Impact of Voucher Design on Public School Performance: Evidence from Florida and Milwaukee Voucher Programs

Working Paper #09-03 (March)
Impact of Voucher Design on Public School Performance: Evidence from Florida and Milwaukee Voucher Programs                                                                                              Rajashri Chakrabarti, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
 
Working Paper #09-02 (March)
Do Vouchers Lead to Sorting under Random Private School Selection? Evidence from the Milwaukee Voucher Program                                                                                         Rajashri Chakrabarti, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
 
Working Paper #09-04 (March)
Vouchers, Public School Response and the Role of Incentives: Evidence from Florida Rajashri Chakrabarti, Federal Reserve Bank of New York   

These papers look at the effect of voucher design on public school
performance and student sorting. The first paper argues that all voucher
programs are not created equal. There are often fundamental differences in
voucher designs that affect public school incentives differently and in turn
lead to very different performance effects from them. Focusing on the
Florida and Milwaukee voucher programs, the paper shows that there are
crucial differences in designs between the two programs and these resulted
in higher improvment of the treated schools in Florida compared to
corresponding treated schools in Milwaukee.  While the literature on the
effect of vouchers on public schools typically focuses on scores, the second
paper  investigates some of the ways in which schools facing the threat of
vouchers in Florida behaved. Using a difference-in-differences strategy as
well as a regression discontinuity analysis, I find that the threatened
schools tended to focus more on students below the minimum criteria cutoffs
rather than equally on all. Second, consistent with incentives, they focused
mostly on writing rather than reading and math. The third paper analyzes the
impact of voucher design on student sorting. Much of the existing literature
investigates the question of sorting where private schools can screen
students. However, the publicly funded U.S. voucher programs require private
schools to accept all students unless oversubscribed and to pick students
randomly if oversubscribed. Focusing on the Milwaukee voucher program, the
paper shows that random private school selection alone cannot prevent
student sorting. However, random private school selection coupled with the
absence of topping up can preclude sorting by income, although there is
still sorting by ability.