Editor’s note: The following study of the effects of increased education choice competition on students at neighborhood schools was done by David Figlio, Cassandra M.D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik and originally appeared in Education Next.
Advocates for taxpayer-funded school-choice programs cite the potential of market competition to spur educational improvement and promote equity for low-income students. When public schools don’t have to compete for students, the reasoning goes, they have less of an incentive to enhance their performance. Students whose communities don’t guarantee access to a high-performing public school are unfairly shortchanged if their families can’t afford to pay for a better alternative. Meanwhile, school-choice critics lament the exodus of talent and resources from public schools, which they argue such programs necessarily cause.
We often read about the launches and participation in publicly funded voucher or scholarship programs, which use tax dollars to help low-income students attend private schools. Most research on these programs examines their effects on voucher recipients, but that is only part of the story—and arguably not the most important part. What we really want to know is how market pressure affects the performance of local public schools over the long run. As a private-school choice program grows, how does increased competition affect educational outcomes for public-school students who don’t use scholarships or vouchers?
We examine these questions based on a rich dataset from the state of Florida, where a tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students has been operating since 2002. During that time, the number of participating students has grown sevenfold to nearly 110,000 as of 2017–18, or 4 percent of total K–12 school enrollment in the state. We construct an index of competitive pressure to measure the degree of market competition each student’s school faced prior to the program’s start. Our analysis then looks at whether non-scholarship students experience negative effects, either in terms of their scores on reading and math tests or their rates of absenteeism and suspensions, based on this pre-program market pressure and the expansion of the program over time.
Instead, we find broad and growing benefits for students at local public schools as the school-choice program scales up.
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