Critics argue that vouchers take needed resources away from struggling public schools, but that’s not what has happened in the District of Columbia, according to a new report prepared by scholars at the Cato Institute.
In fact, if anything, the District of Columbia Public Schools system is profiting by nearly $8 million under the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. That’s what the Cato scholars found when they analyzed the financial impact of the first federally funded K-12 school voucher program in the nation.
The DCPS system spends an astounding $15,376 per pupil, compared to the national average of $9,360, yet still manages to produce the nation’s worst student test results. Thanks to a $13 million federal grant as a result of the voucher program, DCPS “no longer has to bear the cost of educating the students who leave,” the Cato report said. Instead of hemorrhaging money as voucher critics predicted, DCPS gets an additional $100 for every student who doesn’t receive a voucher.
The program, which was signed into law by President Bush in January 2004, provides vouchers worth up to $7,500 for low-income children in the District who choose to attend private schools. In the 2004-05 school year, the first year the program went into effect, 1,027 students took advantage of the offer instead of attending their assigned public schools.
Even without the added federal funds, the voucher program’s positive financial impact on the school system is so great, says study authors Susan Aud and Leon Michos, that DCPS would still save $258,402.
“There is, in fact, a financial incentive for the District and DCPS to encourage students to leave their system and participate in the voucher program,” Aud and Michos said. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what vouchers are supposed to do — introduce competitive pressures to force public school officials to improve their educational product. That’s not what’s happening in D.C.
The Cato study also found a disturbing pattern of DCPS officials effectively skimming from funds that should go to improve classrooms and instead fattening their own administrative budgets:
“DCPS central administration retains nearly one-third of the variable funding it receives from the city government,” Aud and Michos report.
Meanwhile, more than 15,000 elementary students still in DCPS schools lack art teachers and nearly 12,000 don’t have music teachers. This in a public school system that spends $1 billion a year to educate fewer than 60,000 students.
Recent polls show that education has now become city voters’ top issue, but so far none of the candidates for mayor or D.C. Council chairman have pledged to clean-up what is clearly the nation’s worst-managed public school system. How many more generations of local children must graduate with inferior educations before D.C. public officials are finally forced to shape up?
