By The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
PHOTO: Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis - STEVE
CANNON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
New data shows how school choice lifts college prospects.
One issue that helped Florida Governor Ron DeSantis beat
progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum in November’s gubernatorial nail-biter was his
support for the state’s private school voucher program. To understand why that
mattered, consider a report this week on the link between K-12 school choice
and college success.
Nearly 100,000 low-income students can attend private
school in Florida under its Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) program, and 68% of
the students are black or Hispanic.
When the Urban Institute examined limited
data in 2017, it found that school-voucher alumni weren’t much more likely to
earn bachelor’s degrees at Florida’s state universities than were their
public-school peers. Some critics seized on this as evidence of school-choice
failure.
Now comes new evidence from the Urban Institute, which
this time examined a larger data set of some 89,000 students.
The researchers
compared those who used school vouchers to public-school students with
comparable math and reading scores, ethnicity, gender and disability status.
The new research also included students who attended private and out-of-state
colleges and universities in addition to Florida schools.
High school voucher students attend either two-year or
four-year institutions at a rate of 64%, according to the report, compared to
54% for non-voucher students.
For four-year colleges only, some 27% of voucher
students attend compared to 19% for public-school peers.
Voucher students also
appear to have broader post-high school options. About 12% of voucher students
attended private universities, double the rate of non-voucher students.
What of graduation rates?
Voucher students who entered
the program in elementary or middle school were 11% more likely to get a
bachelor’s degree, while students who entered in high school were 20% more
likely. Some 35% of students in the study participated in the voucher program
for only a year.
But the researchers note that “the estimated impact on degree
attainment tends to increase with the number of years of FTC participation,”
indicating the program is important to student success.
High schoolers who
stayed in the voucher program for at least three years “were about 5 percentage
points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree, a 50 percent increase.”
William Mattox, a director at Tallahassee’s James Madison
Institute, has noted in
these pages that among the 650,000 black women who voted in Florida in November
18% chose Mr. DeSantis compared to the GOP’s national average of 7%.
Forty-four
percent of Latinos also supported the Republican.
School choice no doubt wasn’t
the only reason, but offering poor and middle-class parents vouchers to improve
the educational prospects of their children couldn’t have hurt.
