WASHINGTON -- Students in the nation's only federally funded school voucher initiative performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering Washington, D.C., private schools than peers who did not participate, according to a new federal analysis that comes as President Donald Trump is seeking to pour billions of dollars into expanding the private school scholarships nationwide.
The study, released Thursday by the U.S. Education Department's research division, follows several other recent studies of state-funded vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio that suggested negative effects on student achievement. Critics are seizing on this data as they try to counter Trump's push to direct public dollars to private schools.
Vouchers are direct government subsidies that parents can use as scholarships for their children to attend private schools. The payments can cover all or part of the annual tuition bills, depending on the school.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has long argued that vouchers help poor children escape from failing public schools. But Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, said DeVos should heed the department's Institute of Education Sciences. Given the new findings, Murray said, "it's time for her to finally abandon her reckless plans to privatize public schools across the country."
DeVos defended the D.C. program, saying it is part of an expansive school-choice market in the nation's capital that includes a robust public charter school sector.
"When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools," she said in a statement. She added that the study found that parents "overwhelmingly support" the voucher program "and that, at the same time, these schools need to improve upon how they serve some of D.C.'s most vulnerable students."
The D.C. program serves about 1,100 students, giving them up to $8,452 each to attend a private elementary or middle school and up to $12,679 for high school. Participating private schools must be accredited by 2021 but otherwise face few requirements beyond showing that they are in good financial standing and demonstrating their compliance with health and safety laws.
D.C. students who used vouchers had significantly lower math scores a year after joining the program, on average, than students who applied for a voucher through a citywide lottery but did not receive one. For voucher students in kindergarten through fifth grade, reading scores were also significantly lower. For older voucher students, there was no significant difference in reading scores.
For voucher recipients from a low-performing public school -- the population that the voucher program primarily aims to reach -- attending a private school had no effect on achievement. But for voucher recipients from higher-performing public schools, the negative effect was particularly large.
The analysis reviewed data for more than 1,700 students who participated in the lotteries from 2012-14.
Congress created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2004 with the support of key local leaders, including then-Mayor Anthony Williams.
Advocates of the program spent the past eight years fighting for its survival under President Barack Obama, who opposed vouchers. Now they are hopeful that the White House's staunch support for choice, coupled with Republican majorities in Congress, will enable the program to grow.
Already, Trump has freed up millions of dollars in carryover funding from previous years that officials say will allow the program to nearly triple the number of students its serves -- from about 1,100 this year to 3,000 in the next school year.
More than 6,000 students, most of them black or Hispanic, have used D.C. vouchers since the program's inception.
A Section on 04/28/2017