Participating private schools will need to become more accountable if D.C.’s federally funded voucher program stands a chance at continuing, senators said Wednesday at a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The call for more data to determine student success gets at the heart of the school choice debate: What determines the viability of a school: parental standards or government standards?
The voucher program, called D.C. Opportunity Scholarships, allows about 1,700 low-income students in the District to attend private schools, at a cost of about $13 million this year. A bill pending in Congress would reauthorize the five-year-old program and expand the number of eligible students.
But some senators are not convinced the millions have been spent wisely, or should be offered again.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that studies of student success among D.C. voucher students have shown limited gains at best, and that his office was denied data from the administering Washington Scholarship Fund as to how many voucher students are at each school.
“I’m not going to send money to a program that won’t provide me with information,” Durbin said to Gregory Cork, president and chief executive officer of the Washington Scholarship Fund.
Cork said student numbers were not released in the interest of confidentiality, but promised to provide Durbin with the information he needed to ensure each student is accounted for financially.
Durbin also showed pictures of three participating private schools that appeared slipshod from the outside and lacked even functional Web sites.
Cork responded by saying his organization “permit[s] parents full information about the schools. … And in fact we encourage parents making educational choices to visit the schools themselves. It’s been quite gratifying” to see parents do so, he said.
Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., both support the continuance of the voucher program, but agreed with Durbin that more needs to be done to ensure accountability, including mandating that voucher students take the same standardized test given to D.C. Public Schools students.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee testified at the same hearing and voiced support for the vouchers.
“Both the mayor and I continue to support the tri-sector approach,” Rhee said, alluding to regular public schools, charter schools and vouchers. “But I agree with the concerns surrounding accountability. … It will be necessary in coming years to do apples to apples comparisons, and that requires all students taking the same test.”
