Henry M. Levin

Educational vouchers: Effectiveness, choice, and costs

Most of the policy discussion on the effects of educational vouchers has been premised on theoretical or ideological positions rather than evidence. This article analyzes a substantial body of recent empirical evidence on achievement differences between public and private schools; on who chooses and its probable impact on educational equity; and on the comparative costs of public and private schools and an overall voucher system. The findings indicate that: (1) results among numerous studies suggest no difference or only a slight advantage for private schools over public schools in student achievement for a given student, but evidence of substantially higher rates of graduation, college attendance, and college graduation for Catholic high school students; (2) evidence is consistent that educational choice leads to greater socioeconomic (SES) and racial segregation of students; and (3) evidence does not support the contention that costs of private schools are considerably lower than those of public schools, but the costs of an overall voucher infrastructure appear to exceed those of the present system.

The Determinants of Scholastic Achievement-An Appraisal of Some Recent Evidence

This study assesses some of the more highly publicized and controversial conclusions of Equality of Educational Opportunity by James S. Coleman et al. The Coleman Report, published by the U.S. Office of Education in 1966, concluded that per-pupil expenditures and school facilities show very little relation to student achievement levels, and the effect of a students peers on his achievement level is more important than any other school influence. The present paper scrutinizes the data and the statistical analysis on which these findings are based. It is suggested that because of poor measurement of school resources, inadequate control for social background, and inappropriate statistical techniques used in the presence of interdependence among the independent variables, many of the findings of the Report are not supported.

The Effects of Competition Between Schools on Educational Outcomes: A Review for the United States

This article systematically reviews U.S. evidence from cross-sectional research on educational outcomes when schools must compete with each other. Competition typically is measured by using either the Herfindahl Index or the enrollment rate at an alternative school choice. Outcomes are academic test scores, graduation/attainment, expenditures/efficiency, teacher quality, students’ post-school wages, and local housing prices. The sampling strategy identified more than 41 relevant empirical studies. A sizable majority report beneficial effects of competition, and many report statistically significant correlations. For each study, the effect size of an increase of competition by one standard deviation is reported. The positive gains from competition are modest in scope with respect to realistic changes in levels of competition. The review also notes several methodological challenges and recommends caution in reasoning from point estimates to public policy.

Remediation in the Community College An Evaluator's Perspective

Remediation is the most common approach to preparing students academically and socially during their early stages of college. However, despite its profound importance and its significant costs, there is very little rigorous research analyzing its effectiveness. The goal of this article is to provide a conceptual framework for the evaluation of remedial education programs. Based on previous literature, we review a list of ingredients for successful interventions, present a number of approaches to remediation that make use of these ingredients, discuss alternative research designs for systematic evaluations, and enumerate basic data requirements.

The Economics of Educational Choice.

This paper places the recent debate over choice in education into an economic framework that considers both market choice and public choice mechanisms with respect to their efficiencies in producing social and private benefits. On the basis of the evidence, a market approach to education appears to be superior in terms of private benefits, while the public choice approach appears to be superior in terms of social benefits. It is difficult to find an advantage for either system in terms of overall efficiency. The market system appears to be more efficient in terms of meeting private tastes for education, and there is evidence of a slight superiority in terms of student achievement. However, the overall costs for sustaining the information, regulation, and other parts of the market system while providing, at least, minimum social protections look high to prohibitive relative to a public choice approach.

A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Educational Vouchers.

Major policy debates have arisen around the subject of educational vouchers as an alternative for financing and organizing elementary and secondary education. To a large degree, comparisons between vouchers and the traditional system of educational finance and school operations have been limited to one or two dimensions of education such as the relative impact of a particular system on achievement test scores. This article describes a comprehensive, evaluative framework that draws upon a larger range of goals that have been posed for education in a democratic and free society. These criteria include: (a) freedom of choice, (b) productive efficiency, (c) equity, and (d) social cohesion. The framework demonstrates the importance of and tradeoffs among these four criteria in evaluating specific educational voucher plans and enables comparisons with other alternatives such as charter schools as well as the more traditional public school arrangements.

Accelerating Mathematics Achievement Using Heterogeneous Grouping

This longitudinal study examined the effects of providing an accelerated mathematics curriculum in heterogeneously grouped middle school classes in a diverse suburban school district. A quasi-experimental cohort design was used to evaluate subsequent completion of advanced high school math courses as well as academic achievement. Results showed that probability of completion of advanced math courses increased significantly and markedly in all groups, including minority students, students of low socioeconomic status, and students at all initial achievement levels. Also, the performance of initial high achievers did not differ statistically in heterogeneous classes relative to previous homogeneous grouping, and rates of participation in advanced placement calculus and test scores improved.

Cost-Effectiveness and Educational Policy.

The present time of educational reform and budgetary stringency is a propitious one for improving resource allocation in education through a greater reliance on cost-effectiveness analysis. This article provides a summary of the technique and its applications to educational policy. It concludes that there is great potential for the use of cost-effectiveness applications in education, but there is little capability for doing so among most policymakers. Examples are provided of productive cost-effectiveness applications, and recommendations are made with regard to increasing the capacity of educational evaluators, policy analysts, and decision-makers to use the tools appropriately for more efficient resource allocation.

Can Education Do It Alone

Abstract Public policy in the last decade has placed great expectations on education to energize the economy by producing a workforce with higher test scores and greater educational attainments. This paper argues that education requires a range of complementary conditions in order to provide a payoff and cannot do the job by itself. This argument is also extended to research which extrapolates longitudinal consequences of educational investments from cross-sectional studies of the relation between education and various economic and social outcomes. It is argued that this research also overstates the effects of education by not considering the complementary conditions that must be in place to realize the relation that is embedded in cross-sectional data.

Measuring Efficiency in Educational Production

An attempt is made to explore the production set for educational achievement for both “efficient” and “inefficient” schools. The inefficient or average production relationship is obtained by estimating a reduced-form equation for all schools among a sample drawn from a large Eastern city. The efficient set is derived by using a linear programming approach to yield coefficients for those schools that show the largest student achievement output relative to their resource inputs. A comparison of the two sets of technical coefficients suggests that the relative marginal products are probably different. Because of such differences, the optimal combination of inputs for producing educational achievement relative to a given budget constraint will probably vary between achievement-efficient and inefficient schools, and may even vary from school to school. The result is that the use of such production-function estimates for attempting to improve the efficiency of the educational sector may have far less utility than its advocates imply.