Links to Scholastic Articles and Studies of Interest

Parental satisfaction, continued demand for our scholarships, and a growing donor base are key indicators of program success. We consistently conduct internal studies of our program to measure parental satisfaction. Parents are very satisfied with their children’s progress and want to keep them in private school using scholarships. Besides the demand from current recipients to continue the scholarships, we receive requests for new scholarships on a daily basis.  Read more...

School choice and school competition: Evidence from the United States
Caroline M. Hoxby, Professor at the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

The most frequently asked questions about school choice are: Do public schools respond constructively to competition induced by school choice, by raising their own productivity? Does students’ achievement rise when they attend voucher or charter schools? Do voucher and charter schools end up with a selection of the better students (“cream-skim”)? I review the evidence on these questions from the United States, relying primarily on recent policy experiments. Public schools do respond constructively to competition, by raising their achievement and productivity. The best studies on this question examine the introduction of choice programs that have been sufficiently large and long-lived to produce competition. Students’ achievement generally does rise when they attend voucher or charter schools. The best studies on this question use, as a control group, students who are randomized out of choice programs. Not only do currently enacted voucher and charter school programs not cream-skim; they disproportionately attract students who were performing badly in their regular public schools. This confirms what theory predicts: there are no general results on the sorting consequences of school choice. The sorting consequences of a school choice plan depend strongly on its design.  Read more...

What the Harvard/Mathematica Study Says About Vouchers and Low-Income African-American Students
Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Krista Kafer, Center for Data Analysis Report #02-03

In February 2002, researchers at Harvard University, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR), and the University of Wisconsin released the results of a three-year study to determine the effects of voucher-like scholarships on low-income student achievement in New York City.1 In just three years, the vouchers offered by the School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF) were found to have had impressive effects, especially for African-American low-income students.  Read more...

Vouchers and the Power of Choice
Paul E. Peterson

Historically, most school boards in the United States assigned students to schools by drawing boundaries that established specific attendance areas. Where one lived determined the school one attended. Families had relatively little choice in the matter.

The situation has changed substantially in recent years. Today, a wide variety of school choice mechanisms are available to parents and students—vouchers, magnet schools, charter schools, inter-district choice programs, home-schooling, tax credits and tax deductions for private tuition, and, above all, school choice through residential selection. Responding to demands by parents for greater choice among schools, states today provide a greater range of choices than ever before. Approximately 63 percent of American families with school-age children are making a choice when sending their child to school. According to a 1993 Department of Education survey, 39 percent of all parents said that where they chose to live was influenced by the school their child would attend. Another 11 percent of the population sends their children to private school. And still another 13 percent of families has a choice among public schools, such as magnet schools, charter schools, and inter-district choice programs.  Read more...

Catholic School Study

The Rand Corporation analyzed big-city high schools to determine how education for low income minority youth could be improved. It looked at 13 public, private, and Catholic high schools in New York City that attracted minority and disadvantaged youth. Of the Catholic school students in these schools, 75 to 90 percent were black or Hispanic. The study found that:  Read more...

Other Useful Links
CollegeBound.net - College Scholarships, Financial Aid and Admission Research
Enoch Pratt Free Library -- The Public Library of the City of Baltimore, State Library Resource Center.