My colleague at the University of Arkansas, Patrick Wolf, along with John Witte at the University of Wisconsin and a team of researchers have released their final round of reports on the Milwaukee school choice program. You can read the press release here and find the full set of reports here.
They find that access to a private school with a voucher in Milwaukee significantly increases the probability that students will graduate from high school:
“Our clearest positive finding is that the Choice Program boosts the rates at which students graduate from high school, enroll in a four-year college, and persist in college,” said John Witte, professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ”Since educational attainment is linked to positive life outcomes such as higher lifetime earnings and lower rates of incarceration, this is a very encouraging result of the program.”
They also find that “when similar students in the voucher program and in Milwaukee Public Schools were compared, the achievement growth of students in the voucher program was higher in reading but similar in math.” Unfortunately, the testing conditions changed during the study because the private school testing went from being low stakes to high stakes, making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effects of the program on test scores.
In addition, it should be remembered that the design of the Milwaukee study is a matched comparison, which is less rigorous than random-assignment. The more convincing random-assignment analyses are significant and positive in 9 of the 10 that have been conducted, with the tenth having null effects. You can find a summary and links to all of them here.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the new Milwaukee results is the report on special education rates in the choice program. As it turns out, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction grossly under-stated the percentage of students in the choice program who have disabilities. Some reporters and policymakers act as if the Department of Public Instruction’s reports are reliable and insightful because they are a government agency, while the reports of university professors are distorted and misleading. Read this report on special education rates and I think you’ll learn a lot about how politically biased government agencies like the Department of Public Instruction can be.
-Jay Greene
