This academic review into the impact of education vouchers, and their effect on pupils’ outcomes, may interest educators keen to explore evidence-based methods in their teaching.
School vouchers: a survey of the economics literature
Synopsis
This academic paper reviews theoretical, computational, and empirical research on school vouchers, and suggests that current evidence does not sufficiently warrant the widespread use of vouchers, though there are positive findings to support further study.
The researchers specifically cite empirical research on small-scale programmes that suggest rewarding pupils with vouchers is not a systematically reliable way of improving educational outcomes, and can have some detrimental effects, although vouchers were found to have a substantial positive effect in some specific cases.
They suggest that new studies are making some progress in understanding how vouchers may be used to accentuate these positive effects, but that far more research is needed before the system could be effectively adopted on a large-scale.