The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderate- and low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP expanded statewide in 2012. Drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in LSP schools,…

Private school choice policies have been enacted and expanded across the United States since the 1990s. By January 2021, 30 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico hosted 67 distinct private school choice policies. Why have some states adopted and expanded this education reform while others have demurred? Which states are more likely…

Private school choice programs are rapidly gaining traction, with nearly 450,000 student participants in 2019--an increase of 300,000 students in just 15 years. This report evaluates how well some of these programs prepare students for college by examining college enrollment and completion data from the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program, the…

Student performance on standardized tests in Louisiana has trailed national averages for decades. In the 2017 8th-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Louisiana public schools tied for 42nd in the nation and rated significantly higher than only one jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. Only 25 percent of…

School choice has long been a subject of robust debate. Private school vouchers--programs providing public funds for students to attend K-12 private schools--tend to be the most contentious form of school choice. Over the past three years, the research team has released a series of reports examining how the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) has…

In the past few years, four states have established programs that provide public financial support to students who choose to attend a private school. These programs--a tax-credit-funded scholarship initiative in Florida and voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio--offer a glimpse of what expansive statewide choice might look like. What…

As school choice programs expand in the United States, it is crucial to consider how the design of these programs shapes the supply and demand of parents' educational offerings. To better understand the school choice landscape from the viewpoint of current and would-be participants in choice programs, the authors administered an extensive survey…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250% of the poverty line, allowing them to enroll in participating private schools. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This article…

The debate over school vouchers continues as more states offer government dollars to fund private schooling for students as a method of improving choice and quality in K-12 education. Previous research in the charter school sector has found that special education enrollment discrepancies between charters and traditional public schools is likely…

The question of how school choice programs affect the racial stratification of schools is highly salient in the field of education policy. We use a student-level panel data set to analyze the impacts of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on racial segregation in public and private schools. This targeted school voucher program provides funding…

This report examines the short-term effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) on students' non-cognitive skills and civic values. While a growing number of studies have evaluated K-12 school voucher programs along academic dimensions, few have focused on the development of non-cognitive skills and civic values. This study aims to address…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012.…

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation…

How useful are "corporate brands" in markets? In theory, brands convey reliable information, providing consumers with shortcuts to time-consuming provider searches. We examine the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental school choice is expanded through K-12 tuition scholarships. Specifically, we evaluate whether Catholic schools…

This report is the fourth in a series of annual reports produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) that provides descriptive information about the schools participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). A total of 115 schools participated in the MPCP for the entire 2009-10 academic year, with 20,899 students enrolled…