The debate over school vouchers continues as more states offer government dollars to fund private schooling for students as a method of improving choice and quality in K-12 education. Previous research in the charter school sector has found that special education enrollment discrepancies between charters and traditional public schools is likely…

School choice has long been a subject of robust debate. Private school vouchers--programs providing public funds for students to attend K-12 private schools--tend to be the most contentious form of school choice. Over the past three years, the research team has released a series of reports examining how the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) has…

The debate over school vouchers continues as more states offer government dollars to fund private schooling for students as a method of improving choice and quality in K-12 education. Previous research in the charter school sector has found that special education enrollment discrepancies between charters and traditional public schools is likely…

The question of how school choice programs affect the racial stratification of schools is highly salient in the field of education policy. We use a student-level panel data set to analyze the impacts of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on racial segregation in public and private schools. This targeted school voucher program provides funding…

Given the significant growth rate and geographic expansion of private school choice programs over the past two decades, it is important to examine how traditional public schools respond to the sudden injection of competition for students and resources. This article uses: (1) a school fixed effects approach; and (2) a regression discontinuity…

This report examines the short-term effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on students' non-cognitive skills and civic values. While a growing number of studies have evaluated K-12 school voucher programs along academic dimensions, few have focused on the development of non-cognitive skills and civic values. This study aims to address…

Special education and parental school choice are two of the most controversial issues in K-12 education in the United States. In certain places, especially Milwaukee, Wisconsin, those two sensitive education concerns intersect in ways that prompt regular interest on the part of policy makers, advocates, the media, and the public at large. In this…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012.…

This report is the fifth in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) providing descriptive information about the schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Following a brief history of the MPCP, this year's report contains descriptive statistics about schools participating in…

This report is the fourth in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) that provides descriptive information about the schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). A total of 115 schools participated in the MPCP for the entire 2009-10 academic year, with 20,899 students enrolled…

In 2006 Wisconsin policymakers identified the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) as the organization to help answer lingering questions about the effects of the MPCP [Milwaukee Parental Choice Program]. The SCDP is a national research organization, based in the University of Arkansas' Department of Education Reform, dedicated to the…

This is the final report in a five-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This report features analyses of student achievement growth four years after the authors carefully assembled longitudinal study panels of MPCP and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) students in 2006-07. The MPCP, which began in 1990, provides…

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is the nation's oldest and largest urban school choice program, offering private-school scholarships to low-income students in the city of Milwaukee since 1990. In the early years of the program, voucher schools were not required to test their students, though many of them did so using nationally normed…

This report analyzes the net fiscal impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The net fiscal benefits of the MPCP have continued to grow. The estimated increase was particularly sharp in FY10, from $37.2 million to $46.7 million. This increase was primarily due to the cut in the voucher amount, while MPS' per pupil revenues continued…

This is the third-year report in a five-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). The MPCP, which began in 1990, provides government-funded vouchers for low-income children to attend private schools in the City of Milwaukee. The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the MPCP in terms of…