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Download or read book An Empirical Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. School Choice Issues in the State written by Greg Forster and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, one of the nation's largest school choice programs. It is the first ever completed empirical evaluation of a tax-credit scholarship program, a type of program that creates school choice through the tax code. Earlier reports, including a recent one on the Florida program, have not drawn comparisons between the educational results of public schools and tax-credit scholarships; this study is therefore the first step in evaluating the performance of this type of school choice. The Florida program provides a tax credit on corporate income taxes for donations to scholarship-funding organizations, which use the funding to provide K-12 private school scholarships to low-income students. Over 23,000 Florida students are attending private schools this year using these scholarships. Similar programs exist in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Studying a tax-credit scholarship program using traditional empirical techniques presents a number of methodological challenges. To overcome these difficulties, the study used a telephone survey conducted by Marketing Informatics to interview 808 participating parents whose children attended public schools before entering the program. It asked them to compare the educational services they received in public and private schools. The results provide the first ever direct comparison between the education participants received when they were in Florida public schools and the education they receive in the school choice program. (Contains 7 figures and 4 endnotes.).