The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings
Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School on Program and Education Policy and
Governance today released
a study that shows that African American participants in a private school
choice program were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college as a result
of receiving a voucher.
This groundbreaking study, which used a randomized
experiment to measure the impact of vouchers on college enrollment—joins a
plethora of gold-standard research that has already demonstrated high
graduation and parental satisfaction rates among private school choice
participants.
“The
Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from
New York City,” which tracked participating students in New York City over
a nearly 15-year period, was conducted by Matthew M. Chingos of Brookings and
Paul Peterson, a longtime leading researcher on school choice programs and speaker at
the AFC National Policy Summit held earlier this year.
Also among the
findings:
- African American enrollment rates in selective colleges more than doubled among voucher students
- The rate of enrollment in full-time
colleges increased by 31 percent
The
data is consistent with results of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program,
which found that voucher students graduate at a rate of 91 percent—more than 30
percentage points higher than students who did not participate in the
program. And according to the program’s
administrator, in the 2009 and 2010 school years, 94 percent of 12th
graders participating in the program graduated from high school—and 89 percent
of OSP graduates went on to enroll in a two- or four-year college or
university.
D.C.
and New York aren’t the only places where vouchers have been shown to be a
success. Similar students demonstrating
increased achievement and parental satisfaction rates have been conducted in
Milwaukee, Florida, and Louisiana.
