Because vouchers are relatively new in the U.S., operating in cities rather than in entire states, it is difficult to conclude what long-term effects a voucher system might have in California. However, by analyzing voucher programs in two other countries - Chile and New Zealand - the effects become clearer.
In these countries, researchers have concluded that vouchers have had a negative societal impact over time. Studies show that voucher plans increase segregation and inequities in socioeconomic status without increasing student achievement or the overall quality of education. The lessons brought home by U.S. researchers in these countries could save heartache in California and other states in the future.
In Chile, the Pinochet military regime started a voucher program in 1980 as part of a plan to decentralize government with a free-market approach. Under this plan, which is still in effect, parents receive a certain amount of money in the form of a voucher that can be used for both public and private schools. Vouchers, in effect, fund both public and private schools, except for elite private schools that do not accept vouchers. (Before 1980, private schools - mostly Catholic - were partially funded by the government.)
"What happened very quickly in the '80s is that the number of private schools grew under this system and the number of public schools did not," reports Martin Carnoy, a Stanford University School of Education professor of education and economics who has studied Chile's voucher system for many years. "Most of these were for-profit, non-church private schools, run by families or individuals. Schools became a cottage industry."
The Chilean private schools that sprang up were usually located in middle-class areas, making transportation difficult for those living in low-income areas, says Carnoy.
"There was a redistribution of students among schools in Chile," he recalls. "There was a massive shift of students into private schools, particularly middle-class and upper-middle-class children. Private schools in Chile don't exclude low-income kids, but they have a much lower percentage of them than public schools." The trend for wealthier families to take advantaged of subsidized private schools follows the same trend in Europe, notes Carnoy.
"There was a huge drop in the number of kids going to municipal public schools after vouchers," says Carnoy. "Fifty-seven percent go to municipal public schools now, down from 80 percent in 1980." With fewer students, public schools received less money. Overall spending on education dropped sharply, partially because the government paid thousands of teachers severance pay as part of "privatizing" their contracts. Through such means, the teachers' union was eliminated as a bargaining unit. Teachers were transferred from the public employee system to the "private sector" in Chile under the voucher system.
Private schools paid teachers less money than public schools and hired a large percentage of part-time teachers. Because the school day in Chile was a four-hour day, many teachers worked part time in public schools and part time in private schools. When the government recently extended the school day to six hours, private schools complained that they were going to have to raise salaries to retain teachers.
Private schools took the best and the brightest students. "There was the cream-skimming effect," says Carnoy. "Private schools took the better students away."
The drastic redistribution of students and education spending did not result in higher achievement on standardized tests. Test scores fell for most low-income students in public schools, but they also fell for low-income students in subsidized private schools. Middle-income students increased slightly in both public and private schools.
What can be learned from this?
"Vouchers are really just avoiding the issue in California," Carnoy asserts. "To improve our schools, we have to make some very heavy, long-term investments. We need to make teaching a more attractive profession and improve the quality and training of teachers. We should make preschool available to every 3- and 4-year-old. Another area that has been totally overlooked is school management. It's unbelievable to me that schools have no concept of how to train principals or superintendents. This is an industry with the lowest level of supervision in the world. You have schools where you have one supervisor for 30 professionals who has never had training in supervising these personnel or managing an institution."
The Chilean voucher plan contributed to greater inequity in pupil achievement without improving the overall quality of education, concludes Carnoy. "People argued that vouchers created competition, which is supposed to make schools better. But there is no evidence in Chile that vouchers did that."
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, schools began competing for students in an "educational marketplace" in 1989, when the country embarked on an educational reform program called "Tomorrow's Schools." Under this plan, the running of the country's 2,700 primary and secondary schools was turned over to locally elected boards of trustees in each school, and parents were given choice over which school their child would attend. That program stopped short of being a full voucher system, although some have called it a "quasi-voucher" system that partially funded private schools.
New Zealand did have a voucher program called Targeted Individual Entitlement (TIE), which was supposed to provide funds for low-income students to attend private school. Forty-three private, non-religious schools participated in the TIE program, which was recently abolished by the government.
The TIE program had the effect of increasing segregation, according to Edward B. Fiske and Helen F. Ladd, authors ofWhen Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale. "The program, which is aimed at low-income families, attracted parents who are better educated and work in higher-skilled occupations than their peers in other eligible families. They are also disproportionately Pakeha (European) relative to the low-income population as a whole. Minority students are underrepresented in the program relative to their prevalence within the low-income population," concluded the authors in their recently published book.
The New Zealand Treasury Department recommended that private schools select students randomly for the voucher program, but the private schools insisted on handpicking students. "Participating schools make no bones about looking for low-income students who are talented in academics, the arts and, in the case of boys' schools, rugby. There is little doubt that cream-skimming occurs in the TIE program," notes the book.
After vouchers were implemented in Chile, test scores fell for most low-income students in public schools, but they also fell for low-income students in subsidized private schools.
The authors, interviewed by telephone in Thailand, said that school competition - including vouchers - had a harmful impact overall in New Zealand.
"Public schools lost funding and lost students. And the students in schools left behind faced greater challenges than before school choice," says Ladd. Under New Zealand's choice program - including vouchers - student demographics changed. Students with learning or behavior difficulties, those with poor English, those from dysfunctional home environments and other problems became increasingly concentrated in certain schools. New Zealanders came to describe such schools as downwardly spiraling.
Fiske, a former education editor at the New York Times, and Ladd, professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute, suggest alternatives to voucher and other choice programs in their book.
"Government needs to become involved in all sorts of other social problems facing schools and students, such as health problems and struggling families," says Ladd. "We need to pay attention to the social needs of those in struggling urban schools."
"We need to worry about the fact that high- quality teachers tend to move away from urban schools," says Fiske. "We need to offer incentives and rewards to those who teach in struggling schools."
"Overall, we found that choice programs like vouchers are not going to solve problems facing urban schools. They only exacerbate the problems," concludes Ladd.
"Based on what we observed in New Zealand, you can't count on vouchers to solve the problems of schools that are already struggling," says Fiske. "If you have school choice, you have to be prepared to offer intervention to the schools that are left behind. Voucher plans should not be viewed as a substitute for programs to assist struggling urban schools."
