Alabama children attending private schools on a taxpayer-backed scholarship program are not showing significant improvement on standardized tests, a University of Alabama study has found.
Touted as a way to help low-income students escape schools with chronically low test scores, the Alabama Accountability Act provides scholarships and tax credits for students to transfer to private schools. The study by the university’s Institute for Social Science Research found that scholarship students frequently outperformed their lower-income public school counterparts, but not the state as a whole. Those students also were not likely to boost their own test scores.
