Behind the Headline: House Oversight Committee Reauthorizes D.C. Voucher Program

On Top of the News
House Oversight Committee Reauthorizes D.C. Voucher Program
Ed Week | 4/14/16

Behind the Headline
Lost Opportunities
Education Next | Fall 2009

The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday voted to reauthorize the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to low-income D.C. students.  Speaker of the House Paul Ryan praised the program at a press conference on Thursday.

Andrew Ujifusa of Ed Week notes that “The D.C. voucher program has been a reliably controversial K-12 issue in Washington for some time.”

The story of “How Vouchers Came to D.C.” was told by Spencer Hsu in the Fall 2004 issue of EdNext.

Matt Chingos and Meghan Gallagher describe the results of the most recent evaluation of the program

The final report from the initial evaluation, which was released in 2010, has something in it for both OSP supporters and opponents.

Supporters can credit the voucher program with improved reading scores and high school graduation rates: 82 percent of students offered a voucher graduated from high school, compared to 70 percent of those who lost the lottery. But critics can point to the lack of an impact on math scores, the failure of the reading impact to meet the government’s standard for statistical significance (it was significant at the 90 percent confidence level but not the 95 percent level), and the fact that high school graduation information was collected from a survey of parents rather than administrative records.

Patrick Wolf wrote wrote at greater length about the impact of the program on participating students for Education Next in 2009.

—Education Next

Last Updated

NEWSLETTER

Notify Me When Education Next

Posts a Big Story

Business + Editorial Office

Program on Education Policy and Governance
Harvard Kennedy School
79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone (617) 496-5488
Fax (617) 496-4428
Email Education_Next@hks.harvard.edu

For subscription service to the printed journal
Phone (617) 496-5488
Email subscriptions@educationnext.org

Copyright © 2024 President & Fellows of Harvard College