Anna Egalite
Critics of school choice programs often say they harm public schools, and that taxpayer resources would best be used educating "all children" in public schools.
A new study, however, joins a growing body of research suggesting competition from private school choice programs may actually lead to small, but detectable, improvements in public school student achievement.
The study, “Competitive Impacts of Means-Tested Vouchers on Public School Performance,” by Anna Egalite a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, examines the impacts of vouchers on public school students in Indiana and Louisiana.
She finds the voucher programs had a small but positive impact on public-school students' English achievement in both states, and small but positive impacts on Math in Louisiana, which she attributes to the competitive effects of students having new private school choices available.
To study the impact, Egalite employs four measurements: The distance between public and private schools, the density of private options near public schools, the diversity of private schools nearby and the concentration of private school options (one operator or many). She then focuses on the achievement of students who remain in public schools after low-income classmates accept vouchers to attend private schools.
Egalite summarized her research in a recent article for the Friedman Foundation, stating, “the positive impacts are generally small but appear to be largest in the lower-performing public schools, using measures of competition that include concentration and diversity of private school competitors.”
