Vouchers Yield Mixed Results, Report Says

By Mark Walsh

Students using vouchers to attend established private schools in Cleveland are slightly outperforming their public school counterparts in language skills and science, and doing about the same in reading, math, and social studies, according to the latest independent evaluation of the program.

Perhaps the most surprising conclusion of the report by a team of Indiana University researchers, however, is that students attending private schools that sprang up specifically to serve the voucher program are performing worse in all subjects tested than both Cleveland public school students and voucher students in the other private schools.

"These students' 4th grade performance is significantly and dramatically lower than both public school and other scholarship students,'" says the research report, principally written by Kim K. Metcalf, the director of the center for evaluation at Indiana University's school of education in Bloomington. The findings...