A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Educational Vouchers

Major policy debates have arisen around the subject of educational vouchers as an alternative for financing and organizing elementary and secondary education. To a large degree, comparisons between vouchers and the traditional system of educational finance and school operations have been limited to one or two dimensions of education such as the relative impact of a particular system on achievement test scores. This article describes a comprehensive, evaluative framework that draws upon a larger range of goals that have been posed for education in a democratic and free society. These criteria include: (a) freedom of choice, (b) productive efficiency, (c) equity, and (d) social cohesion. The framework demonstrates the importance of and tradeoffs among these four criteria in evaluating specific educational voucher plans and enables comparisons with other alternatives such as charter schools as well as the more traditional public school arrangements.