Mapping voucher programs in the United States

In an earlier post I discussed the work of Saporito and Sohoni, who used the Common Core of Data to find that more white children attend private schools than black or hispanic children, and moreover, when there is a private school nearby, the neighborhood public school has fewer-than-expected white students.

An insightful comment by Robert Kahn suggested that these differences might be smaller in places where there are voucher programs targeting the poor, funding private school attendance for these children.

Embarassingly, I didn't know much about the current state of voucher programs in the US. So here we go.

Times are changing

Apparently a lot has happened recently, starting around 2011. State legislatures leaned a bit more pro-voucher in that year. (I'm not sure if they are still leaning that way.) The results have been some more private school voucher programs, which have not been without controversy.

So vouchers aren't just in Milwaukee anymore.

Sources of information

Two good sources for compiled information on private school vouchers are two pro-voucher advocacy groups: the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, and the Heritage foundation. Both provide pretty maps on the topic, and the Friedman Foundation even provides the data underlying their research as a spreadsheet.

An official source for information on state-wide voucher program legislation is a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

Reading the NCSL report, I learned that there are three types of statewide voucher programs in the US: some that are "Indiana-like," some that are "Florida-like," and some that are "Maine-like.""

• The Indiana-like voucher programs target poor families, and so are the ones I will focus on when I follow Jay's train of thought. (These states usually also target disabled students as well.) Indiana-like states include Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin (esp. Milwaukee and Racine), and Washington DC.

• The Florida-like voucher programs only target disabled students. As an aside, a lot of these programs seem to target very specific subgroups of disabled students, for example, in Mississippi there is a program targeting dyslexic students and a program targeting speech-impaired students. States include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah.

• The Maine-like voucher programs target rural students who simply don't have a public school to attend. Maine and Vermont are in this category.

Mapping the current state of voucher programs in the United States

The following map provides a summary of the data from the three sources. Hover over each state for details.

Not included on the map are four local-area voucher programs in: Douglas, CO; Milwaukee, WI; Racine, WI; and Cleveland, OH. In future analysis it might be worth throwing a dummy in for these four school districts.

In the tooltips for this map, "Friedman participation" is the sum total number of students participating in any school choice program documented by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. This includes more than just pure voucher programs. See their website for more details. A cursory review of the proportions on this map suggests that restricting to just voucher programs may have provided a more accurate measure of true voucher program size.

Heritage "warmth" is how pro-voucher the Heritage foundation thinks the state is, according to the summaries provided on their website.

I also provide whether I think (from reading the NCSL state voucher legislation report) the state voucher programs are like Indiana, Florida, or Maine.

I leave the interpretation to the reader.

Additional references

The K12 enrollment data were obtained from American FactFinder.

The code for the tooltip on the map is a modification of work by milroc, whose work is forked from biovisualize.