MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Private school voucher programs have been popping up all over the country in recent years. But now, for the first time, a national voucher plan is on the table - part of the big tax bill passed by the House that the Senate is now considering. What could it mean for American families? For more on this, we're joined by NPR education correspondent Cory Turner. Cory, good morning. Thanks for joining us.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Thanks for having me, Michel.
MARTIN: So first, who would be able to access these vouchers?
TURNER: Yeah, so as the bill is currently written, they'd be available to kids in households earning no more than three times an area's median gross income. What does that mean? Well, let's just say, Michel, the median where you live is $75,000. Then any household earning less than 225,000 could qualify, so it's a pretty high ceiling. It's going to make it open to the vast majority of students out there to help them pay for private school. Though, I should say one thing here - the program will have a funding cap. So qualifying is no guarantee of actually getting a voucher.
MARTIN: So how much would this cost, and where does this money come?
TURNER: Republicans want to create a really generous tax credit to give to individual Americans who donate their own money to be bundled into vouchers and then given to families. So instead of directly funding private, secular or religious schools, the federal government would essentially be giving up as much as $5 billion a year in tax revenue to encourage other people to fund them.
MARTIN: So let's talk about that as an investment. Is there any evidence that vouchers do help students academically?
TURNER: So I talked to a bunch of researchers for this story, and they told me the evidence here is mixed at best. It also depends on how you measure success. So let's start with test scores. Here's Josh Cowen. He's a researcher at Michigan State who publicly opposes vouchers.
JOSH COWEN: It's true that in the '90s and in the early 2000s, when I first started working on this as a young data analyst, you did see a handful of voucher systems marginally improving academic performance.
TURNER: That's because, Cowen says, these early programs were small. They included some pretty good private schools, and they were specifically targeted to low-income families in distressed public schools. But as state programs have gotten bigger and bigger and less targeted - and some now are even universal - he says, those test score benefits have evaporated.
COWEN: The bigger and the more recent the voucher system, the worse the results have been for kids.
TURNER: Studies of large programs, like Louisiana and Indiana, have found that students who left public schools to attend voucher schools actually lost ground academically. And those losses, Cowen says, were akin to the losses we saw from COVID and even Hurricane Katrina.
MARTIN: So do researchers have any idea why that might be?
TURNER: Cowen says when voucher programs get really big and they pump dollars into the market, low-quality private schools tend to pop up. But another researcher, Patrick Wolf at the University of Arkansas, who publicly supports vouchers says ultimately, test scores aren't a good way to measure private school quality.
PATRICK WOLF: Private schools just don't emphasize goosing test scores as much as public schools do. Public schools have to because they're held accountable.
TURNER: And Wolf points to a few studies that he says measure success a little differently. One found that students who persist in their voucher programs may ultimately make up some of that ground they lost and even pull ahead. There's also some evidence that voucher students may be more likely to graduate high school and even college. And the competition from vouchers can lead to small improvements in public schools, though I want to be clear on this one, Michel. The public school advocates I spoke with all told me those benefits are so small, they don't outweigh the risks that vouchers pose to public schools, including the loss of students and the loss of funding that comes with the loss of students.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Cory Turner. Cory, thank you.
TURNER: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
