The following message was sent March 3, 2009 to board members and supporters of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (www.gpee.org), a policy think tank, development and advocacy group founded by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and Georgia Economic Developers Association in 1990 to improve educational outcomes.
These people actually know about education and how it can be improved, yet state legislators seemingly don’t avail themselves to this resource. What follows is a repudiation of a school voucher initiative in the General Assembly.
In these turbulent times, when money is tight and expectations are high, practitioners and policymakers often look for innovative strategies that will result in educational improvements. One strategy that continues to emerge in discussion and legislation is the use of school vouchers. You will find it discussed in our annual Top Ten Issues to Watch report.
Based upon a thorough review of research, political history, and policy implications, the Georgia Partnership believes that vouchers are not the silver bullet reform mechanism for which some policymakers are searching. Georgia’s students need a commitment from policymakers and practitioners to focus on systemic reforms that will bring the promise of educational excellence to every classroom in the state.
The Partnership relies on research to evaluate policies and drive decision-making. However, despite the theory that competition and parental choice should improve the public education system, empirical research about the impacts of voucher programs generates as many questions as definitive answers. To date there is no consensus among researchers that vouchers significantly improve students’ academic opportunities or outcomes.
In 2008, researchers from Princeton University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conducted a review of existing research on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement and concluded that “the best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero.”
In recent years, increased school accountability and the rise of business-inspired educational practices have brought private-sector expectations for performance and accountability for results to the forefront of the public school arena. Consequently, it would be expected that any new legislation concerning vouchers would require that private schools receiving taxpayer dollars adhere to the following practices: employ fully certified teachers; administer standardized tests used by the state to measure student achievement and report the results to the public; and publish the manner in which they expend the public monies they receive.
Voucher legislation that does not address these three concerns should not be supported. Georgia has made great strides in the quest to provide an excellent education for all its youth, and now is not the time to derail our progress by enacting single-issue reforms. To build a world-class education system and workforce, we must collaborate and focus our efforts on a comprehensive plan for school success – a plan that replaces random acts with a focus on the interconnectedness of issues impacting our student achievement.
