Research Shows School Choice Boosts Student Achievement
by Jim Brown
April 15, 2004
(AgapePress) - A new study by a Harvard economics professor indicates that large U.S. cities would be wise to model their school voucher programs after Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Researcher Caroline Hoxby's study looks at the achievement of children in public schools there before and after 1998, the advent of the city's school choice program.Hoxby found that increased competition among the public schools has resulted in higher student test scores. But she says that should not surprise anyone, considering that public schools are organizations that, like others, can respond to change and the stimulus of competition.
"What this really shows," Hoxby says, "is that the Milwaukee public schools had the potential to be significantly better than they were, and when they faced competition they were able to rise to that challenge."
And worth remembering, the study's author says, is the fact that the schools that faced the most competition after 1998 were schools that were not advantaged institutions, but rather schools that served very low income populations.
The change that Hoxby observed is encouraging, suggesting that competition among schools has yielded up to an entire grade level's worth of improvement on the standardized test scores of Milwaukee students. "This is the most improvement that I've ever seen in a big urban school system," she says.
And the researcher notes that the positive change in the schools' student performance is "very big by education reform standards," exceeding improvements associated with any other kind of education reform in the U.S. -- and that includes "everything from class size reductions to summer school programs and a variety of other things." And Hoxby says these are the biggest increases she has ever seen in more than a decade of education research.
Admittedly, the study findings do not imply that competition transforms low-achieving students into high-achieving students overnight. Still, Hoxby says one thing is clear: after implementing school choice, the Milwaukee schools' student achievement levels rose more dramatically than those of any other U.S. schools that serve low-income populations.
