Chalkbeat

Vouchers nearly universal at half of Indiana private schools that take them, data shows

2024-09-24T11:00:00+00:00

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Voucher use has soared in Indiana since lawmakers made nearly every student in the state eligible, with more than 90% of students at more than half of all participating schools using a voucher during the 2023-24 school year, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

That was true in just 11% of private schools before lawmakers made the Indiana Choice Scholarship available to nearly every student in Indiana by relaxing income eligibility and removing other requirements to participate in the program.

Since lawmakers approved the expansion last year, the number of schools where 100% of students receive a voucher rose from just one in 2022-23 to 28 in 2023-24. Last year, in 178 of the 349 private schools that accept vouchers, more than 90% of students enrolled used a voucher to pay for tuition.

The recent growth in the share of students using vouchers has remade the scope of Indiana’s school choice program. Instead of being limited initiatives allowing students to leave struggling public schools, it’s increasingly a means for all families to choose their preferred educational settings.

Among supporters of choice, there is disagreement about the shift. Some say it proves just how popular and justified vouchers are.

“It’s phenomenal. In some ways, it’s predictable,” said Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education, a school choice advocacy group in Indiana, about the growth in voucher use. “In the years where eligibility has been expanded, you’ve seen greater growth.”

But others worry about costs and say the program has moved too far from its original purpose.

“A few of us feel strongly that this movement is about leveling the playing field for low income kids and working class kids. There’s an argument that these are taxpayer funds and we should limit that to a purpose that’s necessary, for kids who could not make those choices without it,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. “I do think I’ve lost that argument.”

Meanwhile, critics of vouchers say the result isn’t just that Indiana is subsidizing tuition for families who can afford it without state funds, but that the state is doing so at the expense of up to hundreds of millions in funding for public schools.

“It’s the legislature’s obligation to provide for the common school system,” said Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education. “You’re taking the pie and slicing it up.”

Another big change to Indiana school choice could be coming soon. Some Republican leaders are pushing to merge the state’s three voucher tracks into one universal program that would give parents free rein over where to spend state funding.

Universal education choice through incremental expansion

Data from the state released earlier this year indicated that voucher use grew faster than enrollment, suggesting that vouchers were going to families already enrolled at private schools.

A Chalkbeat analysis comparing enrollment data to voucher use data at individual schools shows voucher use has grown at a faster rate than enrollment at the vast majority of schools. (One caveat: Many private schools have populations of just a few dozen students, meaning changes in enrollment and voucher use lead to large jumps in percentages.)

Statewide, around 70,000 students out of the 92,000 enrolled at private schools used a voucher to attend, receiving either the cost of the tuition and fees at their school, or 90% of the per-pupil funding the state gives to their local public schools — whichever is less.

More students receive a voucher worth 90% of their public school funding rather than the full cost of tuition and fees.

At only 13 schools statewide, less than half of all students received a voucher in 2023-24. Not every private school in Indiana participates in the voucher program.

Though private school enrollment has grown, it remains far below that of public schools in Indiana, which enroll over 1 million students.

The growth of the Choice Scholarship is not a surprise to critics or advocates of the program.

The state started with a small voucher pilot program and expanded it incrementally over the last 12 years. But universal access was always the program’s goal, Wiley said.

Both schools and families have driven interest in the Choice Scholarships, which supplement the financial aid package that many private schools offer, Wiley said.

Measuring performance, seeking accountability for private schools

To participate in the Choice Scholarship program, schools must administer Indiana’s statewide tests, including the ILEARN and the IREAD-3. That’s more accountability than what other states require of voucher programs, noted Petrilli.

Accredited private schools are subject to some other state regulations, like the provisions of a literacy law enacted this year that requires them — along with public and charter schools — to offer summer tutoring and to hold back third graders who don’t pass the state reading test. They also must offer the new diplomas currently in development in Indiana.

But they’re excluded from other regulations, like a new law that requires schools to create attendance plans for habitually truant students.

Data from state tests could give Indiana information about which schools should be allowed to open and accept voucher funds, Petrilli said.

Indiana used to restrict private schools’ participation in the voucher program if they consistently scored low on the state’s A-F accountability system. But those grades were essentially frozen for years starting in 2018 before they were replaced by a different system.

The Department of Education will provide the legislature with future accountability recommendations later this year, a spokesperson said.

Average ILEARN scores for the last year show that students at private schools performed better on the tests than students in public schools. But several years of broader studies of vouchers’ effects on student achievement — and other outcomes — show mixed results.

Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University, said his research has shown that when socioeconomic factors are controlled, public school students outperform their private school peers.

There’s likely no political will to further regulate even private schools with high voucher use, experts said. School choice advocates believe that regulations weigh down publicly governed schools, and would do the same for private schools, Lubienski said.

Moreover, as the popularity of the voucher programs grows, there may be more resistance to change or regulation.

“As they develop more intense constituencies, they develop more of a political force that can help them be shielded from transparency,” Lubienski said. “Historically, what kind of reforms last? The ones that do, they develop a constituency. … It’s not likely to disappear when you have a constituency that depends on it.”

Universal vouchers are also a centerpiece of the education plan from U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, the Republican candidate for governor.

The cost and impact of vouchers

But critics like Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education say the $439 million price tag for the program in 2023-24 represented a costly diversion of public resources from public schools that the state is constitutionally obligated to fund.

According to the state’s 2023-24 voucher report, if all 70,000 students receiving vouchers had attended public schools, the state would have added over $500 million in public education funding. But most voucher students receiving vouchers have never attended a public school.

“There are so many things you have to go through as a public school system to be transparent,” Fuentes-Rohwer said. “We are very concerned that funding leaves public schools that have the obligation to educate everyone.”

With a rise in the number of schools that have a large voucher population, some predict that private schools may seek the same per-pupil funding as public schools in the future.

Lubienski noted that charter schools were once thought to be able to deliver greater achievement with less funding and regulation, but now are seeking equitable funding.

Petrilli of the Fordham Institute agreed: With less funding, charter schools ultimately couldn’t compete with traditional public schools on teacher salary.

But Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education said her group would not support a push to fund vouchers at 100% of the per-pupil cost that public schools receive. Receiving 90% of public schools’ per-pupil funding is the cost of maintaining their individuality and autonomy, she said.

She said she hopes in the next legislative session, the state removes the final requirement for the Choice Scholarship program — that families make no more than 400% of the amount needed to qualify for the free and reduced-price lunch program — in order to create a fully universal program.

“The greatest accountability for these schools is that people have to choose to go to them,” said Wiley.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Mia Hollie is a data intern at Chalkbeat based in New York City. You can reach Mia at mhollie@civicnews.org.

Confronting chronic absenteeism: NYC schools lean on data, tap peer-to-peer support

2024-09-23T20:11:24+00:00

Bronx Principal David Liu did not notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning three years ago after pandemic campus closures. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.

Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School became fatigued by five-day school weeks. Child tax credits and supplemental unemployment benefits also began to wane, forcing parents back into the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.

“The grind of what school was started to hit students at different times of the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism became kind of more like this slowly growing thing in our school.”

Now, the school has begun to crack the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem challenging school districts across the country. Administrators implemented a data system to better track students’ attendance and leverage staff and community organizations to counsel those at risk of chronic absence. The school even offers incentives to get students to show up, such as early-morning breakfast raffles or day trips.

Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the longstanding issue. Some have started to use restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Increasingly, schools are enlisting other students to encourage their friends to attend school regularly.

Most districts, including New York City, consider a student chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that is 18 missed days of school.

The citywide chronic absenteeism rate stood at about 25% before the pandemic. Once students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students jumped 15 percentage points. While schools have made progress to lower that rate over the years, citywide chronic absenteeism still hasn’t returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the Mayor’s Management Report.

Though higher-poverty schools began closing the gap on chronic absenteeism in 2022-23, that gap still hovered about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have found themselves addressing issues that exist beyond the school’s environment, such as students’ access to health care, child care, and transportation.

That is why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging – it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families that they serve. In its 2022-23 Comprehensive Education Plan, Gotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absence problem.

And while data collection often serves as a first step to addressing chronic absenteeism, creating plans that lead to improvement requires people, said Kim Nauer, an education fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who has looked at how poverty contributes to chronic absence.

“Every single one of those numbers needs to be a kid and a name and a parent and a person attached to them,” she said. “Otherwise you’re not going to make progress in any sustained way. Like robocalls [are] useless.”

Using data to target specific student groups

Gotham Collaborative High School, which served a little over 300 students last school year, had already viewed chronic absenteeism as an issue worthy of intervention before the pandemic. The school’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate was already higher than the average, at about 56%, and it then grew to 61% in 2020 when the pandemic forced school closures across the city.

During the 2022-23 school year, however, the high school’s rate of chronically absent students dropped to roughly 29%, its lowest in years.

Tackling the issue has taken years of targeted work and has relied on a data system the school created, grouping students into four buckets according to their absences. Each group receives certain interventions depending on the severity of their record. Those are provided through several support teams that might include peer mediator ambassadors, school counselors, and a social worker.

Sometimes intervention looks like an in-depth, individualized assessment of a student and their needs, or a home visit with a student and their family. But other times it may look like a school social for students who feel that they don’t have a strong network of friends, or an early-morning breakfast raffle.

Addressing the needs of students whose attendance and academic performance didn’t raise warning flags was critical, Liu said. Before introducing the new system, he said, the school identified only a small selection of students – those who came in the least, or about half of the school year, and those who had near-perfect attendance. Changing their focus helped shift the school toward lower instances of chronic absence, he believes.

“This was a main ‘aha’ moment for us,” he said. “These are our students that are coming 80% of the time, four out of five times a week, they might be B-average students. It sparked a lot of conversations about how do we show them that what they’re doing is not meeting what they can be doing and their potential?”

Many schools with a high share of chronically absent students use some variation of Gotham Collaborative’s data tracking system.

New York City schools receive weekly automatic reports that list students who have missed five or 10 school days. Schools can also print additional reports that show all students who have missed school five or 10 times, or chronically absent students from the previous school year. The reports are most effective when schools create workflows to immediately address what they are seeing in the data, said a spokesperson for the education department.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to address the issue, also noted that early intervention is important. When she and other researchers began studying chronic absence using the current, widely adopted 10% rule, she said one of its main purposes was to serve as an early-warning metric. So if a student misses two days of school in a month, she said, that should alert teachers and staff that a student is in need of support.

“I don’t want you to wait til 17 days to notice that things are a challenge,” Chang said, in reference to annual absences. “Or even in the first month, if it’s 10 days, that’s a problem.”

Using peer-to-peer support to overcome chronic absenteeism

Researchers like Chang and Nauer often examine chronic absenteeism among younger students because it is more representative of families’ circumstances. A 5-year-old, for example, isn’t missing school on their own accord, Chang said.

But for teens, chronic absenteeism comes with its own set of complexities. Liu has noticed that some of his students may miss school due to working long hours or having to bring younger siblings to and from school. Some may choose not to show up to avoid conflict with friends, he said.

And because the conversations that staffers have with students inevitably look different than those that students might have with people closer to their age, Liu is now focusing on tapping students’ ability to deeply connect with their peers to curb chronic absence.

“Every year we get older, but the kids stay the same age,” he said. “So every year the staff gets one year removed from being generationally, culturally relevant.”

At The International High School for Health Sciences – where all students are newly arrived immigrants – students may also grapple with other hurdles that affect engagement, such as learning English for the first time, or preparing for standardized tests unfamiliar to them, according to administrators at the school. Yet the high school’s chronic absenteeism rate during the 2022-23 school year fell to 29.5%, nearly cutting its rates from the previous two years in half.

In 2018, the school began using restorative justice — a practice that the school has used in lieu of other disciplinary measures since it opened over 10 years ago – to address chronic absenteeism, administrators say. A chronically absent student – typically in their final year of high school – sits down with a group of their closest friends, a teacher that they have a strong relationship with, and the assistant principal. The group discusses the student’s strengths, reasons for why they don’t show up at school, and how others in the group can support them moving forward.

International High School also receives extra support from staff at Queens Community House, the school’s community-based partner. Now in its third year, the partnership is funded through NYC Community Schools, a grant-based program that extends to about a third of the city’s more than 1,500 schools.

Queens Community House provides services such as tutoring outside of regular school hours – particularly during Regents season – and events that range from self-care workshops to game nights. Communicating with families, however, is one of its primary functions, said the school’s Community Schools Director Lizbeth Mendoza.

“The framework for a lot of these conversations is building relationships,” she said. “So I’m actually the person that sends out the message letting a parent or guardian know that their student was absent at the end of the day.”

Principal Roberto Hernandez poses for a selfie with High School for Teaching and the Professions students.

At the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx, groups of older mentors and younger mentees start pairing together in October. The mentors, typically 11th or 12th graders, receive training in their own classes on how to support their mentees, whether that be through engaging in activities together or talking through the mentees’ experiences.

“They go in and they really create this bond,” said Principal Roberto Hernandez. “And what I found within the last two years was a sense of ownership that our mentors are having for their mentees.”

This sense of commitment has trickled into other areas of focus for the school, like attendance, Hernandez said. For some students, it has also created a sense of commitment to the school at large: Two of the high school’s guidance counselors are former students. Now that the school has a designated guidance counselor for every grade level, Hernandez said it is easier for the administration to connect with individual students.

“It’s not just teaching, it’s getting to know them and letting them get to know you, and they love it,” he said. “And I think that’s all contributing to where we are today.”

Mia Hollie is a data intern at Chalkbeat based in New York City. You can reach Mia at mhollie@civicnews.org .