More Evidence Suggesting Vouchers are Very Bad
And yet still eat up huge amounts of state funding
School vouchers are expensive and ineffective.
It’s a story I’ve been writing for more than a decade.
Unfortunately, in Tennessee where I live, the legislature just passed a voucher scheme. That plan is estimated to cost more than $1 billion over the next five years.
Now, new data out of Ohio offers one more example of why that was a terrible idea.
On all proficiency tests, students getting a voucher for one year or less overall are about 75% proficient. Three years later, they’re 54% proficient.
That’s a drop of nearly 1/3!
Ouch. Not great. Students are LOSING ground academically after taking vouchers.
Put another way, the voucher students’ first-year scores would rank in the top 1/4 of all Ohio Public School Districts; their third-year scores would rank in the bottom 1/5 of all Ohio Public School Districts.
In other words, vouchers move students in the wrong direction - that is, if the goal actually has anything to do with improving student achievement or closing achievement gaps.
Importantly, there is no subject in which voucher students are tested where they improve their proficiency over 3 years.
So, that’s not outstanding.
In 2025, Tennessee will start a large-scale, universal school voucher scheme that costs a lot of money. The track record in other states (like Ohio) is that it also fails to get results in terms of academic achievement.
We’re paying more and actually harming kids.
Result after result shows these programs lead to kids losing ground academically. State after state shows that the actual costs are higher than projected.
This is the exact opposite of fiscal conservatism.
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