Black students who won private school vouchers through a lottery in New York City were much more likely to later enroll in college than other low-income students who applied but did not win, according to a study released this morning.
The study of a privately funded New York voucher program for elementary school students showed no significant impacts for students overall, including Hispanic students. But the story was different for black students: 34 percent who attended private schools with vouchers were enrolled full-time in college three years after graduation from high school, compared to 26 percent for the non-voucher group – a rate 31 percent higher. For black students enrolled in college either full- or part-time, the voucher boost was 24 percent. The researchers called those differences large and statistically significant.
The study is the first to use a “randomized trial” – considered the gold standard for researchers – to determine effects on private school vouchers on college enrollment. It was conducted by Matthew M. Chingos, research director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Paul E. Peterson, who directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard.
The students participated in the New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program, which, in 1997, offered three-year, private school scholarships worth up to $1,400 annually for up to 1,000 low-income kids. Recipients could attend any private school in the city. At the time, the total per pupil cost in the city’s Catholic schools was $2,400.
The researchers offered words of caution about interpreting the results, given statistical estimates they described as “fairly noisy.” But they also said further discussion was warranted given the apparent differences in outcomes for black and Hispanic students.
One possibility: The Hispanic students in general attended schools that were of higher quality, or were perceived by the parents to be of higher quality, than the black students. “All in all,” Chingos and Peterson wrote, “it seems as if the voucher option was less critical for Hispanic students than for African American students.”
Another possibility: Black families were more likely than Hispanic families to seek out private schools for secular rather than religious reasons. Black students in the control group were less likely to attend college than like Hispanic students (36 percent to 45 percent). And the data showed a big majority of black families who won vouchers selected Catholic schools, even though only a small percentage of them were Catholic.
Given that black students were more at risk, the researchers wrote, perhaps black families were more likely to seek a private school to help their children succeed academically even if it wasn’t a perfect fit religion-wise.
Update at 8:56 a.m.: Here is a piece about the study that Peterson wrote for today’s Education Next. Here is an op-ed that he and Chingos and Peterson wrote for today’s Wall Street Journal. It requires a subscription to read in full, but here’s an excerpt:
President Obama is certainly correct to identify the particularly steep educational barriers that African-American students must surmount if they are to become college-ready. And he seems to have nothing against private school per se, as he has long sent his own daughters to private schools. Yet—apparently thanks to opposition to vouchers from powerful teachers unions—the president still hasn’t taken the next step and helped open private-school doors for low-income children as well.
“I have an 8-year-old in third grade, and she’s doing great. It’s miraculous the way she has changed,” said a voucher-winning African-American mother at a focus group session in 1999. The cause of the change was clear. It came from the power of parental choice in education. It wasn’t “miraculous”—unless you happen to be one of the parents directly involved.
