Vouchers: More Heat Than Light

When Francisco Lopez casts his vote in the presidential election this fall, school vouchers just might be a deal breaker. With the help of two $4,800 publicly funded "scholarships," or vouchers, Lopez, a father of five, sends two of his daughters to a Roman Catholic girls' school a few blocks from their home on the south side of Milwaukee, Wis. Rather than place their children across town in the public school system's gifted program, Lopez and his wife Monica opted for a neighborhood private school that offers smaller classes and better communication between teachers and parents. The Lopezes are so pleased with their family's three-year experience in the Milwaukee program--the oldest and largest U.S. public voucher initiative--that they're reconsidering how to vote. "At first Al Gore was our favorite," Monica says, but she has heard he is against school vouchers, "so now I'm not sure who I like."

In an election year when both major-party candidates are making education a top priority, one of the issues generating the most heated debate--and creating the most confusion among voters--is school vouchers, a controversial reform that uses tax dollars to help parents send their kids to private schools or hire private tutors. Statewide voucher proposals are on the ballot in California and Michigan. And George W. Bush advocates a federal voucher program that Gore opposes.

Bush would take federal aid from poorly performing public schools and give it to low-income parents to apply toward private-school tuition or tutoring. Like other voucher proponents, Bush argues that his plan would force schools to improve by making them compete for families' money, just as colleges must do. But Bush has stopped using the V word, saying he supports "opportunity scholarships." That euphemism, pollsters say, evokes fewer negative connotations among voters, who have been told by teachers' unions and other opponents of vouchers that they would siphon money away from public education.

Do vouchers help boost the test scores of children who use them? Researchers are trying to find out, but the evidence so far is inconclusive. Henry Levin, a school-privatization expert at Columbia University, says when students with vouchers are compared with others, "the differences in performance are so small that when people on both sides of this issue are arguing passionately, they're arguing based on personal beliefs, not evidence."

The best evidence should come from the decade-old Milwaukee program, which has more than 8,000 students. But Wisconsin stopped funding research on the program in 1995, after John Witte, a politics professor at the University of Wisconsin, found no difference in test scores between students who used the vouchers and a sample of Milwaukee public school students. Witte did note, however, that parents who used the vouchers were generally more satisfied with their children's schooling than other parents were.