Another Look at the New York City School Voucher Experiment

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Abstract
This article reexamines data from the New York City school choice program, the largest and best-implemented private school scholarship experiment yet conducted. In the experiment, low-income public school students in kindergarten to Grade 4 were eligible to participate in a series of lotteries for a private school scholarship in May 1997. Data were collected from students and their parents at baseline and in the spring of each of the next 3 years. Students with missing baseline test scores, which encompasses all those who were initially in kindergarten and 11% of those initially in Grades 1 to 4, were excluded from previous analyses of achievement, even thoughthese students were tested in the follow-up years. In principle, random assignment would be expected to lead treatment status to be uncorrelated with all baseline characteristics. In addition, it was found that the effect of vouchers was sensitive to the particular way race/ethnicity was defined.