President Obama, Mayor Vincent Gray and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton — all of whom opposed congressional efforts to restore funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program — have some humble pie to eat. Since Congress revived the moribund voucher program in April, enrollment is up 60 percent. That’s because more than 92 percent of the predominantly black and Hispanic applicants would otherwise have been forced to attend inferior public schools in need of improvement as defined by federal law. Too many of those students would never make it to graduation. Obama, Gray and Norton said they wanted to kill the OSP, which provides up to $12,000 per student for tuition at qualifying private schools, because the program produced only “modest” effects on overall student test scores. However, a federally mandated evaluation done by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences found that OSP students made the second largest academic gains of any program studied. That’s quite a bang for the $400 million spent since OSP was originally approved by Congress in 2004. They also ignored how the federally funded voucher program has been a life-changer for thousands of underprivileged D.C. youngsters, which is why three quarters of District residents support it.
The final 2010 report on the OSP found that 21 percent more participants graduated from high school than among other DCPS students. A similar finding was replicated in Milwaukee, where voucher recipients earned 12 percent more high school diplomas. Graduation is not only a prerequisite for admission to a two-year technical college or a four-year degree program, it also correlates with higher levels of employment, personal wealth, and even life expectancy – and lower levels of criminal behavior and other social pathologies.
Thanks to OSP, D.C.’s traditional public and charter schools have received hundreds of millions of federal dollars for students they did not have to teach. And since vouchers cost about half as much per student than public schools, the program has also meant more money was available for public schools. As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters noted in these pages last month, “Vouchers are one of the few policies that lead to educational improvements, while saving taxpayer dollars.” But low-income District parents are flocking to OSP again for another reason: It offers their children a rare shot at a better life. Democrats who tried to shut their educational lifeline down for good should now apologize for standing in these school house doors.
