Despite a vast literature on school vouchers, less is known about their long-term competitive effects on public schools. The current paper examines the competitive effect of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, the largest single voucher program in the US, on math and ELA proficiency rates in public schools in the last eight years. Exploiting…

Introduction: Differences-in-Differences (DD) is a commonly-used approach in policy evaluation for identifying the impact of an intervention or treatment. Under a parallel trend assumption (PTA), we can recover a causal effect by comparing the difference in outcomes between a treatment and a control group, both before and after an intervention was…

Access to lifelong learning opportunities has long been discussed in terms of the economic benefits conferred by access to and engagement in further education by members of the labor force, particularly within the global knowledge economy. However, equitable access to lifelong education opportunities, particularly for low-skilled adults in the…

This paper analyses the origin, development and fall of the 'school voucher' system in Spain. It was called the Ley de Financiación de la Enseñanza Obligatoria (Compulsory Education Financing Law) (LFEO), and this reform represented the first attempt at an international level to establish a school voucher model for a whole country. This article…

The rapid growth of special needs vouchers has been accompanied by the loss of historic civil rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We examine three of the largest special needs voucher programs in the United States: those in Florida, Georgia and Ohio.…

Public education, at least as it has been known for the past several generations in the US, is under threat. Conservative state legislatures from Arizona to Florida have enacted sweeping voucher legislation, channeling taxpayer dollars to private schools. At the same time, a vicious culture war has engulfed the public education system in…

Researchers have considered how school choice policies affect student achievement, but less inquiry explores how the organization of schools may change in the presence of choice. This descriptive and exploratory paper analyzes a state representative sample of school mission statements at two time points: before the enactment of choice policies in…

The primary justification for school voucher programs in the United States has revolved around questions of efficacy, especially relative to student achievement outcomes. More recently, however, a series of studies revealed sizable negative impacts on students enrolled in voucher programs. Collectively, these studies presented an evidentiary…

We examine the literature linking private and charter schooling to perceptions of student safety in United States schools. The results are generally positive for student, parent, and principal reports of school safety for the nine studies on safety in public charter schools and the eleven studies on safety in private schools. Eight of the nine…

This article aims to measure and compare the effectiveness of voucher schools and public schools on mathematics and reading test score trajectories from Grade 4 to Grade 10 in Chile. We analysed a national database that includes measures taken in 2007, 2011, and 2013 from a same sample of over 140,000 students. Multilevel-growth models were used…

Voucher policies represent a market mechanism to support school choice, with the expected effect of stimulating competition among schools and, in turn, positively benefiting the educational outcomes. As the only Italian region adopting this policy to free private/public school choice, Lombardy is the subject of this study. In particular, we aim at…

Increasing mature-age access to education and training in a way that is responsive to changing labour market needs is a key policy challenge. In this paper we examine the impacts of a unique reform in the Australian state of Victoria that aimed to meet this challenge by introducing a broad-based voucher for those 25 and older. In effect, the…

Private school voucher programs provide government subsidies to eligible students for tuition and other education-related costs. Parents participating in choice programs benefit from a larger and more diverse supply of education providers. Private schools must choose whether or not to participate in a voucher program in their community. In…

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. Although prior studies of this nature have been limited to Florida and Milwaukee, using multiple…

School vouchers are state-funded programs--often called scholarship programs--that allow students to use public monies to attend a private school. The state provides a set amount of money, typically based on the state's per-pupil amount, for private school tuition. There are currently 27 voucher programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia.…