Tough times may be in store for the nation’s first federally-funded voucher program. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) released its latest evaluation (.pdf) of Washington, DC’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. The results reveal an uptick in reading achievement for most program participants, but little difference in overall performance between voucher students and their public school peers. The report comes just as Congress wrestles with whether to reauthorize the pilot program, due to expire next year.
First, the good news: 88 percent of students using the scholarships posted reading gains, placing them on a trajectory two to four months ahead of their peers who were not offered a scholarship. Parents of scholarship students reported high levels of satisfaction with their child’s school; 76 percent gave the schools a grade of “A” or “B.” These parents also viewed their children’s schools as safer than did the parents of kids not in the program. However, IES analyses showed “no statistically significant difference in test scores in general” between scholarship students and their public school counterparts.
Not surprisingly, the findings have elicited markedly different interpretations. As a Washington Post editorial noted, the results are “sure to be read through a prism.”
Indeed, the National School Boards Association saw through a glass darkly, claiming, “The voucher program, like others before it, has come up short.” Earlier this month, the NSBA sent a letter to Congress recommending that funding for the DC program be discontinued. Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s representative in Congress, also wants the program shut down, writing in a Washington Post editorial this week that students would be better off in public charter schools or with privately-funded options.
Choice proponents saw the big picture, referencing both the study’s academic findings and its compelling reports of parental satisfaction. Supporters also highlighted the perils of cursory judgments, suggesting it may be too early for researchers to see definitive gains. The Washington Scholarship Fund, which operates DC’s program, noted (.pdf) that “substantial academic progress” in voucher programs has generally occurred after more than two years, as it did in Milwaukee; the current report evaluates just 19 months of student performance. Overall, as the U.S. Department of Education pointed out in a press release this week, “The positive effects found in this year’s report are larger than those in last year’s report, and whenever statistically significant effects were found, they favored students who were offered scholarships.”
What’s next? On Tuesday, a House Appropriations subcommittee voted to fund DC’s scholarship program through next year. But according to the Washington Post, the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Jose Serrano, says the program’s days are numbered, with total government funding unlikely after next year. Next week, deliberations move on to the full Appropriations Committee.
Let’s hope the program is allowed to continue. Almost 2,000 students are depending on it. Thousands more have applied for vouchers only to be turned down. DC scholarship students aren’t likely to have other choices if this one is taken away from them: the average yearly income for participating families – many of them headed by single parents – is under $23,000. For these students, the program is “a lifeline of hope,” as Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings noted. Without it, says the U.S. Department of Education, 86 percent of these kids would be consigned to failing schools.
Surely we can do better than that. However we see through the glass, these data are unequivocal about one thing: parents overwhelmingly value educational choice – especially when poverty would otherwise block them from having it. Clearly, ongoing research on the academic effects of choice – in DC and elsewhere – is warranted. But the latest round of data offer no good reason to end a program offering hope to some of our nation’s most disadvantaged students. No one – including Congress – should pull that lifeline.