Lost Opportunities: Lawmakers Threaten D.C. Scholarships despite Evidence of Benefits

School choice supporters, including hundreds of private school students in crisp uniforms, filled Washington, D.C.'s Freedom Plaza last May to protest a congressional decision to eliminate the city's federally funded school voucher program after the next school year. That afternoon, President Obama announced a compromise proposal to grandfather the more than 1,700 students currently in the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, funding their vouchers through high school graduation, but denying entry to additional children. Both program supporters and opponents cite evidence from an ongoing congressionally mandated Institute of Education Sciences (IES) evaluation of the program, for which I am principal investigator, to buttress their positions, rendering the evaluation a Rorschach test for one's ideological position on this fiercely debated issue. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] School vouchers provide funds to parents to enable them to enroll their children in private schools and, as a result, are one of the most controversial education reforms in the United States. Among the many points of contention is whether voucher programs in fact improve student achievement. Most evaluations of such programs have found at least some positive achievement effects, but not always for all types of participants and not always in both reading and math. This pattern of results has so far failed to generate a scholarly consensus regarding the beneficial effects of school vouchers on studentachievement. The policy and academic communities seek more definitive guidance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The IES released the third-year impact evaluation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in April 2009. The results showed that students who participated in the program performed at significantly higher levels in reading than the students in an experimental control group. Here are the study findings and my own interpretation of what they mean. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Opportunity Scholarships Currently, 13 directly funded voucher programs operate in four U.S. cities and six states, serving approximately 65,000 students. Another seven programs indirectly fund private K-12 scholarship organizations through government tax credits to individuals or corporations. About 100,000 students receive school vouchers funded through tax credits. All of the directly funded voucher programs are targeted to students with some educational disadvantage, such as low family income, disability, or status as a foster child. Nineteen of the 20 school voucher programs in the U.S. are funded by state and local governments. The OSP is the only federal voucher initiative. Established in 2004 as part of compromise legislation that also included new spending on charter and traditional public schools in the District of Columbia, the OSP is a means-tested program. Initial eligibility is limited to K-12 students in D.C. with family incomes at or below Methodology Notes If one's purpose is to evaluate the effects of a specific public policy, such as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), then the comparison of the average outcomes of the treatment and control groups, regardless of what proportion attended which types of school, is most appropriate. A school voucher program cannot force scholarship recipients to use a voucher, nor can it prevent control-group students from attending private schools at their own expense. A voucher program can only offer students scholarships that they subsequently may or may not use. Nevertheless, the mere offer of a scholarship, in and of itself, clearly has no impact on the educational outcomes of students. A scholarship could only change the future of a student if it were actually used. Fortunately, statistical techniques are available that produce reliable estimates of the average effect of using a voucher compared to not being offered one and the average effect of attending private school in year 3 of the study with or without a voucher compared to not attending private school. …