DC Voucher Program

The omnibus bill was held up by one vote on Friday March 6th, as a result of the concern by some congresspersons over the "earmark "controversy. However the second most serious controversy surrounded the deletion of funding for the DC voucher system funded by the federal government under the DC School Choice Act which created the first private kindergarten-through-grade 12 school-choice program supported by federal funds. The Department of Education selected the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) to operate the program. Two reports by the Government accountability office (GAO) and one from the Institute of Education Sciences (a US Department of Education organization) show little or no effects.

Highlighted findings from the IES report

After two years there was no statistically significant difference in test scores in general between students who were offered a DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) and students who were not offered a scholarship. Overall, those in the treatment and control groups were performing at comparable levels in mathematics and reading.

The program had a positive impact on overall parent satisfaction and parent perceptions of school safety, but not on students' reports of satisfaction and safety.

Parents were more satisfied with their child's school and viewed the school as less dangerous if the child was offered a scholarship. Students had a different view of their schools than did their parents. Reports of dangerous incidents in school were comparable for students in the treatment and control groups . Overall, student satisfaction was unaffected by the Program.

There were some impacts on selected groups of students, but adjustments for multiple comparisons indicate that these findings may be due to chance. There were no statistically significant impacts on the test scores of the high-priority subgroup of students who had previously attended schools designated as in need of improvement (SINI).


Highlights from the GAO reports (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02752.pdf)

• "Accountability and internal control were inadequate."
  
  
• "Federal tax dollars were spent on tuition for private schools that did not charge tuition vouchers were paid to schools that employed teachers who lacked bachelor's degrees: "at least 3 of 52 schools that participated that year indicated that at least half of their teachers did not have at least a bachelor's degree, and 6 schools indicated that about 10 to 20 percent of their teachers lacked at least a bachelor's degree."
  
  
• "Some participating schools did not meet basic requirements to operate in the District. For example, a few had no certificate of occupancy on file with the District or had certificates that did not specify educational use."
  
  
• "Parents were given incomplete and inaccurate information about the private schools their children attended."
  
  
• "While students from schools in need of improvement had priority for receiving scholarships, for each year the program has operated, the percentage of students from schools in need of improvement who were offered scholarships has been smaller than the percentage of students in District public schools who attended such schools."
  
  
• "Although most private schools in the District officially participated in the program, the schools varied widely in the number of openings available to scholarship students, and very few openings were available at the secondary level."