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IU research center study continues evaluation of Cleveland school voucher project
Sept. 5, 2001
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The fourth report has just been released on the longest-running evaluation of a school voucher program in the United States. The latest evaluation of the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, from the Indiana Center for Evaluation at Indiana University focuses on a group of children who entered school as kindergartners in 1998.
"We will follow this group of nearly 2,600 students as they make their way through elementary school," said center director Kim Metcalf, who is directing the evaluation.
The study was commissioned by the Ohio Department of Education, and the latest report was released this week. The report is available at the center's Web site at http://www.indiana.edu/~iuice/. The news release on the report from the Ohio Department of Education is available at http://www.ode.state.oh.us/.
"The current findings will likely be used to support arguments on both sides of the voucher issue, but much remains to be learned," said Metcalf, an associate professor in curriculum and instruction in the IU School of Education. "As we have maintained throughout our work, and as research on vouchers in Milwaukee and other cities has indicated, the effects of schooling, and thus of the scholarship program, are cumulative and incremental. Further, research of other voucher programs indicates that the positive effects of choice are more likely as students move beyond the primary or early elementary grades."
The voucher program was established in Cleveland in 1995 to provide qualified families with an opportunity for a scholarship (tuition voucher) to defray the cost of private school enrollment for their children. The program is one of the most hotly debated educational experiments in the country and is currently facing constitutional challenges in the court system.
The IU study of the Cleveland project is the longest-running continuous evaluation of a publicly-funded voucher program in the United States. When the Ohio legislature voted to establish the program in Cleveland, it also mandated an external, objective evaluation. The current study covers the period from autumn 1998 through late April 2000.
The first IU evaluation, from spring 1997 through 1999, examined the initial impact of the voucher program on the students, families and schools participating, and the impact on the public schools from which the voucher students were drawn.
Results of the first phase were relatively consistent with patterns found by other researchers. Most studies have found that voucher programs, whether publicly or privately funded, tend to promote more positive parental or family attitudes toward school, increase parental involvement and result in increased parental satisfaction.
Metcalf said the first phase of the Cleveland study showed a limited but statistically significant positive impact of the program on students' academic achievement, particularly as they progressed beyond the early primary grades. This finding also is consistent with research done in other cities. The center's early Cleveland work also provided unique findings related to teacher and administrator perceptions of the program's impact on the schools and on the reasons for parental selection of schools.
The IU center's original contract on the Cleveland project was for five years (1997-2001), and it recently received an extension for two more years. This will give Metcalf and other researchers at the center at least a seven-year testing period.
For more information on the voucher report or to reach Metcalf, contact the center at 812-855-4438 or iuice@indiana.edu.
(Richard Doty, 812-855-0084, rgdoty@indiana.edu)