Zeal For Truth

As an elementary school teacher in the public education system, I am required to join the local (OEA) and national (NEA) teacher unions. Recently, the NEA celibrated “150 years in education,” and all of their “accomplishments” as a union and how far the United States has come in the past century in terms of educating children. Quite frankly, I was dumbfounded. Recent history alone has shown that Americans are increasingly appalled at the state of education in our country. So much so, that President George Bush ran on an education platform in the 2000 election and won the presidency promising to enact the “No Child Left Behind” legislation.

Since that legislation, debate has raged in favor of improving public education through federal law or de-federalizing education to a certain extent through the use of vouchers and other school choice options. It is fair to say that parents are often unhappy with the level of education their children are recieving in the public education system.

Recently a trial voucher program was piloted in the District of Columbia in Washington D.C. The Washington Post reports that this voucher program provides $ 7,500 vouchers (about half the average public expediture per student in the D.C. area) to 1,800 K-12 students who live in the D.C. area and come from low income families to transfer to private schools and escape the troubled D.C. public schools. A study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences was released recently. The report studied five key outcomes of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program: school differences; academic achievement; parental perceptions of school satisfaction and safety; student reports of school satisfaction and safety; and the impact of using a scholarship.

Key findings of the report include:

• After one year, there was no clear evidence of a statistically significant difference in test scores between students who were offered a scholarship and students who were not offered a scholarship, over the seven month school year.

• Overall, students who were offered the scholarship were performing in math and reading at levels comparable to students not offered a scholarship;

• The study’s results showed a positive impact on math achievement for two subgroups of students: students who had not previously attended a D.C. public school classified as in need of improvement and students with relatively higher baseline test scores.

• The Program had a substantial and consistently positive impact on parental satisfaction and their perceptions of school safety.

• Of the parents whose child received a scholarship, 74% gave their child’s school a grade of “A” or “B” compared to 55% of parents whose children did not receive scholarships.

It would seem then, looking at these facts, that the voucher program was sucessful in its first year because students maintained reading scores, gained in math scores, met parental expectations, and managed to do this in a period of seven months. Remember, this was done with approximately half the funds that would have been spent of these students in the same year in public schools.

Others, such as Washington Post reporters Amit R. Paley and Theola Lab disagree, their article cites voucher programs as being irrelevant and goes so far as to suggest that vouchers programs have recieved a failing grade.