School voucher claims lack hard evidence, GAO report concludes

Claims that private school vouchers improve student performance cannot be verified, says a new report issued by the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO).

The GAO surveyed existing research on voucher programs operating in Milwaukee and Cleveland. In its report, "School Vouchers: Publicly Funded Programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee," the report noted that research does not show that voucher students improved on standardized test scores.

Various evaluations of the two programs have found that voucher students perform at little or no better than their public school counterparts. A few studies have found that some voucher students have done better in some subjects, but the findings are controversial because the studies were undertaken by scholars with a strong pro-voucher bent.

"None of these findings can be considered definitive because the researchers obtained different results when they used different methods to compare for weaknesses in the data," the report concluded.

The GAO also noted that good data is hard to come, by, especially in Milwaukee, mainly because of policies put into place by legislators. In Wisconsin, lawmakers voted to stop testing voucher students five years ago, after a string of reports showed that voucher students were doing no better academically than public school students. Thus, researchers are forced to use five-year-old data in evaluating the program, even though it has greatly expanded since 1996.

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