Abstract
Despite the growth of private-school voucher programs, our understanding of their effectiveness relies on results from small-scale randomized control trials. We show that those results may not translate to programs at scale by examining changes in school quality following the implementation of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program. We find that public schools facing high exposure to the policy increased quality while participating private schools decreased quality. Initially poor performing public schools drive our results, suggesting that the public school quality gap shrunk because of the program. Policymakers should consider these indirect effects to understand vouchers’ total impact on educational outcomes.
Brianna Felegi
Assistant Professor of Economics
My name is Brianna Felegi and I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech. I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Notre Dame in May 2023. My primary fields are Applied Microeconomics with an emphasis on the Economics of Education and Labor Economics. My current research agenda focuses on evaluating policies intended to increase access to schooling.