards school segregation is increased by the effect that school and school catchment area segregation have on the residential mobility of families with children. By combining register-based research and qualitative evidence, we describe the complex interconnections of social and spatial processes contributing to growth of segregation and educational inequality in urban schools and neighbourhoods in Finland. Processes operating at multiple scales exacerbate the risk of self-perpetuating vicious circles of segregation, where segregation in schools and neighbourhoods feed into each other. Besides the macro-level patterns of segregation in the cities and their education systems, local hierarchies between neighbouring schools and between school classes may further segregate schools and their individual catchment areas. Such micro-level processes may lead to growing segregation even when initial differences are small, as parents compare and navigate the network of schools close to their residential location, and school reputations mediate choices in local school markets. Our research has unearthed multiple mechanisms creating growing divides between schools, demonstrating that not even a relatively egalitarian educational system with high overall quality of schools is entirely shielded from segregation tendencies, which may lead to a decline in equality and greater risks of educational exclusion.

The prevailing argument for school choice in metropolitan cities has been that children from economically disadvantaged communities need opportunities to access better quality schools than the traditional public schools assigned to them based on their address. However, as these cities experience gentrification, more economically advantaged parents are taking advantage of school choice policies for their children - despite already living in the catchment zones for highly desirable traditional public schools. This study explores the intersection of community and school gentrification and the motivations for supporting and participating in the school choice process for parents in Washington, D.C., a highly gentrified city with a robust school choice landscape. Leveraging a relatively robust school choice system, the author interviewed 25 professional-class, low-income, and working-class parents in Washington, D.C. who completed applications for the citywide school lottery. The findings show that parents have vastly different priorities when choosing schools, depending largely on race, class, and whether they are a gentrifier or native Washingtonian. The findings reveal contradictions between the stated values and the actions among White professional-class parents, a pursuit of equality of conditions for low-income and working-class Black parents, and tensions between gentrifying and native parents in communities as gentrification changes the complexion and culture of schools.

What Governs a Household's Choice between a Public School, a Private School and the No-Schooling Alternative? A Case Study of Rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

This article analyses how Finnish parents of sixth graders in a comprehensive school act in the local ‘school markets' of the case city. The parents' subject positions as choosers are reflected on and explored in relation to the discourses and resources they use when discussing their school choices. The data were gathered in 2009 by administering a questionnaire ( n = 374) and by conducting interviews with 76 of the respondents. The main data used here were thematic interviews, which were analysed using the discoursive approach. The analysis revealed that the parents used three different types of subject positions and discourses when having conversations about their choices and when considering their options. These discourses used were partly overlapping and unexpectedly social, and cultural resources were capitalised on less than previously assumed. Contrary to earlier European research on school choices, most parents in this study were not eager to choose any other school than their allocated local school, because they trusted the quality of Finnish comprehensive schools. The parents' thoughts and actions were notably guided and governed by the local school authorities, according to whom the local school is good enough.

Given its modest position as a lower-middle-income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. This paper provides an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance, from an institutional viewpoint and by analyzing several data sources, some of which have rarely been used. The study finds that Vietnam has significantly increased school enrollment at all school levels in the past 20 years, and has achieved virtually universal primary school enrollment. Girls' net enrollment rates caught up with and then overtook those of boys at the secondary level in the past decade. Most of the variation in school enrollment and completed years of schooling was due to within-commune individual factors, rather than between-commune or between-province factors. School-level factors played an important, but diminishing, role in determining students' test scores, which was likely caused by a convergence in school quality in the country. The paper further discusses a host of challenges for the country -- most of which have received insufficient attention to date -- such as little school choice, a low secondary enrollment rate (compared with other Programme for International Student Assessment participants), inadequate training for the labor market, and the necessity of strategic planning for systemic reforms.

Private Education Market, Information on Test Scores and Tuition Practices

How Effective Are Private Schools in Latin America?

In its most recent annual report, the Inspectorate of Education (2018) provided evidence of rising segregation in the Netherlands. The report highlights how, in primary education, children are increasingly distributed unequally on the basis of ethnic and socio-economic background. Free school choice enables wealthy parents to opt out of schools that have perceptibly more deprived pupils – thus expressing their wish for like-minded peers for their children. Similarly, parents from low socio-economic groups do not want to send their children to ‘snobbish’ schools, while ethnic groups are worried about the (perceived) loose morality around sexuality and gender in white schools. The result is an increasingly segregated landscape where children are educated in mostly socio-economically homogenous schools. School inspections are expected to counterbalance such mechanisms by informing parents of the true quality of schools, but like-mindedness and group identity seem stronger motivators for school choice. This chapter will reflect on the rising segregation in Dutch education, how this relates to generalized trust in the state to provide high quality education for all and a historic context of a ‘pillarized’ society and education system. It will also focus on issues around intergroup trust and why the long tradition of public reporting on school quality has not been able to curb this trend.

In recent decades, school choice policies predicated on student mobility have gained prominence as urban districts address chronically low-performing schools. However, scholars have highlighted equity concerns related to choice policies. The case of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans provides an opportunity to examine student mobility patterns in a choice-based district. This paper analyzes student mobility between and within the various sectors and school types using a multinomial framework. We find rates of student mobility in post-Katrina New Orleans to be similar to other traditional urban school districts. Overall, our results indicate that high-achieving students switch to high-quality schools whereas low-achieving students transfer to low-quality schools. It is clear some students are taking advantage of the ability to choose a high-quality educational option, although many students are still not. Policy implications, especially for education policy makers implementing or considering school choice policies, and areas for future research are discussed.

School quality is crucial in supporting student success. This study aims to analyze the influence of Academic Supervision, Instructional Leadership Style, and Work Discipline on the Quality of Elementary Schools in Dempet District, Demak Regency. The specific objective of this research is to determine the extent to which each of these variables individually and collectively affects the improvement of elementary school quality.This study employs a quantitative correlational approach with a survey research design. The research population consists of 458 teachers, with a sample of 151 teachers selected. Data were collected using a questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics, prerequisite tests, simple linear regression analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The results indicate that Academic Supervision, Instructional Leadership Style, and Work Discipline have a positive and significant effect on School Quality. The regression equation for Academic Supervision is Y = 4.737 + 0.223X1, with an R-Square value of 0.027, indicating a small contribution to school quality. Instructional Leadership Style has a significant effect, with the equation Y = 36.022 + 0.967X2 and an R-Square value of 0.238, explaining 23.8% of the variation in school quality. Work Discipline also has a significant effect, with the equation Y = 48.063 + 0.530X3 and an R-Square value of 0.230, contributing substantially to educational quality. The combined regression model of the three variables results in the equation Y = 4.737 + 0.223X1 + 0.740X2 + 0.406X3 and an R-Square value of 0.361, explaining 36.1% of the variation in school quality, demonstrating the significant contribution of these three variables in improving school quality

Why, in some urban communities, do rich and poor households cohabit while, in others, we observe sorting by income? Does income inequality impact residential choices and community segregation? To answer these questions, I develop a two‐community general equilibrium framework of school quality, residential choice, and tax decision with probabilistic voting. The model predicts that an equilibrium with income mixing in which households segregate across public schools and low‐ and high‐income households choose to live in the same community might emerge in highly unequal societies. In this particular equilibrium, income‐mixing communities perform lower public school quality than communities populated by middle‐income households. The effect of inequality on the quality of public schooling in the income‐mixing community is ambiguous and depends on the relative endowments of private goods, such as housing, in the two communities.