Vouchers

Vouchers (also referred to as educational or school vouchers) are a policy and practice by which financial credits (sometimes called scholarships) are awarded to students so that they can select the school that they wish to attend and use the voucher to pay for tuition and other costs. Vouchers are a direct growth out of a free-market philosophy characterized by the Nobel laureate Milton Freidman in his book Free to Choose and are a political mainstay of several conservative movements during the past 20 years. The idea is based on the philosophy that if parents are unsatisfied, then they can “shop around” to select the school they think is best for their children. School vouchers have been important as the basis for the creation of charter and magnet schools as well.

According to several sources, including the popular blog citizen Joe, there are at least six states, plus the District of Columbia, that currently have voucher programs, with Utah, Ohio, and Wisconsin being the most recent to add such a program. Popular in the early 1990s, voucher programs have lost some of their popularity, with relatively few states offering new programs in recent years.

Most often, school vouchers are intended for children from families who are low income, as defined by [Page 1010]federal poverty standards, or for children who attend failing schools. Each child is given a varying amount of tuition credits ranging from $2,700 in Cleveland up to $7,500 in the District of Columbia. It should be noted that there have been significant legal and political challenges to the implementation of school vouchers and that the issues remain unsettled.

Concerns by those opposed to the use of vouchers have to do with the use of public school money to finance selective or exclusionary programs and the potential for public funding to be applied to parochial or faith-based educational programs.

However, school vouchers have received an increasingly large amount of attention and funding. Toward the end of the 1990s, vouchers were being awarded to more than 100,000 students from a fund of more than $300 million.

A significant concern is how children who have special needs will be treated through the incorporation of such programs. In an extensive review of the impact of vouchers on children with disabilities by the National Council on Disability, a final report concluded that several factors in the acceptance of such programs in the public schools should be considered.

• In general, vouchers will not extend to children and youth with disabilities. Relevant parts of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act will still apply but not to most activities of the private school.
• Because only a part of the costs associated with special education are covered through vouchers, parents of children with disabilities will have to cover some additional and necessary costs. Because the majority of voucher participants are from low income settings, the probability of these children receiving all necessary services is low.
• Schools where choice is the predominant model need to follow all Americans with Disabilities Act statutes; compliance will increase the costs of such programs.

Given the recent implementation of school vouchers and the lack of large-scale studies, there are few data on the effectiveness of the vouchers. For the most part, results have shown that vouchers do not have as great an impact on academic achievement as do traditional school structures. In addition, the results are mixed, not because of the actual numbers involved but because of the interpretations of the numbers. It appears that there are so many competing interests, especially where the programs are faith-based, that it will be a few years until the picture regarding effectiveness is much clearer.

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