Study Casts Doubt on School Voucher Benefits : Education: Harvard research shows programs may hinder low-income students and promote segregation. Proponents say problems can be minimized.

Experiments with public and private school choice, touted by some as a way to extend to the poor the educational opportunities available to the affluent, can actually leave many low-income children stranded in schools that are worse off than before, according to research to be released today by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The studies include the first examination of the impact of fledgling school choice programs in Milwaukee, San Antonio and St. Louis. But they do not include enough data to support broad conclusions about whether children learn more as a result of their participation in such programs.

Sure to be used by opponents of choice programs in California and elsewhere, the research papers demonstrate that merely giving parents more options does not guarantee that they will become sophisticated educational consumers. And that means parental choice will not automatically generate the powerful market forces that reformers believe are needed to push public schools to improve.

“The problem is that the more involved, more committed parents will search out the best options . . . but they will leave [other] kids behind in schools where there is no competitive pressure to improve quality,” said Bruce Fuller, a Harvard associate professor who co-directed the research.

That, he said, creates a dilemma.

“We don’t want to discourage parents from searching out better alternatives but, on the other hand, without some . . . effort to get all parents to make these choices it may further isolation.”

The research papers, which will be presented to the annual meeting of the National Council of State Legislators in Milwaukee, also found that school choice plans may create greater racial segregation.

Milwaukee is home to the nation’s largest voucher program, which gives about 1,000 low-income families $3,600 vouchers to pay tuition at private schools. Most of those students are minorities who have chosen to attend virtually all-Latino or all-African American schools.

Because of its popularity, the Wisconsin Legislature recently expanded the program to serve 15,000 students by 1996.

Proponents of school choice criticize the Harvard study, saying it highlights pitfalls that are predictable but not inevitable.

“Through proper design, these problems can be eliminated or reduced,” said Stanford University professor Terry Moe, one of the nation’s leading advocates of school vouchers. “We can turn the thing around . . . and see to it that vouchers and choice promote equity rather than inequity.”

He acknowledged that no voucher or choice plan now in operation does that. “The trick for policy makers is to use markets to social advantage by setting up a framework of simple rules to ensure they work the way we want them to.”

Moe has been an adviser to a well-financed San Diego group that is putting the final touches on a statewide voucher initiative that it may try to put before California voters in November, 1996.

He said the group has been struggling with the same issues raised by the new research, and appears ready to go forward with an initiative that falls short of including the safeguards needed to avoid promoting inequities.

Inequities arise, authors of the research papers conclude, in part because not all parents are well-informed about their options or highly motivated to exercise them. They also may not have the means to transport their children to superior schools that might be across town or in distant suburbs.

In Milwaukee, researchers found that parents who participated in the voucher program were better educated and more involved in their children’s schools than those who did not.

Results are mixed on whether exercising a choice improves educational outcomes. After three years, children in Milwaukee who use vouchers to attend private schools have shown no academic improvement over those attending neighborhood schools.

Learning gains have resulted in San Antonio, however, where parents of about 1,000 Latino students use publicly funded vouchers to send their children to schools designed to emphasize the Spanish language and Mexican culture and history.

But the researchers point out that admission to the program depends, in part, on students’ previous academic achievement. And the parents who choose to participate, on average, have higher incomes and greater educational accomplishments than those who do not.

Despite such problems, the number of choice programs is on the rise nationwide. California has a year-old open enrollment program that requires every school district to give parents some choice of where to enroll their children. But those choices are restricted in many ways and only a small percentage of families participate.

Only 10,000 out of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s enrollment of 640,000 take part in the open enrollment plan. A disproportionate number of those students are white residents of the relatively affluent west San Fernando Valley.

Former state Sen. Gary K. Hart, who is now an education policy analyst based at Cal State Sacramento, backed such programs when he was a member of the Legislature.

He acknowledged that not all parents have the desire or the resources to allow them to select the best school for their children.

But, he said, “open enrollment is worth pursuing because we’re concerned not only about issues of access, but also about sending a message to public schools in California that they don’t have a monopoly and they need to be more interested in their customers.”