NEPC Review: K-12 School Choice Calculator - (Reason Foundation and EdChoice, January 2024)

The “About” section explains that the initial settings in the calculator, which assume 1% of public-school students switching to private schools and 20% of current private-school students accessing public funds, are drawn from Scafidi and Butcher’s analysis of the New Hampshire program.3 The section also notes that other programs report higher rates of private-school students taking advantage of c. [...] The calculator provides an option to estimate spending on a program including children with disabilities, citing the related average per-pupil spending: “To estimate average to- tal per-pupil costs for students with special needs, the analysis applies a factor of 1.91 to the per-pupil current expenditures for all students in the public K-12 school system.” This ratio is drawn from the 1990s Specia. [...] Take-Up Rates reflect the percentage of public-school students likely to switch to private school and the percentage of existing private-school students likely to participate in the program. [...] The calculator’s options to limit eligible pop- ulations by income thresholds, disability status and grade range rely on a simple reduction of the total eligible population to the share of the population in each category, but changing the eligibility pool in combination with the rate at which a voucher is provided will most certainly affect the uptake rates of current public- and private-school st. [...] In 1997, Levin and Driver laid out a framework for more broadly evaluating the costs and benefits of choice programs, including the extent to which those programs affect equity and social cohesion, as well as whether they were efficient in their 10 of 17 production of outcomes.33 All of the estimates in the illustrative table result in significant increas.