Before Congress continues the DC voucher program, it needs to focus on the program’s underperformance and dysfunction and cut through the illusion that thousands of poor children have been lifted out of dangerous, underperforming DC schools and that poor families have been given the same choices rich folks like the McCains and Obamas enjoy. Actually, few DC voucher students have come from low-performing DC schools and only a handful of these students have entered the prestigious, high-performing schools of the comfortably rich. Nor have students necessarily moved from poor public schools to better private ones. Nor is there now nor will there be research data that could demonstrate academic achievement to justify continuation of the program. The DC voucher program is a failed experiment that has been a nightmare of poor administration, a ragtag group of participating schools providing less than perfect information about their programs and an evaluation scheme designed to examine a political, rather than an educational proposition. In actuality, the program hasn’t even proven to be a barrier-breaking exemplar of how the free market could increase school choice.
Instead of the pricey private schools, the majority of DC voucher students attend modest, religion-based schools that welcome the $7,500 per student payment. Some of the schools are accredited, some are not. None are required to have highly qualified teachers nor demonstrate their competence as defined by the No child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Actually, the participating private schools are not governed by the (NCLB) law and none are required to meet the academic standards set by the District.
The D.C. School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 intended that DC students from low-performing public schools be the beneficiaries of DC public vouchers; however, in the first year many students already in private schools received vouchers to continue at the same schools. This was not a program that many parents understood, nor were many academically-strong private schools prepared to enroll students from low-performing schools. The Washington Scholarship Program (WSP), contracted in 2004 to administrator the program, found that it had an unrealistically short timeline in which to recruit both DC families and the DC private schools to receive them. Faced with unused vouchers, WSF extended the application process multiple times, vigorously recruited students and struggled to find spaces at private middle and high schools. They also, contrary to the Act, converted private school students into voucher students. (D.C. School Vouchers Outnumber Applicants)
The DC voucher program hasn’t promised universal access to tony private schools: rather, the goal has been increased choice, but the result has been that numerous parents have chosen private schools that have lackluster academic programs. (An acceptable goal for libertarians who advocate the right to choose regardless of quality.) . As the 2004 GAO report states, the quality of participating private schools is uneven:
The extent to which private schools had characteristics associated with high-quality educational programs has varied. For example, some schools reported that some of their teachers lacked at least a bachelor’s degree. Furthermore, 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. Despite important variation among schools, the grantee did not always provide parents with complete and accurate information on their characteristics. For example, WSF provided parents inaccurate information on teachers’ qualifications and tuition for some schools. (p. 9)
Even though the DC voucher program lists among its partner schools prestigious academies such as Archbishop Carroll High, the National Cathedral and St. Albans Schools, the annual tuitions of these schools range from $10,000 to $32,000 for “regular” students. The $7,500 voucher our public school student brings is a bad deal — $6,500 to $24,500 short of the actual per pupil costs of some private schools. However, the deal improves when the participating schools have, prior to the voucher program, been charging less than $7,500, which is the case for many of the participating religion-based schools.
Somewhat understandable, parents paying full-load at the private schools want the public student selected to “fit” in with their children. In the end, the prestigious schools are allowed to choose the student, rather than the family choosing the school. That leaves the rest of the students not with the same choices of the McCains’, but rather, of the strange assemblage of schools that will take their vouchers.
Not discouraged by the extraordinary variation among the private schools, the WSF researchers proceeded, as required by law, to attempt to compare the performance of voucher students to DC public school students who had applied but had not received a voucher and had continued on at a DC Public School (DCPS) or a DC charter school. There was to be no concern that the students were not taught the same materials, but rather, the test was to be whether students taught random materials in private schools would perform better than students taught standardized materials in District public schools on the District’s standardized test.
The Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI) was awarded the contract to run the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) and administer the tests and make the comparisons of academic performance. The SCDP quickly ran into resistance from the students who had applied for but did not receive vouchers: strangely the non-voucher students did not see any advantage to give up their weekends to be tested, even for a $50 stipend. A serious blow was further dealt to the design when DCPS changed its standardized tests in the second, year thus making longitudinal comparison impossible. SCDP has adapted its research to a series of focus groups and has released three reports in which it describes voucher parents’ level of satisfaction, participation and attitude toward school, all positive changes. Its first report noted, “Higher academic standards, improved safety, increased discipline, greater parental involvement and access to a religious and values-based environment were among the top reasons why parents express satisfaction with OSP.” It’s third report focused on attitude: “this report sought not only a deeper understanding of families’ evolving attitudes about and behaviors associated with school choice, but also how they measure student success and how they are most likely to express their satisfaction (or the lack thereof) to policy-makers and other interested stake holders as the pilot program approaches reauthorization.” In other words, as the DC voucher program approaches its final funded year, it has little more than the good feelings of its families to recommend it.
Do we really want to refund a feel-good program that can’t demonstrate academic quality? Should we use public money on schools that aren’t governed by NCLB, have under-qualified teachers and can’t meet District safety standards?
