Give Vouchers--and Kids--a Chance

October 18, 1997

Last year, almost 2,000 children from low-income families in Cleveland used vouchers to attend private schools. Their parents, by and large, liked the schools a lot, according to a recently released report. But whether those kids got a better education is still an open question.

The same study that found a high rate of parental satisfaction also found that students who attended two schools established for "voucher kids" had improved scores on standardized tests. But the number of students in the study was small and little other research exists to corroborate the findings.

That's one of the problems with evaluating the success of school voucher programs--there aren't enough of them to tell whether they're worthwhile. There's an obvious solution to that problem: Create more voucher programs to enable more low-income families to pick their children's schools, then rigorously monitor the kids' academic progress.

Sadly, it's not that simple. School vouchers have become a political plaything for liberals and conservatives alike, and even academicians have gotten into an ivory-tower version of schoolyard brawls over acceptable methodology for assessing voucher programs.

That's particularly unfortunate, because the real losers in the ongoing voucher debate are schoolchildren who live in poverty and are trapped in substandard inner-city schools.

Providing such children with tax-supported vouchers to let them attend either private schools or public schools outside their district offers them an opportunity for a better education, usually for far less money than their own districts spend on them.

What's more, vouchers serve notice to schools with abysmal performance records that they no longer have a hammerlock on the community's children; if they can't teach them, somebody else will.

It makes sense that parents would be happier with schools that they choose. The Cleveland study, conducted by the Program in Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, found that two-thirds of parents whose children used vouchers were "very satisfied" with the academic quality of the schools. They also were pleased with the schools' discipline, class sizes, physical facilities and moral instruction.

Parental satisfaction is an important yardstick, since most parents want what is best for their children. But how children fare academically must ultimately be the real test of vouchers, and no one will know that until enough kids are in voucher programs to show significant results.

The Illinois General Assembly last year failed to pass legislation establishing a pilot voucher program in Chicago. It's time to revisit the issue and add vouchers to the other options available to lower-income families struggling to find for their children the educational opportunities so readily available to their more economically blessed peers.

There's no incontrovertible evidence yet that their children will be better off academically as a result, but it's hard to imagine they'll be worse off. And we'll never know until they get the chance to try.