Education Next – Jason Bedrick
“Despite a few setbacks, 2015 was a great year for educational choice. By the time the ball dropped in Times Square, 15 states had adopted 21 new or expanded educational choice policies, and courts rejected challenges to choice laws in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina. However, the new year brought sobering news for choice supporters. For the first time ever, a random-assignment study found a negative result from a school voucher program. In a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT, and Christopher Walters of the University of California at Berkeley found that students who received a voucher through the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) during the 2012-13 school year were 50 percent more likely to receive a failing score on the state math test than students who applied for but did not receive a voucher.”(more)