The following text will appear September 20 in an advertisement in The New York Times and The Washington Post. It also will appear in a forthcoming issue of The New Republic. The material is sponsored by the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Harvard University's Paul Peterson and David Campbell, Georgetown University's Patrick Wolf, and the University of Wisconsin's William Howell recently reported statistically significant test score gains by Black students who received school vouchers in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio.

Last week, The New York Times said these scholars "overstated" the gains, basing this claim on a press release from David Myers of Mathematica Policy Research. Myers is quoted as saying vouchers had "no impact" in New York.

Let's look at the facts.

A separate report, issued by Mathematica and co-authored by Myers, Peterson, Howell, and others, shows the same New York test score gains reported by the Harvard-Georgetown-Wisconsin team.

On September 16, a colleague and I asked Mr. Myers if anything in the Harvard-Georgetown-Wisconsin report overstated New York findings. Mr. Myers said no.

Mr. Myers later said that Peterson, et.al., should have presented grade-by-grade results for New York. This is a subject on which respected scholars differ. Such disagreement does not justify a public charge that the New York findings were overstated.

Peterson, et. al., quote noted education statistician, Anthony Bryk, who says that conclusions about school impacts should not be drawn from "only single grade information....Judging a school by looking at only selected grades can be misleading. We would be better off, from a statistical perspective, to average across adjacent grades to develop a more stable estimate of school productivity." (Anthony S. Bryk, et al., "Academic Productivity of Chicago Public Elementary Schools: A Technical Report Sponsored by The Consortium on Chicago School Research, March 1998.)

Posted at www.schoolchoiceinfo.org is a table comparing the Harvard-Georgetown-Wisconsin findings with those of Mathematica and Mr. Myers. The findings in the two studies are virtually identical. The authors of both studies caution about drawing unwarranted policy conclusions from the New York results.

Moreover, the Harvard-Georgetown-Wisconsin report shows that test score gains for African Americans in Washington D.C. and Dayton are not concentrated in any grade level. These data reflect a much broader base of information than available to Myers.

Clearly, there is an emerging consensus among researchers about the generally positive impact of school choice initiatives on Black children from low-income families. BAEO believes this emerging consensus justifies continuation and expansion of school choice experiments for low-income families, along with continued scholarly study of the results from such experiments.

Go to Research and Archives for "A Consensus Among Researchers About the New York City Voucher Program," by Howard Fuller, Ph.D., listed under "all archived research."