D.C. Conference Centering On Vouchers
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Giving private school vouchers to Washington, D.C., schoolchildren has increased the funds available to the city’s public system at large, but it has not triggered a competitive pushback of improvement in the public schools, researchers will argue at a conference in Washington today. The findings offer a measured defense of a program and come on the heels of study showing it had little if any impact on test scores after two years. The federally funded program now gives 1,800 D.C. children vouchers to cover tuition at a private school of their choice, a value that has ranged between $3,400 and $24,545 a student.
“The information so far is all positive,” the principal researcher in the federal government study, Patrick Wolf, said yesterday. But he added: “We’ve got a ways to go before we’re going to know conclusively whether or not this is a good thing for parents and students.”
One paper to be presented today concludes that the program has provided a “net inflow of funds” both to the city’s public schools and to the city government. Opponents of private school vouchers, a group that includes many Democrats and teachers unions, say the scholarships could drain money from the public school system.
Voucher supporters say the scholarships’ threat to public schools could spur them to improve. But several papers conclude that the D.C. program did not spur improvement. One cites as explanation the program’s limited size and a policy of reimbursing schools for any lost funds caused by students leaving for private school.
Larry Mishel, president of a liberal think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, challenged whether today’s conference — organized in part by Mr. Wolf, whose Georgetown University research group receives funding from the Bush administration — had convened a balanced panel.
Mr. Wolf said he has invited speakers including the staffs of voucher opponents such as Senator Kennedy and all the members of the D.C. City Council, many of whom oppose the project.
Vouchers are among the most volatile issues in education, and research on them tends to invite varying interpretations. Ten years ago, when a philanthropic group gave vouchers to 1,300 New York City students, separate studies of the program drew different conclusions based on the same data.
