ERIC Number: ED401597
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1996-Aug
Pages: 48
Abstractor: N/A
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The Effectiveness of School Choice in Milwaukee: A Secondary Analysis of Data from the Program's Evaluation. Occasional Paper 96-3.
Greene, Jay P.; And Others
In 1990, Milwaukee (Wisconsin) became the site of the first publicly funded school-choice program providing low-income parents with vouchers that could be used to send their children to secular, private schools. An evaluation of Milwaukee's school-choice experiment was conducted by a team of researchers, headed by John Witte at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, during the years 1991-95. That study concluded that choice was not an effective way to improve the education of low-income, central-city students. The data were made available on the World Wide Web in February 1996. This paper presents findings of a study conducted by the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston (CPP) and the Program in Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University (PEPG) that analyzed the University of Wisconsin-Madison database and research methodology. The CPP/PEPG study examined student performance as measured by standardized mathematics and reading tests. It concludes that students enrolled in choice schools for 3 or more years, on average, did better on standardized tests than a comparable group of students attending Milwaukee public schools. The results indicate that the reading scores of choice students in their 3rd and 4th years were, on average, from 3 and 5 percentile points higher, respectively, than those of comparable public school students. Math scores, on average, were 5 and 12 percentile points higher for the 3rd and 4th years, respectively. The CPP/PEPG study also argues that the earlier researchers failed to use analytic techniques appropriate to experimental data; the bulk of their research focused on comparisons between choice students and a much less disadvantaged cross-section of public school students. Nine tables are included. (Contains 30 end notes.) (LMI)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
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Language: English
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