In Louisiana, where a lottery system made the impact of school choice easy to study, voucher-carrying students saw their maths test scores fall dramatically within a year and were 50% more likely to fail than those who stayed in public schools. The evidence on whether public schools improved is mixed; in some places, like Indiana, students who stayed in them also slumped. The rare study that shows vouchers to be a boon tends to have been questionably designed: higher college enrolment among early adopters of Florida’s scheme can probably be attributed to the participation of better students.
Private schools can choose whether to take vouchers. It tends to be the shoddier ones in lower demand that do. An analysis by HuffPost found that 75% of America’s voucher-taking schools are religious; facing waning enrolment at parochial schools, the Catholic church has championed the Texas bill. States cannot force elite schools to participate. In theory, students in exceptionally bad public schools could still benefit from switching to mediocre private ones. But evidence from other states shows that the primary users of vouchers are children who already go to private schools. “That can’t possibly be a good use of public funds from a cost-benefit perspective,” says Sarah Cohodes of the University of Michigan.
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