EVIDENCE MEANS THINGS:

[T]he latest findings, which emerge from studies of statewide programs in Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana, have left education experts stunned. In a nutshell, they find huge declines of academic achievement among students in voucher programs in those three states.

"These results are without precedent in the educational literature," says Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the think tank New America. "Among the past results, none were as positive as these are negative."

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana's expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program. Those performing at average levels in math and reading -- that is, at about the 50th percentile -- fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program. In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

Those results resembled December 2015 findings by Christopher Walters of UC Berkeley, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke and Parag Pathak of MIT covering the Louisiana program's first year, which found that participation in the program "substantially reduces academic achievement."

The findings dismayed advocates of "school choice" such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an Ohio charter school advocacy group, which acknowledged, "This is all very bad news," though it noted that the 2015 study covered only a single year and therefore "ought to be taken with a grain of salt."

But things didn't look any better in Ohio in July, when the Fordham Institute released its own survey of the voucher program in that state. Voucher students, the study found, "have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.... Such impacts also appear to persist over time, suggesting that the results are not driven simply by the setbacks that typically accompany any change of school."

The third data point comes from Indiana, where a voucher program was sedulously promoted by former Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice president. There, two researchers from Notre Dame have found that "voucher students who transfer to private schools experience significant losses in mathematics achievement" and no improvement in English compared to their records at their former public schools. A student who entered the Indiana program at the 50th percentile in math fell to the 44% percentile a year later, according to the study, which is still in progress.

Tweet   @brothersjudd