Title

Private School Vouchers and Student Achievement: An Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

Author(s)

Cecilia E. Rouse Cecilia Rouse (Princeton University and NBER)

Abstract

In 1990, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to provide vouchers to low income students to attend non-sectarian private schools. In this paper, I use a variety of estimation strategies and samples to estimate the effect of the program on math and reading scores. First, since schools selected students randomly from among their applicants if the school was oversubscribed, I compare the academic achievement of students who were selected to those who were not selected. Second, I present instrumental variables estimates of the effectiveness of private schools (relative to public schools) using the initial selection as an instrumental variable for attendance at a private school. Finally, I used a fixed-effects strategy to compare students enrolled in the private schools to a sample of students from the Milwaukee public schools. I find that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program appears to have had a positive effect on the math achievement of those who attended a private school; but had no benefits for reading scores. I have found the results to be fairly robust to data imputations and sample attrition, however these limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting the results.

Creation Date

1996-12

Section URL ID

IRS

Paper Number

371

URL

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp0144558d303/1/371.pdf

File Function

Jel

H75, I21, I22

Keyword(s)

private school vouchers, student achievement, quasi-experiment

Suppress

false

Series

1