School Choice in New York City after Two Years [electronic resource] : An Evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Program. Interim Report / David Myers, Paul Peterson and Daniel Mayer.
This report describes the second-year results for an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF) program to award 1,300 scholarships so that children of low-income families in grades 1 through 4 in New York City public schools could transfer to private schools. Because the scholar...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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2000.
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| Summary: | This report describes the second-year results for an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF) program to award 1,300 scholarships so that children of low-income families in grades 1 through 4 in New York City public schools could transfer to private schools. Because the scholarships were awarded through a lottery, the evaluation allowed for the conduct of a randomized experiment in which students were randomly selected for a treatment (scholarship) group and a control group. As reported by parents, the schools attended by scholarship students were smaller than the schools attended by public school students. Private school parents were less likely to report serious problems such as fighting, absenteeism, and racial conflict at their children's schools. Students in private schools were asked to complete more homework than students in public schools. On standardized tests, students offered scholarships generally performed at about the same level as students in the control group. African American students offered scholarships scored about three points higher than similar students in the control group, and the impact of going to a private school for two years for African American students was four percentile points. No impact was seen for Latino students. Overall, findings suggested that the difference between the scholarship group and the control group remained about the same over the two years. About 62 percent of the students offered scholarships used them for two full years, and 12 percent used them in the first year but not the second. 24 percent of students offered the scholarships refused them. The most frequently cited obstacles that prevented parents from sending their children to the preferred school included cost (35 percent), transportation problems (14 percent), and lack of space at the school (10 percent). Findings show that 40 percent of parents who switched from public to private schools gave their schools an A; less than 10 percent of similar parents in the public schools gave their schools an A. Five appendixes contain discussions of baseline characteristics for the treatment and control groups, sample weights, the analytic approach, supplemental data, and estimates of ever attending a private school. (Contains 22 tables and 52 endnotes.) (SLD) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED446193. |
| Physical Description: | 129 pages. |