The Washington Post reports:
A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program. . . Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.
Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups. . .
The study, conducted by the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, compared the performance and attitudes of students with scholarships with those of peers who were eligible but weren’t chosen in a lottery. Parents of students in the program were more satisfied with their children’s new schools and considered the schools safer, the report found. Students showed no difference in their level of satisfaction.
(Via Volokh.)
The usual counterattack by the education statists against vouchers is that private schools engage in “creaming” taking the best students and therefore producing the best results. That argument will be very hard to make now, since the DC participants were selected by lottery. I suppose the new argument will draw from the fact that the students from the very worst schools did not improve, but I’m not sure how they’ll form it.
Still, I’m not wild about vouchers, for a completely different reason. What the government funds, it always ends up trying to control. Private schools that accept vouchers are setting themselves up for government interference, which will ultimately hurt educational performance, as well as degrade some of the other attributes that make them more attractive than public schools. I’ve always felt that the best way to implement school choice is via refundable tax credits, rather than vouchers. That way there’s no money flowing directly from the government to schools.
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