The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools [Hardcover]

Paul E. Peterson (Author), William G. Howell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

While the merits of vouchers have been the subject of intense public debate in recent years, there has been very little available evidence upon which to gauge their efficacy. The first publicly funded voucher plan involving private schools wasn't established until 1990 in Milwaukee; before then, the only data on school choice came from a small, poorly designed program in California. Voucher programs grew dramatically in the latter half of the 1990s. In 2000, about 60,000 students participated in seventy-one programs, most privately funded. This growth is now providing researchers with the ability to measure the impact of vouchers for the first time in multiple cities.The Education Gap is the first book to gather a significant body of data on vouchers in multiple locations, and it reveals startling new evidence that voucher programs benefit African-American students more than participants from other ethnic groups. To explain this phenomenon, the authors point out that residential selection is the most common form of school choice available in American public education today. Since this process is likely to leave African Americans in the worst public schools, new forms of choice directed toward low-income families are most likely to benefit black students.The authors examine the effects of school vouchers on test scores, parental satisfaction, parent-school communications, and political tolerance among students and parents participating in four pilot programs in New York City; Dayton, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; the Edgewood school district in San Antonio; and a program that offered vouchers to 40,000 low-income families nationwide. Though the programs operated in a wide variety of settings, the findings were surprisingly consistent. After two years, African-American students who used vouchers to switch from public to private schools scored substantially better on math and reading tests. By contrast, no significant positive effects on the test scores of other ethnic groups were detected. While parents in all ethnic groups were generally more supportive of private education, African-American parents expressed particularly high enthusiasm for the private schools their children attended. The authors also report information on the kinds of students and families who take advantage of a voucher opportunity, allowing them to seewhether only the best and brightest public school students were able to take advantage of school voucher programs. The results documented in The Education Gap shed new light on the effects of school vouchers on students in poor, urban environments. This information will be important to policymakers, scholars, and citizens are they continue to search for ways to improve education in urban areas.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The authors' RFT design sets this study apart from most of the earlier school choice studies...the authors' sophisticated and skillfully presented research elevates a debate that has been largely limited to the realm of politics and public opinion...This impressive volume should be required reading for anyone nvolved in K-12 research or policymaking." —Michael F. Addonizio, Wayne State University, Book Review

"This is the most important book ever written on the subject of vouchers." —John E. Brandl, University of Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs

"Love them or hate them, vouchers are on the agenda. Because of the strength of its research design and the daunting financial and administrative hurdles facing anyone who tries to launch another randomized evaluation of vouchers, The Education Gap will provide an important intellectual battleground for the debate over vouchers for years to come." —Alan B. Krueger, Princeton University

About the Author

William G. Howell is an associate professor in the Government Department at Harvard University and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Brookings Inst Pr; 1St Edition edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815702140
• ISBN-13: 978-0815702146
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,359,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Howell and Peterson are tops in their field, December 19, 2003

By 

"ibischuck" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Hardcover)

Paul Peterson and William Howell are revolutionaries in their field--Education Public Policy. This book is so great because it lacks the ideological and political biases that permeate nearly 90 percent of the voucher books out there. Despite what the previous reviewer stated I wish to defend Howell and Peterson's book (which needs no defending from me). Their book which is put out by the Brookings Institute (hardly an ideologically driven think-tank Brookings is the model of centrism) Howell and Peterson formulate their empirical data from randomized field trials. RFTs are the gold standard in empirical research studies that seek to compare two groups of individuals while controlling for one factor. In this case Howell and Peterson are able to control for the much noted self-selection bias problematic to many voucher studies and show that African-American students from similar economic and educational backgrounds score significantly (1 standard deviation)higher when they are educated in parochial/private schools than in their neighborhood public schools. A wealth of research from 99.9 percent of all the other scholars studying this topic have in one shape or form supported that finding--that black students do improve upon going to a private school viz. a voucher. Only Alan Krueger and Zho (2004) of Princeton discredit parts of the study, but they refuse to control for baseline data which does not allow them to control the self-selection bias. Furthermore Krueger et al. uses a questionable racial classification scheme where self-identified black/hispanic folks are reclassified as African-American/non-hispanic. In the final analysis its hard to disagree with Peterson and Howell and the above reviewer does so at his own peril. These folks are professionals in the truest sense of the word and they work at the venerable Harvard Program on Education and Governance Policy--please don't try to mislead people into thinking they are overly ideologically motivated.

5.0 out of 5 stars Text for college, December 23, 2011

By 

KelliShopping (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Education Gap: Vouchers And Urban Schools (Paperback)

This book is a requirement for some urban educ classes I have coming up this semester. I used Amazon Prime and it was adream I got all my books within days of ordering and there is no worry about having them in time for classes. They were much cheaper on Amazon than in the bookstores.

2 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars statistical smoke and mirrors, May 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Hardcover)

5-7-2003 article discredits all of Peterson's claims. His research partner, Mathematica, refused to back his claims. subsequent analysis has shown Peterson's findings are more ideology than research.