D.C. students face tough choices if scholarship voucher program ends

Vonette Davis knew she found the right school for her son when instead of angry notes from teachers, the fifth-grader at Southeast’s St. Thomas More Catholic School came home with a clarinet.

“He loves music, and I think it will help with his math and English, too,” Davis said. “If the voucher program stays in place, I’d like him to continue it through eighth grade and onto Archbishop Carroll High School or Duke Ellington [School of the Arts].”

Julio Davis is one of about 1,700 mostly low-income D.C. students who use up to $7,500 of federal money for tuition at a private school through the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. But the students’ money is about to dry up, forcing many to return to the District’s struggling public school system or seek hard-to-get financial aid for private schools.

A spending bill soon to be voted on in the Senate would fund the five-year-old program through the end of next school year but would require reauthorization to keep it going in 2010. This is an unlikely prospect in a Congress controlled by Democrats traditionally opposed to private school vouchers.

“I’d have to put him back in public school,” Vonette Davis said, where he struggled academically and misbehaved in the classroom during his first few years at Southeast’s Simon Elementary.

But public school is exactly the place many opponents of vouchers think Julio and others like him could thrive — under certain conditions.

American Federation of Teachers officials argue that money spent on private tuition would be better used in public schools to decrease class sizes and better train teachers. Those two factors, unions argue, have the biggest effect on student performance.

“What we’ve seen so far in the five years that vouchers have been offered is that they haven’t made the kind of difference that proponents argued they would,” said Nancy Van Meter, an AFT policy analyst.

Van Meter cited studies of voucher programs in places such as Milwaukee and Florida that she said show less success than experiments with decreased class size and better teachers.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., added the language requiring reauthorization. The law creating the program in 2004 required annual funding votes but not yearly reauthorization. In arguing for the change, Durbin pointed to evidence of tuition going to schools that don’t normally charge tuition and of private school teachers lacking college degrees.

“We really have to step back and say, ‘Did it work?’ ” Durbin said recently to the Senate Appropriations Committee. “If it didn’t work, let’s try something different.”

But voucher advocates point to numerous studies showing long-term success. Paul Peterson, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and one of the nation’s foremost experts on vouchers, said continuing them was essential to gathering those years of data required to measure effectiveness.

“It takes time to get educated,” he said, adding that a congressionally mandated D.C. study has only two years of data. “You don’t just take one pill and get smarter — ideally you’d track students for at least five years.”

In that time, Davis thinks her son could become a strong student and a clarinet virtuoso.

“That’s why I’m adamant — we need this money,” Davis said. “These kids need opportunities.”