Nearly 15 years ago, I stepped into a classroom for the first time as a 3rd-grade teacher at a Catholic school in Tampa, Florida. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning teaching in the midst of an ongoing experiment in Florida education policy.
Many of my students were only able to attend our school thanks to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, a private-school choice program designed to give lower-income families more education options. Located in a working-class suburb on the edge of Tampa, the parish church connected to our school had a thriving, diverse church-going community. But even a modest tuition of under $5,000 a year had put the school out of reach for many families. The scholarship program changed that. For the first time, families from across the parish and the surrounding community could afford to send their kids to our school if they chose. The result was a growing school that more fully reflected the spectrum of income levels and backgrounds of our community.
When I was a teacher, I mostly thought about how private-school choice affected the children in my classroom. Years later, as I went on to research voucher programs and work in education policy, I more often heard questions about programs like Florida’s from a different perspective: What about the kids in the public schools? Don’t choice programs take needed funding and hurt the students left behind? Why aren’t public dollars instead going to public schools that need them most?
Hearing these concerns about choice programs expressed so frequently, it is only reasonable to wonder what effect these programs have on public school students. In the context of Florida, was the scholarship program that served my students a good investment of scarce state funds? What have we learned from states that have tried this school choice experiment? How do they affect the students who remain in the public system? Sure, the scholarships provided opportunity to a small group of students, but at what cost?
In a research synthesis published today with the American Federation for Children, I examine these questions in the context of Florida. The analysis brings together two lines of research published in the last few years: (1) the effects of additional school spending on student achievement and (2) the effects of school choice–induced competition on public school students.
Using the highest quality research in both areas, I find that scaling Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program over 15 years improved public school student achievement through competition much more than we’d expect had the same amount of new funding instead been spent directly through the public school system. In fact, the academic benefits for public school students in schools facing higher levels of competition were 11 times higher than what the best research on school spending would predict. In contrast to fearful predictions that this scholarship program would undermine public education, my apples-to-apples comparison demonstrates it proved to be a cost-effective method of raising public school achievement at scale.
