Moving the goalposts: the evolution of voucher advocacy in framing research findings

ABSTRACT

The primary justification for school voucher programs in the United States has revolved around questions of efficacy, especially relative to student achievement outcomes. More recently, however, a series of studies revealed sizable negative impacts on students enrolled in voucher programs. Collectively, these studies presented an evidentiary sea-change and undercut voucher advocates’ traditional claims regarding achievement impacts, presenting an opportunity for us to examine the strategies used to advance evidence on vouchers in new and traditional media. We identify several such strategies, including highlighting limitations of student achievement measures; explaining negative results through program particulars (e.g. overregulation or inadequate funding); demonizing opponents; and changing the conversation (e.g. switching to normative claims). We note voucher opponents’ activities becoming more frequent and otherwise evolving – e.g. becoming bolder and combining achievement results with other ideas and arguments to oppose voucher programs. Media coverage of voucher programs and research, more generally, fluctuated significantly according to broader political events. These findings reveal how research evidence can be leveraged in policy discussions and advocacy – what we call ‘strategic dissembling’ – whereby advocates and policymakers adjust in real time to changing empirical conditions as part of their long-term efforts to advance a particular policy agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• School vouchers
• voucher advocacy
• privatization
• politics of education
• research use
• media

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report related to this research.

Notes

1. An interim study in Louisiana indicated voucher students closed that gap (Mills and Wolf 2017), but large negative effects reappeared by the fourth and final year of the study (Mills and Wolf 2019). Although not a ‘state-wide’ program, in Washington, DC, where the voucher program has been in existence since 2003, most recent research found large negative effects in the first two years, and no effect by the third and final year of the study (Dynarski et al. 2017, 2018; Webber et al. 2019). Also, a working paper provides an analysis of achievement outcomes from vouchers in North Carolina, although that study used recruitment strategies for student participants that led to non-representative samples, biasing the results (Egalite, Stallings, and Porter 2018).

2. Another viable strategy in some cases could be to simply ignore the findings. This strategy might have been demonstrated by President Trump himself: Days after the D.C. voucher study was released, he hailed Congress’ reauthorization of this voucher program, stating ‘This is what winning for young children and kids from all over the country looks like’ (as quoted in Strauss 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Lubienski

Christopher Lubienski is a professor in Education Policy at Indiana University, a fellow with the National Education Policy Center (USA), adjunct professor at Murdoch University in Western Australia, and Guest Professor and Senior Research Fellow at East China Normal University in Shanghai.  His research focuses on education policy, reform, and the political economy of education, with a particular interest in research utilization in policymaking processes.

Joel R. Malin

Joel R. Malin is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at Miami University-Oxford, Ohio. Malin’s research focuses on research-practice-policy connections, and upon the leadership and organization of complex, cross-sector collaborations. His research in the latter area has primarily addressed college and career readiness reforms, occurring at the intersection of secondary and higher education. In the former area, his book The Role of Knowledge Brokers in Education (edited with Chris Brown), was published by Routledge in 2019.