Notre Dame receives million dollar grant to study Indiana's voucher program
10/09/2015

 

The University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO) will use a recently awarded $1 million grant to examine the effects of Indiana’s private school voucher program.

 

The voucher program study will be led by CREO’s director Mark Berends who will ask questions “central to the merits” of Indiana’s voucher program.

 

According to the school’s press release, the questions include:

 

• What impact do the Indiana Choice Scholarship vouchers, which allow more students to attend private schools, have on student achievement gains and the schools these students attend?
• How do Indiana charter schools, which have doubled in number over nearly five years, affect student achievement gains?
• Are the impacts from vouchers and charter schools greater for some groups of students than for others, thus influencing the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps observed among many students?
• Compared with traditional public schools, how are charter and private schools different in terms of their organizational and instructional conditions (e.g., school leadership, professional development, funding, learning climate and parental involvement)?

CREO most recently examined the Indiana voucher program’s effect on participating schools and found, among other results, that more than 90 percent of Indiana Catholic schools have chosen to participate.

 

There’s little question that Indiana’s parochial schools, including its Catholic schools, have benefitted from Indiana’s private school voucher program.

 

We’ll be surprised if this study is surprising.