Education

Research Roundup: Three New Studies Of The Long Term Effects Of School Choice


There is a lot of research on private school choice. Like, a lot. Vouchers, tax credits, city-based, state-based—the types of programs researchers have studied goes on and on. Short term effects, long term effects, test scores, graduation rates, voting, volunteerism—the list of outcome measures goes on and on.

For lots of reasons, looking at longer-term outcomes is superior to looking at shorter-term outcomes. Ultimately, education is about preparing children to be adults, so ideally we’d like to know how educational interventions shape adult behavior.

Lucky for us three studies released in the last month look at the long-term effects of different types of school choices on different types of adult behavior.

The first study, published in Social Science Quarterly, examines the relationship between participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (a school voucher program) and crime. The researchers paired student data with records from the Wisconsin court system to see if there was a difference in the rates of committing crimes between students who participated in the program and demographically matched students who did not.

So what did they find? The authors conclude, “The evidence from our total of five analytic model estimations on seven crime variables…suggests that sustained participation in the MPCP [Milwaukee Parental Choice Program] school voucher program may lead to decreased criminal activity later in life.” Specifically, “Our model estimates indicate that experiencing the MPCP throughout high school reduces the likelihood of a student committing a misdemeanor as a young adult by 2–7 percentage points, of committing a felony by 3–4 percentage points, of being accused of any crime by 5 percentage points, and of being found guilty of theft by 2 percentage points.”

The second study, published in the journal Youth and Society, looked at private school attendance and volunteering later in life. The researchers used the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, a survey of 15,000 U.S. 10th graders who were asked a battery of questions in 2002 and then again in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The survey asked questions about volunteering, including where students chose to volunteer if they did. It also classified students as having attended a private Catholic school, a private Protestant school, a secular private school, or a public school.

The researchers were interested in looking not only at different rates of volunteering but also the types of volunteering that these young adults did. Does the type of activity vary based on the type of school they attended?

In short, yes. Rates of volunteering during high school years tend to be higher in private than public schools, and highest in Catholic schools. However, by the time students are entering young adulthood, volunteering rates between sectors and school types are statistically indistinguishable from one another.

There were meaningful differences, however, in the types of organizations that these young people chose to work with. Catholic school students, for example, were less likely to volunteer with political organizations but more likely to volunteer in hospitals and community centers. Protestant school students were more likely to volunteer with religious organizations and less likely to volunteer in community centers or with environmental groups. Perhaps not surprisingly, students who attended secular private schools were substantially less likely to volunteer with religious organizations.

The third study updates previous research on the longer-term effects of private school choice programs in Florida, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. The team of researchers, under the aegis of the Urban Institute, have been looking at high school graduation rates, college matriculation rates, and college graduation rates from three private school choice programs for the past several years. With each passing year, they are able to add more data to their analyses.

This most recent update found that students who participated in the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program, “were more likely to go to and graduate from college than their public school peers.” This is a finding that the researchers have found before, but the effect has become stronger as they have been able to add data from private colleges and colleges from outside of the state of Florida.

Previously, the researchers found that participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had positive effects on college enrollment but not on college graduation. However, as they included more data they found “statistically significant positive effects on both college enrollment and attainment for MPCP students first studied in grades three through eight.”

Finally, even after including more data on participants in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the researchers continue to find that “students offered a scholarship enrolled in college at rates that were statistically indistinguishable from students who lost the lottery.”

Taken in total, these three studies add to our understanding of the effects of schools of choice on the long-term behavior of the children who attend them. I would argue that they generally point in a positive direction for school choice, but with lots of important variation over time, place and policy. It is great to see researchers work to tease out those more granular distinctions.



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