Word: voucher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vouchers' supporters see them as a revolutionary instrument--capable, in the short run, of rescuing poor kids from bad public schools and, in the long term, of forcing that education system to compete in a free market. But critics say vouchers will destroy the public schools by turning them into repositories for America's unwilling, or unwanted, schoolchildren. And they say that voucher programs, especially ones that include religious schools, will Balkanize America by abandoning its common core of teachings and traditions...
...years the voucher debate has been conducted in what-ifs and let's-assumes. But with Cleveland's program wrapping up its third year, hard results and conclusions are coming in--from parents, academics and standardized tests. There has been one clear upside to vouchers: a Harvard study found that two-thirds of Cleveland's voucher parents were "very satisfied" with the academic quality of their children's private schools, compared with only 30% of parents who stuck with public schools. What's not clear is whether they're right to be so happy...
...test scores were perhaps even more surprising. Voucher proponents have long argued that if students were allowed to leave failing public schools--for better-run and more disciplined private and parochial schools--their performance would improve dramatically. But the Indiana study found only minor differences between voucher students and public school students on a standardized fourth-grade academic-achievement test. Voucher students scored better than public school students in language and science, but the differences were, the study found, "relatively small." In the other areas tested--reading, math, social studies and "total battery"--voucher students did no better than their...
...Voucher supporters fault the study's methodology, attacking everything from the impartiality of the researchers to the conditions under which the fourth-graders were tested. Lydia Harris, a reading specialist at Hope Central Academy, says the examiners who came to the school "didn't have a clue," and administered the test during children's nap time. She also suspects the State Department of Education, which commissioned the study, may have wanted vouchers to come off badly because its bureaucratic inertia makes it resist systemic reforms like vouchers. Even the study's authors concede their results don't necessarily discredit vouchers...
Still, public school backers seized on the hard numbers in the Indiana study as proof that vouchers can't deliver on their lofty claims. "These results are absolutely astounding," says Richard DeColibus, president of the Cleveland teachers' union. "But no one takes any notice of it because it goes against their preconceived notions that private schools teach better." The fact that the Indiana study didn't give second thoughts to voucher supporters is proof, he says, that their foremost concern is not children, but promoting a conservative education agenda. "Why would they want to expand a system that is demonstrably...