School vouchers fail another test, conservatives remain unswayed

June 17, 2008

School vouchers haven’t had any luck at all lately. Voters in Utah, expected to be rather conservative, overwhelmingly rejected a statewide ballot referendum on vouchers last November. The president touted a voucher plan in his State of the Union address, which was DOA in Congress. A study of the Milwaukee system found that students who receive vouchers to go to private schools don’t do any better academically than those “stuck” in public schools.

But it’s the voucher system in the District of Columbia — created by congressional Republicans to be the first-ever federally-funded voucher program — that’s been especially troubled. Last fall we learned that after Congress handed over tax dollars to unregulated private schools without conditions, lawmakers ended up financing unaccredited schools, “unsuitable learning environments,” schools with no operating permits, and schools where teachers didn’t even have bachelor’s degrees.

Complicating matters, a report from the administration released yesterday found that students in DC who received vouchers didn’t do any better academically, either.

Students in the D.C. school voucher program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, generally did no better on reading and math tests after two years than public school peers, a U.S. Education Department report said yesterday.

The findings mirror those in previous studies of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program…. Students who previously attended struggling schools — a group the program is designed to help — showed no boost in test scores compared with their peers.

It was only natural, then, to see the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal run opinion pieces today, urging Congress to — you guessed it — continue the program that isn’t working.

The WSJ ran this item from William McGurn, attacking Barack Obama for withholding his support for the DC voucher system that isn’t working, and the WaPo ran this editorial this morning.

Members of a House Appropriations subcommittee today will take up President Bush’s request for $18 million to continue the voucher program, along with new money for public and charter schools. Before they adopt language dismantling the program, they might want to take a good, hard look at who these children are: mostly African Americans from mainly single-parent households with incomes averaging around $22,700. As Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) wrote in an eloquent appeal to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a voucher critic: “The program is offering these students an opportunity that would probably otherwise be closed to them, but open to the children of more affluent families.” Children, say, like the sons and daughters of those who get to vote on whether this program will continue.

So, the DC voucher program is already suffering from accountability problems, and like voucher programs in other parts of the country, hasn’t improved test scores.

The logical response, according to Lieberman, the White House, the WaPo editorial board, and conservatives at the WSJ, is for Congress to give the program more money, and wait for the encouraging results to come around. Eventually.

The timing of the latest report doesn’t help the right at all. Congressional Dems, including DC’s non-voting representative, want to phase out the program, while Bush wants it to continue. A House Appropriations subcommittee is expected to debate the policy today.

We’ll see what happens.

Students who previously attended struggling schools — a group the program is designed to help — showed no boost in test scores compared with their peers.

You can’t refute a theology with facts. And that’s what this involves — a theology.

  • The logical response, according to Lieberman, the White House, the WaPo editorial board, and conservatives at the WSJ, is for Congress to give the program more money, and wait for the encouraging results to come around.

    Typical Democrats. Just throw more money at the problem. Oh, wait…

  • The logical response, according to Lieberman, the White House, the WaPo editorial board, and conservatives at the WSJ, is for Congress to give the program more money, and wait for the encouraging results to come around. Eventually.

    This is in fact eerily similar to their “plan” for “success” in Iraq… a lot of the same players, too.

  • Success has never mattered. Ideology matters. Iraq, abstinence, school vouchers, none work and yet all get more funding.

  • The logical response, according to Lieberman, the White House, the WaPo editorial board, and conservatives at the WSJ, is for Congress to give the program more money, and wait for the encouraging results to come around. Eventually.

    By a strange coincidence, that sentence sums up their Iraq policy too.

  • “unregulated private schools without conditions”

    No accountability and no results? Wow, I’m stunned (

  • (oops, mismatched HTML tags, trying again)

    “unregulated private schools without conditions”

    No accountability and no results? Wow, I’m stunned (sarcasm). Thanks, but I’ll withhold judgment on voucher programs until: 1) there is no promotion of religion involved, and 2) it is run ‘correctly’, which means regulation.

    “The logical response, … is for Congress to give the program more money”

    Be careful, there: throwing money at our education problem is precisely what teachers’ unions also suggest. That solution hasn’t worked either. Again, accountability needs to be implemented (and in a far better way than NCLB).

  • Ah, the irony of Joseph Lieberman lecturing Eleanor Holmes Norton on hardship, poverty, and how best to care for black children.

  • Now, if this was Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, you just change the lede “Voucher Students Perform As Well As Public Schools”. Then you continue to shovel the bs!

  • The whole voucher/charter school crusade is designed to totally undercut (already in bad shape) public education, and by-the-by, teacher unions. Somewhere, somehow, there are Rethugs making money off this thinly disguised attack on one of the mainstays of a functioning democracy: a well-educated populace. All the more reason to just keep throwing money at it.

  • Is it too cynical of me to think that these Republicans want to destroy the public schools so that they can have an underclass they can use for a volunteer army to fight an endless war on terror?

  • Page 39 of the report is important. It says that when you measure the improvement of students who actually used the scholarship (amazingly, almost 1 in 5 opted NOT to use the scholarship) the impact of treatment (IOT) was substantially effective in raising reading scores (effect size = .39).

    The anti-scholarship interpretation of this study is based on an analysis of students were were simply offered scholarships, whether they used them or not. Now this was very much what the study claimed to be reporting, so there’s no deception here at all. My concern is that the results not be portrayed as suggesting that private schools are ineffective. On the contrary, the study establishes that kids who used the scholarships to switch to private schools showed solid, statistically and practically significant gains in reading.

    I consider myself a liberal realist, and I am personally not in favor of school vouchers, but I think it’s good to acknowledge the details of what this study does and does not say.

  • If you try to spend the same amount of money for private schools as public, and then take 30% off the top for corporate profits, you have to cut some costs somewhere. Good teachers are not going to work for a whole lot less without many benefits.

  • To conservatives the success is to get students out of Public Education.

    They don’t need to do better. I suppose it’s enough they don’t do worse. The success is to destroy Public Education as we know it in this country.

  • gttim @ 15… mind providing a source for that 30% profit figure? The vast majority of schools our area not affiliated with a parish or diocese are independent, non-profits — and many pay teachers less than they would earn in public schools. Privates generally cost more per student because they have more teachers per student and don’t get the economies of scale that come with larger school districts.

  • #15…unless of course you don’t hire “good” teachers but lowest bid contract reps without degrees.

  • Part of the overall scheme here is that public schools get to ease poor students out in order to show required improvements on NCLB test scores. The private schools do not have these obligations.

  • Throwing more money at school that don’t work—wasn’t that the reason behind establishing these “alternative” schools in the first place? Public schools weren’t getting the job done?

    All they need is to adopt a “carrot/stick” concept here. Make the money available, but make the programs accountable. Detailed records of expenditures, remedial programs for testing skills, accurate classroom performance documentation—just as it should be. The critters who don’t want to be in the spotlight will crawl back under their pedagogical rocks, and the non-performing schools will dry up and blow away with the wind—like dust. Three or four alternative programs to do work would be a bigger threat to the non-functional public schools than dozens and dozens of non-functional alternative programs—and they’d be a lot cheaper, too….

  • gttim@15:

    1) 30% is a pretty dang good profit, no matter what the business. The liberals are complaining about the oil companies making a 10% profit at the moment.

    2) You seem to be under the impression that government works as efficiently as business. It never has and never will.

    That said, there will be those that argue schools shouldn’t be about efficiency. I say, it depends on how the government measures and rewards the ‘efficiency’. In the case of schools, it would NOT be ‘most students educated for the least amount of money,’ which is one of the strawmen I’ve seen used against vouchers.

    I *hardly* have all the answers. But in my opinion, there really is little accountability with the current system (and apparently with the voucher system in DC as well). Until that changes, we’ll get the same results as always.

  • To someone who read the study:

    What strikes me is that there were some increases in reading scores among those who opted to take the “scholarship”, but specifically those who were not attending a school in need of improvement (SINI) beforehand. The study says that based on the small n-size and other variables of this sub-group, it could be a false discovery. Further analysis is needed, afterall. 2 years is barely a preliminary study…

    But, to parse out the interesting, first-blush interpretation: the effects of attending a sub-par public school are so pernicious that attending a safer, more academically rigorous school does not remedy the effects.

    On the other hand, students who didn’t attend SINIs before taking the vouchers did show improvement. Great!

    But as a society, aren’t we rather more concerned about the kids stuck in SINIs? Thus far, vouchers haven’t been shown to be a promising solution to this problem.

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