The First Year of the Education Voucher Demonstration

Abstract

The Education Voucher Demonstration began in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District during the 1972-1973 school year. Under the voucher concept, parents freely select a school for their child and receive a credit or voucher equal to the cost of the child's education that is paid directly to the school upon enrollment. It was presumed that this form of school finance would foster competition among the schools and improve the quality of education by making schools more responsive to students' needs. An initial external evaluation at the conclusion of the first year found, however, a relative loss in reading achievement for students in the six public schools that participated in the voucher demonstration. The present report reexamines some of these data using a quasi-experi mental design involving multiple pretests and individual students' test scores (rather than school means) as the unit of analysis. The results appear to indicate that the deleterious reading effect of the voucher demonstration was confined to a few within-school programs featuring nontraditional, innovative curricula.