With President Bush's encouragement, Congress passed a provision in last week's budget for a $14 million voucher program in Washington, D.C. -- the first such federally financed program in the country. While the president and Congress may think that jumping on the voucher bandwagon is the best way to improve our nation's schools, little indicates that they're right. Our experiences with voucher programs have so far been disappointing, and a look at Chile -- a country that has had a nationwide voucher program in place for more than 20 years -- suggests that they won't get better with time.
Decades ago, Milton Friedman popularized the idea of school vouchers. His idea was straightforward: Provide parents with a voucher for a specified amount of money and allow them to redeem it at the public or private school of their choice. Schools would be put to the tests of the market, and the educational system would improve. The idea lay more or less dormant in the United States until the 1990s, when several cities set up small programs. Studies and experiments followed, but the results haven't matched the high hopes.
Supporters can point to a few things. Parents of children in voucher programs, for instance, are much happier with their children's schools. But on the most crucial factor, academic achievement, there hasn't been much to brag about. The most consistent findings have been modest academic achievement among African Americans and a lack of evidence one way or the other for everyone else. These consistent findings, however, have included a consistent caveat: More time and research is needed. When we turn to Chile, we see that there's not much to look forward to.
Chile adopted its voucher program in the years following Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, coming closer than any other country to realizing Friedman's vision. Pre-reform, the Chilean school system was heavily centralized. The Ministry of Education was responsible for financing and management. It devised the curriculum for the entire schools system, decided who was hired, and determined how much they would make. The system that replaced it in the early 1980s did away with nearly all of this.
Administration of the public schools was transferred out of the Ministry of Education and into the hands of local municipalities, eliminating top-down management. Students were given vouchers if they wished to attend private schools, and public-school funding became dependent on student enrollment. Vouchers could be used at religious schools, and families with the means could opt out of the system entirely and attend tuition-only schools (voucher-accepting private schools couldn't charge tuition).
Some things have gone as expected. Students moved out of the public schools and into private ones. Public-school enrollment fell from 80 percent in the 1970s to below 60 percent in the 1990s. And private schools responded to the increase in demand. Their numbers increased by roughly 30 percent from 1982 to 1995.
But in a recent paper evaluating the Chilean voucher program, Chang-Tai Hseih and Miguel Urquiola of the National Bureau of Economic Research find no evidence that the reforms have improved academic achievement. Looking at 150 communities throughout the country, Hseih and Urquiola found that increases in private-school enrollment had no affect on average math and language test scores. Repetition rates -- defined in Chile as the number of students who have repeated the same grade twice -- actually grew worse as more students attended private schools. Hseih and Urquiola also looked at the country's performance in international tests and found that Chilean students seem to be performing slightly worse than they were 30 years ago.
Meanwhile, Patrick McEwan has found that while the Catholic schools seem to perform slightly better than the public schools, the voucher-friendly private schools do, at best, as well as the public schools, and sometimes less so. A few studies have argued that the private voucher schools actually perform better than the public ones. But it's worth pointing out that these schools don't have to accept every student who applies -- a luxury the public schools don't have. Private schools can, and do, skim the better ones. What's surprising is that even with this advantage, they haven't pulled clearly ahead.
The failure of the Chilean program to make great strides could be attributed to the design of the policies. Perhaps the incentives aren't structured the right way. Despite the decrease in demand for public schools, for example, few have closed over the years. But even if the voucher program is flawed, overall student achievement for the country should have improved as more students moved into the private sector. And, as Hseih and Urquiola show, this just hasn't happened. Examining the consequences of the Chilean reforms, it's hard to argue that vouchers have done much to improve the educational system of the country. And they suggest that 20 years down the line, the results of America's voucher experiments will look much as they do today: disappointing.
The trouble with these policies goes beyond their mediocrity. We already have a pretty good idea of what will improve our schools: smaller classes and better curricula. Vouchers take us away from these essential goals and carry us toward a new set of problems, such as the possibility of increased racial and economic segregation. While school-choice proponents undoubtedly see Congress' decision as a landmark, it's actually a setback.
Jason Barnosky is a doctoral student in political science at Brown University.
