D.C. Vouchers Have Scant Effect on Scores, Study Finds

For the second year in a row, researchers have found little to no overall difference in the standardized-test scores of students who are enrolled in private schools under the District of Columbia’s federally funded voucher program and their peers who attend public schools in the nation’s capital.

Specifically, for students who had attended public schools deemed to be failing before the students took part in the voucher program—a high-priority target for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—the new federal study shows no statistically significant impacts on their test scores.

At the same time, the researchers found that being offered or using a voucher under the scholarship program may have improved reading scores for three other subgroups of students, though researchers urged that those impacts be “interpreted and used with caution.” Those three subgroups constituted 88 percent of students who are participating in the voucher program and included: students who attended schools that were not labeled as failing when they applied for vouchers; students who had relatively higher academic-performance levels before entering the program; and students who were voucher applicants in the program’s first year of operation,...