On July 14, Diane Ravitch wrote this:
La. students with vouchers do worse than peers in regular schools: http://tinyurl.com/347yht5. The panacea that never works, never dies.
Leave aside the uninformed claim that vouchers never work (in fact, they improve graduation rates, force public schools to improve, and improve test scores at least some of the time).
Has Ravitch found any actual evidence that Louisiana students are being harmed by vouchers? No.
Consider who receives vouchers in Louisiana. The program is limited to families with incomes under 250% of the poverty line — that is, students who tend to be poorer. On top of that, students must have attended “a public school during the 2009-2010 school year that is labeled academically unacceptable by the State.”
In other words, the voucher program is limited to students with lower incomes who attended failing public schools.
Now, as described in the EdWeek article that Ravitch so credulously cites, a former insurance executive and state board of education member named Leslie Jacobs came up with a comparison of voucher students and public school students. As far as I can tell, that comparison is available only in a blog post:
In the 2009-10 school year, 1113 children in grades K-4 received vouchers to attend one of the 32 participating non-public schools. Unfortunately, looking at the spring 2010 test scores, voucher students performed much worse than students in the New Orleans RSD – both its traditionally run public schools and public charter schools.. . . .
Analysis
The performance of students enrolled in the voucher program raises serious concerns. While Louisiana’s proficiency goal is for all students to be Basic and above, in the voucher schools, only 35% of 3rd graders and 29% of 4th graders earned scores indicating they are grade level proficient in reading. Compare that to the RSD charters, where 54% of 3rd graders and 58% of 4th graders scored Basic and above. In fact, in English 4th grade students enrolled in the RSD charter schools outperformed students attending voucher schools by 2 to 1.
That’s the full extent of the “analysis” section. Evidently, all that Ms. Jacobs did was compare the raw average scores of voucher students to those of New Orleans public school students as a whole. Needless to say, this “analysis” is worthless — she’s comparing poorer students from failing public schools to everyone else. It’s unsurprising that the former might not be doing quite as well. Such an apples-to-oranges comparison tells us nothing about the performance of voucher-receiving private schools.
It’s a shame that Ravitch would treat this comparison with such gullibility while refusing to acknowledge the highly rigorous research done on vouchers.
In response to Sbuck’s post:
The comparison of voucher school student performance to the Recovery School District’s student performance is a fair one. The RSD schools are schools are schools that were failing and have been taken over by the state. 96% of their students are African American and 93% qualify for free and reduced lunch. While voucher school students in New Orleans must meet the income criteria, they do not have to have previously attended a failing school- for two reasons. First, kindergarteners are eligible for vouchers. Secondly, students are not assigned to a public school in New Orleans. Parents pick their public school. A parent merely needs to say they would have attended one of the few remaining failing elementary schools and they can qualify if they meet the financial means test.
For this reason, comparing the performance of the voucher students to the schools in the RSD is a very fair comparison. Any voucher student could apply to any RSD school, and many nonfailing RSD schools have capacity to take more students.
I support students from failing schools getting vouchers to attend a BETTER school. The issue in New Orleans is that the voucher program has no performance standards. Any school can particpate, irrespective of whether or not they are offering a better academic alternative.
Thanks for the comment. It’s still not a fair comparison. Voucher students might disproportionately come from the worst-performing students, and taking a snapshot of their performance in one year doesn’t tell you anything about how much they might have gained over where they would have been otherwise.
Moreover, can you clear up a couple of things?
1. You refer to kindergarteners being able to get vouchers. That’s true. But the voucher program has been in existence only for two years, and grades K through 2 are not tested. Thus, children who entered the voucher program in kindergarten have not been tested yet, and cannot possibly affect any test score comparisons.
2. The Louisiana Dept. of Education webpage (linked above) says that a student must have actually been enrolled in a failing school last year to get a voucher for the upcoming year. Can you provide any evidence of what you claim, i.e., that students do NOT have to have actually attended a failing school?
I’d also point out that in order to receive vouchers, students other than kindergarteners had to have been attending one of the following 21 schools that got the lowest ranking (“academically unacceptable”): http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/uploads/13578.pdf
But the Recovery School District has over 3 times that many schools. See http://www.rsdla.net/About_the_RSD/Schools.aspx
So it is just false to suggest that all RSD schools are “failing” — if all the RSD schools were academically unacceptable, then the list of public schools whose students can get vouchers would be much longer.
If you read my actual blog entry, my call to action was to:
1. give parents information on the schools where data exists (there are at least 10 students testing per grade) and 2. create some standards that schools must meet to continue in the program. I agree that one year of data is not enough to make decisions about the program. But, the initial results are so dismal that it should prompt policy makers to set standards that participating schools must meet within a certain time frame. There are a number of voucher schools whose performance is worse than the lowest performing school in the RSD.
Happily, most RSD schools are no longer failing. Many of the 21
No, your data do not show anything whatsoever about the “performance” of the voucher schools. Do you not understand that point? If bad students transfer into voucher schools and then get low test scores, we just don’t know whether those students are doing better, the same, or worse, than if they had stayed in their failing public schools.
The only way to tell that would be to have several years of data on individual students both before and after using a voucher, and then to have a fair comparison group. You don’t have either of those things.