Choice and Competition Spur Educational Improvement
The success or failure of school choice programs is often debated only in terms of the gains made by those receiving vouchers. This should not be the only measure, however, as increasing school choice can increase the academic performance of those who remain in the public system.
Economic theory demonstrates how competitive forces influence decision-making processes. When challenged by superior alternatives, public schools must improve or lose students.
While theoretically sound, the empirical evidence is somewhat more difficult to come by due to the newness of choice programs and their often-limited scope. It is also very difficult, methodologically, to measure exposure to private school choice.
Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster, researchers with the Manhattan Institute, have spent some time analyzing this issue and recently published an article looking at this concept in depth.[1] They determined that schoolchildren eligible to participate in the federal lunch program could be used as a proxy for those with exposure to free private schools in Milwaukee.
Collecting and analyzing these data, along with test scores from 168 Milwaukee schools, they concluded that as eligibility for free private schools through school choice increased by 50 percent, average public school test scores (at the 4th grade level) increased by 10 percentage points, controlling for other factors such as race and income.
Furthermore, Greene and Foster were also able to show how increased exposure to Community Schools produced similar increases in public school test scores. Since community schools are free, the authors used community schools’ distance from public schools as a proxy to competition.
They concluded that if a community school located an average of two and a half miles away from a public school, average test scores increased by 3.5 percentage points at the public school. If however, the community school was half a mile away the increase in test performance in the public schools was nine percentage points.
Public school systems have an incentive to respond to choice programs. When analyzing such programs, therefore, policymakers need to be cognizant of the effects of competition on the public system.
In the most recent evaluation of the Cleveland voucher program, for example, a statistically significant difference was not found between the learning gains of voucher students and those of comparable public school students.[2] Many observers took this to mean that the voucher program had no effect, when in actuality it was probably the exact opposite. The finding that public and voucher test scores converge over time is entirely consistent with a competitive education industry.
The benefits of school choice are not limited to those who except it, but generously spill over into the system as a whole. Therefore, while perhaps not intuitively obvious, it is cleat that increasing school choice in Cleveland could lead to not only an increase in the performance of voucher recipients, but also a rejuvenation and revitalization of the public school system itself.
Notes
[1] Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster, “Rising to the Challenge: The Effect of School Choice on Public Schools in Milwaukee and San Antonio,” Civic Bulletin 27 (New York, NY: Manhattan Institute, October 2002).
[2] Kim Metcalf, “Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program Evaluation - 1998-2001,” Indiana Center for Evaluation, March 2003.
Aengus Barry is a former policy analyst with The Buckeye Institute. Danielle Mendola is a former research intern with The Buckeye Institute.
