Ongoing evaluation of Milwaukee Choice Program finds students achieving on same level as peers
Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who led the study, presented their findings at UW–Madison. The study also found that Milwaukee Public Schools are doing better than expected when compared with other urban school districts.
The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.
The comparison between students in private voucher schools and those in public schools was made two years after large panels of students in the program and students in the Milwaukee public school system had been carefully matched to each other.
“In the study of student growth over two years, the voucher students are doing about as well in reading and math achievement growth as a carefully matched sample of MPS students,” says professor John Witte of UW–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, who worked with the Arkansas researchers on the evaluation.
The evaluation project represents the most comprehensive evaluation of school choice in a single place ever attempted, says Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas professor of education reform and holder of an endowed chair in school choice. Wolf leads the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research organization based at the University of Arkansas that is conducting the evaluation.
“We still have two more years of data to collect for this longitudinal study,” Wolf says, “but at this point the voucher students are showing average rates of achievement gain similar to their public school peers.”
The evaluation also found that while students in the choice program perform at levels roughly comparable to similarly income-disadvantaged students in the Milwaukee public school system, they perform better than low-income students in other U.S. urban areas. Families in the choice program reported that their children’s commitment to education and study habits are more important harbingers of academic success to them than are test scores.
Dozens of private schools have left the school choice program over the past few years, either because they violated state regulations or failed to attract enough students. The research team concluded that the private schools driven from the program had much lower student test scores than the schools still participating in the choice program.
The research team also looked at the effect of the school choice program on racial segregation in the city’s public and private schools. They found that school choice in Milwaukee has neither worsened nor improved the levels of racial segregation.
When the results of the longitudinal Milwaukee voucher research project are completed in 2010, they are expected to have answered many questions about the effect voucher systems can have on improving academic achievement and other important student and family outcomes. The data are expected to assist education officials and policymakers around the country as they consider implementing voucher programs.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was the first urban school voucher program of its kind when it started in 1990. In 2008-09, the year studied in this round of reports, the program enrolled 19,803 students in 127 private schools through the use of vouchers.
Researchers with the University of Arkansas; UW–Madison; Westat, a contract research organization based in Rockville, Md.; the University of Kentucky; Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.; Furman University in Greenville, S.C.; Young Harris (Ga.) College; Qwaku & Associates; and the Manhattan Institute make up Wolf’s team.
The research team is looking at the effects of the voucher program on such outcomes as student achievement, parent and student satisfaction, civic values, and how parents and students experience the program. The five-year evaluation also will determine the systemic effects of the choice program on education finance, public schools, non-participating students, private school capacity and school-level racial integration.
The next set of reports will include an assessment of the effects of the Milwaukee choice program on high school graduation rates.
— By Stacy Forster, with information from the University of Arkansas
