2023-08-18 14:39:41
Do school vouchers really work?
In theory, the idea of educational vouchers should functional. In theory. It is a controversial approach in the educational field, which seeks to give families the “freedom” to choose the education they want for their children, but also raises challenges related to equity and educational quality.
educational vouchers they are an approach in which coupons or vouchers are given to families so they can choose the school they want to send their children to instead of attending a designated public school. This concept seeks to introduce competition and the free market into the educational system.
It works in the following way: Instead of directly funding public schools, the government allocates funds to parents in the form of education vouchers. These vouchers can be redeemed at public or private schoolswhich allows parents to select the educational institution they consider most suitable for their children.
This approach is intended to promote the improvement of educational quality, since schools compete to attract students by offering high-quality academic programs and additional services. Voucher advocates argue that this system drives innovation and accountability in schools, since must prove themselves to attract students and their coupons.
However, critics point out that vouchers could lead to segregation, as high-quality schools could become inaccessible to those who cannot afford the additional costs or who are left behind in the competition for school choice. As it is, a handful of examples have shown that the proposal does not always work in practice as in theory.
The Chilean case of educational vouchers
Chile is one of the cases considered “pioneers” in the implementation of vouchers, but it has not been without criticism and controversy. In the trans-Andean country, what appeared to be a growth in the improvement of the results of students against international tests, but no connection could be made between the system itself and the improvement in performance. Experts assured at the time that Other factors such as the reduction of poverty and the drop in inequality also contributed to the educational improvement.
The controversy of the idea is in consider education as a mere commodity, and not as a human right. The voucher model could leave some schools in the poorest rural areas underfunded and at risk of disappearing.
School vouchers in Sweden: segregation and inequality
Sweden was another country where the school voucher system was implemented. The system has been in force there since 1993 and the Argentine economic analyst David Mesa Noack commented in a article that increased segregation, causing families with the best economic position to have access to the best schools.
Between 2003 and 2012, there was an increase in inequality and a resounding drop in international ratingsand even the Organization for International Cooperation and Development (OECD) the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) came to publish criticism in this regard, which can be read here y here.
He academic inclusion index fell more than in the rest of the countries OECD members in the period between those years, although the general level of Swedish education is better than most countries in the world. This has other causes: it is a comprehensive, inclusive and comprehensive system even before the introduction of vouchers, but since then there has been a gradual decline related to the growth of privatization in education.
There are also difficulties regarding equality between populations of different ancestry, because the demographic divide between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods that arose in the main urban centers it was accentuated post-reform. Several studies analyzed the impact of the establishment of private schools in Swedish cities after the inclusion of vouchers, and the general result was that there was a sharp increase in educational segregation after the establishment of this type of educational centers designed for those who can pay more.
The most striking of the results of the studies on the effect of school vouchers in Sweden is that the increase in school segregation happened in all sorts of neighborhoodsregardless of the socioeconomic level of each of them, as can be read in this analysis by Peter Friedriksson, academic at Stockholm University.
School vouchers in the United States: the case of Milwaukee
The idea of educational vouchers was first implemented in the United States during the administration of libertarian Republican Ronald Reagan, but it gained new impetus during the George W. Bush administration several decades later.
A case of poor results can be verified in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they were installed in 1990. A study by the University of Arkansas found that there was no impact on improving school performance, contrary to what theory says ( that free competition between schools forces them to improve).
Performance in schools with and without vouchers was practically the same. The report also noted that more than half of students who started ninth grade at a voucher school were not there by twelfth grade, it says. prospect.org.
Additionally, some schools have faced serious financial problems, which has led to the closure of some of them.
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