The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

Research Writing 135 United States General Accounting Office (2001) that shows only minimal improvements in reading and writing scores between voucher schools and public schools. Haggai Kupermintz (2002) argues in his work that external variables not related to the voucher system produced the gains shown in the Florida system around the time when vouchers were implemented. The AFT (2006) states that a 2001 study done by Jay P. Greene on Florida’s A-Plus voucher program was discounted by Gregory Camilli and Katrina Bulkley in another 2001 study, and that his findings on the effectiveness of vouchers on education were invalid. The evidence presented by the opposition is not necessarily wrong, but I do believe that it is premature. A more recent study by Greg Forster and Christian D’Andrea (2009) took a second look at Florida’s version of free choice education (via tax credit scholarships). The results, collected by a random assignment telephone survey with a 3.5 % margin of error, were an overwhelming endorsement of the program. In the areas of individual attention, academic progress, teacher quality, school responsiveness, and student behavior; roughly 95-97% of respondents were at least “satisfied” with the scholarship program, with an average of 75% being “very satisfied” (Forster & Andrea, 2009). Comparatively, only an average of 43% had been at least “satisfied” with the public school equivalents, with an average of a mere 4.4% being “very satisfied” (Forster & Andrea, 2009). The results appear even more impressive when it is considered that most of the respondents are low-income, minority individuals (Forster & Andrea, 2009). It should come as no surprise that 100% of the respondents in the Florida study favored a renewal of the scholarship program (Forster & Andrea). In other states, academic improvements are also being found. Matt Kibbe (2012) shows in his work that district scores for standardized tests in Louisiana have risen by 24 percent since 2005, around the time when free choice began to make headway there. Interestingly, a large part of Louisiana’s program was simply the decision to let parents choose which public schools they wanted to send their children to instead of having it be assigned to them by district boundaries. Simply allowing individual choice to flourish sparked a growth of literacy. In Washington D.C., Jason Richwine (2010) conducted a study of the congressional voucher program using a lottery system to determine his respondents (a technique often