RESEARCH General Education

SCHOOL CHOICE
Chile's 20-year-old voucher program sheds light on U.S. debate

Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

2/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Private schools produce higher student achievement than their public counterparts, advocates for school vouchers argue. And fostering school choice and competition will raise educational standards overall, they say.

In the United States, it's mostly theory, since there's no large-scale voucher system to test. But research from at least one country with long voucher experience doesn't support the argument about higher achievement and standards, according to Patrick McEwan, an economist and professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois.

In Chile, where vouchers were implemented nationwide in 1980, student achievement has been roughly equal between public schools and non-religious, for-profit voucher schools, McEwan said.

By some measures, in fact, such as fourth-grade achievement in math and Spanish, the public schools have been marginally better -- with the gap even wider outside Santiago, the capital city.

In his recently published research, McEwan compared students of similar backgrounds, and took his achievement data from tests conducted from 1990 to 1996. Catholic voucher schools in Chile have been "somewhat more effective" than either their for-profit or public counterparts, he said, though most of those were in place before vouchers.

The for-profit schools "were really the main engine of growth" in Chile’s voucher system, and now account for two-thirds of enrollments in the nation’s private primary voucher schools. About one third of municipalities, mostly in poor, rural areas, have no private school of any kind.

"You look at all the evidence as a whole, and ask the questions: 'Were there windfall gains in achievement? Did vouchers dramatically improve education in Chile?' And the answer is no," McEwan said. "There may have been some gains for some students in some contexts, losses for others in other contexts, but on the whole it didn't produce dramatic changes."

That doesn't mean, however, that his research supports the case against vouchers. "The results are probably not satisfying for either voucher advocates or opponents," he said.

For instance he found that the for-profit schools, though equal at best to the publics in effectiveness, had been much more efficient in their costs. The Catholic schools in Chile were roughly equal in costs to the publics.

The research on Chile’s voucher program, co-written by Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford University, was published in the fall issue of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Another paper by McEwan, on the potential impact of large-scale voucher programs, will be published in the summer issue of the Review of Educational Research. In both papers, McEwan argues that there is little research on the voucher issue in the United States that would support the case for either implementing or opposing a large-scale voucher plan.

Many of the key questions about how competition would affect all schools and students have never been fully addressed.