Mar 03, 2017 07:14 AM EST By Audri Taylors, UniversityHerald Reporter

Advocates of "school choice" claim that voucher programs significantly improve student achievement because it allows students to gain more access to a wide variety of options when it comes to school choice. But a Stanford study states otherwise.

Voucher programs are being used by parents to finance their children's enrollment to private schools, and these programs are government funded. But there is no strong evidence that proves that these programs improve academic performance and achievement of students, Stanford News reported.

Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Martin Carnoy there is a very weak evidence that supports this claim. He also said that they carry hidden costs and are only serving as a distraction to other possible and more helpful solutions to obtaining higher returns.

The report, published by the Economic Policy Institute also shows that vouchers do not have improve student achievement at all, according to Think Progress. The Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington, D.C., which is directly funded by Congress has shown that students who took advantage of vouchers and scholarships did not necessarily have reading or math gain, but the Trump administration is looking into the expansion of the program.

Milwaukee is where the country's second largest voucher program has been running, but only one out of four students attend their public institutions. Even the black students who comprise 70 percent of all voucher recipients had lower math and reading scores in eighth grade.

Carnoy said that in cases where there was an improvement in the test scores, the increase could have been influenced by public accountability and not because of vouchers. Another Milwaukee study has also shown that there were no improvement in the test scores among voucher students who were attending private schools, until there was a memorandum on publicizing the results of the tests taken by the voucher students.

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