Last week, several news outlets circulated a report by the U.S. Department of Education’s research division that found negative results for students who participated in the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only private school choice program for low-income children in Washington, D.C. Predictably, opponents of school choice descended on the report to tout it as evidence that school choice does not work. But as usual, the devil is in the details, and the bottom line is not what the school choice deniers would have you believe.

First, the report tracked test scores for only one year after students participated in the program. But a recent paper by researchers at the University of Arkansas examining a variety of school choice programs found that the effects of private school vouchers “often start out null in the first one or two years and then turn positive.” And as the authors of the paper rightly point out, “longer-term achievement effects, of course, are much more salient than immediate achievement effects whenever longer-term effects are available.”