Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee

64 Pages Posted: 14 Sep 2007

Date Written: September 2007

Abstract

The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only nonsectarian private schools to participate in the program. However, following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program was expanded to include religious private schools in 1998. This second phase of the voucher program led to more than a three-fold increase in the number of private schools and almost a four-fold increase in the number of choice students. Moreover, because of some changes in funding provisions, the revenue loss per student from vouchers increased in the second phase of the program. This paper analyzes, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of these changes on public school performance (as measured by test scores) in Milwaukee. It argues that voucher design matters and that the choice of parameters in a voucher program is crucial in determining the effects of public school incentives and performance. In the context of a theoretical model of public school and household behavior, the paper establishes that the policy changes will lead to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program as compared with the first phase. Following Hoxby (2003a, 2003b) in the classification of treatment and control groups and using 1987-2002 data and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy in trends, the paper then shows that the theoretical prediction is validated empirically. This result is robust to alternative samples and specifications and survives robustness checks, including correcting for mean reversion.

Keywords: vouchers, public school performance, competition, response, mean reversion

JEL Classification: H4, I21, I28

Suggested Citation

Chakrabarti, Rajashri, Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee (September 2007). FRB of New York Staff Report No. 300, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1013623 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1013623

Rajashri Chakrabarti (Contact Author)

Federal Reserve Bank of New York ( email )

33 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10045
United States

HOME PAGE: http://nyfedeconomists.org/chakrabarti

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
119
Abstract Views
916
Rank
422,206
PlumX Metrics