ABSTRACT
Education voucher proposals are increasingly a part of the policy debate and could play an important role in education reform. The topic of vouchers is important for those involved in the policy debate and for funders of programs, education administrators and teachers, parents, and students. This chapter provides detailed framework for deciding on and designing experiments for education vouchers. It focuses on key questions that must be resolved in order to make an experiment and to produce useful findings. Evaluations can bring frustration as well as enlightenment, as anyone involved in this work no doubt has experienced. One frustrating result is to produce findings that seem to matter little in the policy debate; the choice turns out to be driven by considerations other than the type of empirical information produced by research. A second source of frustration is an evaluation that produces uncertain findings: "It could be this, it could be that; we cannot tell you which".
