Monday, December 31, 2001 in
By Matthew Franck
When Laura Dillard eagerly signed up three years ago for a program that now helps hundreds of St. Louis families pay for private school, she took on a tiny but significant role in one of education’s hottest debates.
Dillard’s four children are among about 1,300 in the city receiving tuition assistance from either the Children’s Scholarship Fund or its sister program, the St. Louis School Choice Scholarship Fund.
The awards pay up to $1,500 annually for four years for children to attend a private school of their parents’ choice. Both programs are billed as a charitable endeavor whose sole aim is to offer educational options to families who could otherwise not afford them.
But don’t tell that to education researchers who are itching to answer the question of whether the state and federal governments should allow parents to spend tax money on private school tuition.
The way researchers see it, if scholarship recipients here and elsewhere thrive in private school, there may be more grounds for establishing public vouchers.
In the past year, voucher supporters say studies of scholarship recipients in New York and Washington point to modest test gains and high parental satisfaction. Not surprisingly, voucher critics have chipped away at those findings, saying there is no compelling evidence of academic improvement.
But for Dillard, there’s no debating the issue. She said her four children were thriving academically and socially since enrolling at Holy Family School, a Catholic school at 4130 Wyoming Street.
“It’s just changed their world completely for the better,” she said.
Dillard said she had noticed the most difference with her two oldest children, who previously attended public school. Her son, for example, had repeated the second grade and yet did not learn to read while in city public school. After a year at Holy Family, he was reading, she said.
Without the scholarships – which are reserved for low- and middle-income families in the city of St. Louis – Dillard said she could not have afforded Catholic schools.
A report released this month by RAND Corp., an independent research organization, tracks a high level of satisfaction among parents who have used scholarships to enroll children in private schools.
The report tries to condense findings from numerous studies. Much of the research has examined the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which gives awards to 40,000 students nationally, including more than 600 in St. Louis.
Brian Gill, a RAND researcher who prepared the report, said parents using the scholarships perceive private schools to have superior academic programs and better discipline.
But determining whether the scholarships truly lead to higher test scores is another matter.
Only anecdotal evidence
The RAND report backs earlier claims that African-Americans on scholarship at private schools in New York and Washington are performing better than their counterparts in public school.
But Gill said that drawing conclusions about other students was difficult.
In New York, researchers had the benefit of a control group, comprised of families who applied for the scholarships but were rejected through a lottery. That allowed for a comparison between similar public and private school students.
In St. Louis, no control group was created. As a result, any assessment of the impact of the scholarships awarded here would be largely anecdotal.
Holy Family Principal Mary Ann Kaufmann knows her take on the scholarships is not definitive, but she’s confident they produce results. Of the 258 pupils at Holy Family, 47 are on scholarship. Most of those had previously attended public school.
“I’m thoroughly convinced it has helped each of them,” she said.
Kaufmann does not claim huge test score gains for the students who have come to her school, though she believes most are improving. But the principal is certain that students are behaving better and are more interested in learning. Just as important, she said, parents are getting more involved in the school.
Christina Holmes, who administers the St. Louis School Choice Program and the Children’s Scholarship Fund locally, said the programs’ success was tied not to test scores, but parent satisfaction.
Holmes keeps in touch with parents receiving the scholarships and says their enthusiasm for the children’s private schools is nearly unanimous.
Bottom line is uncertain
Voucher opponents like Elliot Mincberg dismiss findings on parent satisfaction as flawed and irrelevant.
Mincberg, a vice president of the anti-voucher group People for the American Way, said parents who stayed in the scholarship program were obviously satisfied or else they would return their children to public schools.
But many parents have opted out after a year or less. In St. Louis, Holmes estimates a 20 percent annual attrition rate, though she chalks most of that to families moving out of the city.
Mincberg said it was much more important to focus on academic performance. And that’s where the RAND report fails to turn up any evidence supporting calls for public vouchers, he said.
Gill agrees that the research has limited value in the voucher debate. For starters, he said, little work has been done to determine what impact the scholarships have on public schools. Much of the debate on vouchers, meanwhile, is centered on the harm they might cause to public education.
And even if the scholarships are benefiting some children, there’s no telling if that success would be repeated with a wide-scale government voucher program, Gill said.
It may be, for example, that scholarship recipients do well because they are entering established schools where their peers are already academically successful. That positive environment might fade if a school were to enroll a large number of voucher recipients at once.
“The biggest question is whether this could be duplicated on a larger scale,” Gill said.