Estimating the Academic Benefits for Public School Students
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First passed in 2001, the Florida state legislature created a modest tax-credit scholarship program which initially enrolled 15,000 students from low-income families for the 2002-03 school year. That program has since expanded into the nation’s largest private school choice system, growing to over half a million students as of this school year. This policy decision have transformed the competitive landscape for education in the state and multiplied the options available for every child.
Rigorous, student-level research on the program over the first fifteen years of the scholarship program found that students in traditional public-schools located in higher competition areas had higher test scores, fewer absences, and fewer disciplinary incidents. Over time, the size of the test score effect scaled with program growth – public school students in schools facing more competition were 120 days of learning (2/3 of a school year) ahead in reading. This effect was even larger for low-income students.
Recent research on the effects of increasing public school spending and this research on the competitive effects found in Florida make it possible to estimate an important hypothetical: How much growth in learning might we have expected if Florida had spent those tax revenues on additional public education budgets instead of funding the scholarship program over the first fifteen years?
A new synthesis of the research from AFC Senior Fellow Dr. Patrick Graff addresses this question. He finds that the competitive effect of scaling Florida’s school choice program was more than 11x more cost-effective for improving public school student academic achievement than if those same revenues had been used to increase general K-12 education spending for the same group of public school students instead. Contrary to the arguments of some that school choice hurts public schools, Florida’s experience demonstrates that scaling school choice greatly benefits public school student outcomes. Passing and growing scholarship programs should be considered as a system-level educational intervention worthy of consideration by policy makers seeking cost-effective methods of raising student achievement at scale.
11.2x More Cost Effective: Scaling the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program produced achievement gains for public school students over eleven times larger than equivalent K-12 spending increases.
Total Cost of $127 / Public School Student / Year: In contrast, to achieve the same effect size via increased spending, education budgets would need to increase by $1,423 per student per year. Over fifteen years, that is $2.84 billion vs. $31.8 billion.
The True ROI is Likely Larger: This analysis makes several conservative assumptions, likely understating the true advantage of competition. It does not include equilibrium effects (i.e., any competitive effect shared by public-school students in both high and low competition areas), cost savings to the state when students switch from public to private schools, or the well-documented tendency for education interventions to produce smaller effects at scale, which would cause spending increases to produce smaller effects than the meta-analytic average. In Florida, the strength of the effect grew with program size.
