[bitshiftfaced]

> What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?

> Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")

In areas that have done charter schools, the result is that poor-performing school administrations/companies (in terms of standardized tests) lose their charter and effectively "close down." Better performing ones are allowed to replace them.

The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations. They're no longer forced to go to terrible schools that keep getting money thrown at them despite having deeply-rooted problems: problems that the school has no incentive to fix due to the way the current public schooling system works.

[MengerSponge]

Charters aren't vouchers. They've got their own issues, but they're a fundamentally different tool.

> The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations.

Citation needed. In fact, in many cases, students end up worse off.

[bitshiftfaced]

> Colombia's PACES program provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers that covered the cost of private secondary school. The vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress. Since many vouchers were assigned by lottery, program effects can reliably be assessed by comparing lottery winners and losers. Estimates using administrative records suggest the PACES program increases secondary school completion rates by 15 to 20 percent. Correcting for the greater percentage of lottery winners taking college admissions tests, the program increased test scores by two-tenths of a standard deviation in the distribution of potential test scores.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.96.3.847

> The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nation's capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the “gold standard” evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.21691

> We use the introduction of a means-tested voucher program in Florida to examine whether increased competitive pressure on public schools affects students' test scores. We find greater score improvements in the wake of the program introduction for students attending schools that faced more competitive private school markets prior to the policy announcement, especially those that faced the greatest financial incentives to retain students. These effects suggest modest benefits for public school students from increased competition. The effects are consistent across several geocoded measures of competition and isolate competitive effects from changes in student composition or resource levels in public schools.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.6.1.133