Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams

As 2003 draws to a close, Congress is just one step away from approving a federally-funded school voucher program for Washington, D.C., one that is likely to raise the national profile of vouchers—which supporters portray as a method for increasing educational options for children in low-performing schools, and opponents describe as a strategy for undermining rather than reforming public schools.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved H.R. 2673, which contains the “D.C. School Choice Incentive Act of 2003” on December 8, 2003 by a vote of 242 to 176. The Senate is expected to delay action until mid-January 2004. But even voucher opponents acknowledge that the five-year federally funded program is a near-certainty to win Senate passage.

Local Opposition and Support
Some local education advocates, such as Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools, are strongly opposed to the plan. They argue that while the city’s school system suffers from a wide range of problems, a thriving charter school movement has given many students choices outside the regular public schools. (An estimated 14,000 students attend the city’s 42 public charter schools.) And they worry that the plan will drain resources and the best students from the public system.

The voucher plan is also seen by some as another example of Congressional meddling in the affairs of the city. While Washington is the political center of the world’s dominant democracy, it is also uniquely disenfranchised. Residents have no voting representative in Congress, and the City Council and Mayor must get Congressional approval for many aspects of the city’s governance.

However, the voucher proposal has high-profile local support from D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz, and Kevin Chavous, chairman of the city council’s education committee. These three city leaders say reform of the city’s schools is proceeding too slowly, and that D.C. parents need more and better educational choices. They’re also eyeing the increased federal spending included in the plan.

The main concern now should be how the District’s school children will fare. Will low-income students who transfer to private schools through the program perform better academically? Will D.C. public schools lose or gain money on the deal? Will the voucher program reduce or increase the ability of parents to advocate for their children in school? On these critical issues for the children and communities involved, there is profound disagreement.

The Struggle to Improve
Since the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, public schools across the nation have been perceived for the most part as failing to contain “the rising tide of mediocrity” described therein. Nowhere is this negative view more pervasive than in Washington, D.C. In a press conference supporting D.C. vouchers, Mayor Anthony Williams compared the failings of the District’s public schools to a natural disaster.

But Williams’ sudden focus on the problems within the city’s schools ignored some promising signs of improvement. Tommy Wells represents District 3 on the D.C. Board of Education. “The fact is that the District has four of the highest performing high schools in the country,” Wells said. “We have the Transformation Schools program in place to improve the lowest performing schools, and test scores are up.”

The D.C. Voucher Act cites low academic performance, as demonstrated by scores on the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, as one of the major findings in support of the need for vouchers. In mid-November 2003, the U.S. Department of Education released the 2003 NAEP Reading and Math assessment for grades four and eight. As Wells claims, scores did improve, especially for D.C. students of color.

• 4th grade reading scale scores went up 10 points among African American students between 1998 and 2003.
• Among Latino 4th graders, the increase was 14 points.
• 8th grade math scale scores for Latino students improved by 22 points from 2000 to 2003.
• Gains for African American students were smaller, an 8 point increase, but still significant.

Despite the gains, District students still fare poorly on the NAEP, with 71 percent scoring “below basic” in 2003.

Voucher advocates argue that academic achievement will increase more rapidly for students who can take advantage of the voucher program, which would allow an estimated 2,000 students from families with incomes up to 185 percent of the federal poverty rate (or about $36,000 for a family of four) to attend private and parochial schools.

However, there is as yet no clear evidence that students who participate in existing voucher programs in other cities are doing better academically. In its 2001 review of school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, the General Accounting Office (GAO) found little or no statistically significant differences in the achievement test scores of voucher students compared to public school students.

Money Matters
Casey J. Lartigue, Jr. is an education policy analyst for the Cato Institute, and the author of a paper, “School Choice in the District of Columbia,” which lays out several arguments in favor of a voucher program for the city.

Among them is an economic argument. Lartique argues in his paper that D.C. taxpayers “would realize savings” under a voucher plan because the public schools spend more per student than the vouchers would cost. Per-pupil expenditures in D.C. are among the highest in the nation, at about $12,000. The voucher program would provide about 2,000 students with up to $7,500 each towards the cost of tuition.

Meanwhile Nina Rees, deputy undersecretary for innovation and improvement for the Department of Education, said during an online forum hosted by the Washington Post that the Bush administration would not support any voucher program that would reduce funding for public schools in the district.

Rees and others argue that the public schools would come out ahead in the deal. The legislation proposes to spend $14 million per year on vouchers, and an additional $1 million for administration of the program. Another $13 million would go to public charter schools, and yet another $13 million for the regular public schools.

But some of those familiar with local educational spending and outcomes have a different take on the numbers. Wells points to the fact that the budget for D.C. public schools is based on the number of students in the system. “ When you take 2,000 students out of the system, D.C. public schools will lose $16 million because we’ll have that many fewer students in our census,” he said. “This revenue drain will weaken the public schools and kids will end up being hurt. It’s that much less money to deal with our special needs students, for example.”

The Washington, D.C. public schools enroll about 65,000 students, 84 percent of them black, about 9 percent Hispanic, and the remainder white, Asian, or other. About 11,000 students have been identified as having special needs.Special education costs have been a major driving force behind soaring per-pupil expenditures in the city.

From Wells’ perspective, the additional $13 million in federal funding would still leave a $3 million hole. Voucher proponents, however, counter that a system with 2,000 fewer students to educate should be able to recognize some significant savings.

Local Control and Accountability
It’s difficult to argue against an issue like school vouchers when some of the most visible elected officials in the District—Williams, Cafritz and Chavous—are in favor of it.

However, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s non-voting representative in Congress, has come out strongly against the proposal, arguing that city residents are opposed to vouchers. A recent poll by the National Association of School Boards found that 76 percent of D.C. respondents opposed any voucher program “that means less money for public school students.”

But voucher proponents say the wording of the NASB question skewed the results, and point out that a 1998 Washington Post poll found 56 percent support for vouchers, using a question that did not mention the issue of lost funding for public schools.

“This was the last thing I wanted to spend time on,” said Wells. “ But when the mayor and others made this such a visible issue, I felt that I had to take a stand as an elected official.” Wells worries that private schools can’t be held accountable for helping all their students achieve.

Especially since the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law, public schools are being held accountable for student achievement overall, and in particular for improving achievement among low-income and minority students. Beyond that, D.C public schools are accountable to the public because they’re funded with public money.

Rees and other voucher advocates say that this experiment will demonstrate how schools can be made accountable to parents, but are short on the details of how that process will work. A parent with a child in the D.C. public schools can follow a well-worn path to try and resolve problems: start with the teacher, bring in the principal, and if necessary call “downtown”, as the central administrative offices are called. School officials may not always be responsive – but unlike private school administrators, they don’t have the option of choosing not to deal with a troublesome child, or one with troublesome parents.

The legislation calls for the Secretary of Education and the D.C. mayor to commission an evaluation of the voucher program, which will focus on the academic achievement of participating students. Parents would receive at least one report a year on student achievement and the safety of the school.

Long-Term Concerns
The proposed voucher program runs for five years, and one question that troubles Wells and others is what will happen after the federal program expires. If the city can’t afford to continue funding vouchers, or if taxpayers won’t support it, then those children would be flooding back into a smaller school system with fewer classrooms and teachers, that will have a hard time accommodating them.

“This puts the kids whose parents accepted the vouchers at risk, because the D.C. public school system will have downsized to address the loss of these students,” says Wells. “We’ll be unable to gear up to bring voucher kids back into the system. Unless local voters agree, we ought not do this.”

Resources:

• District of Columbia Public Schools
• U.S. Department of Education
• National School Boards Association
• Mayor Anthony Williams speech on school choice and vouchers

Talk Back

If you’ve got comments or questions about this story, we’d like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips (susan@connectfokids.org).

Cecilia Garcia is the executive director for Connect for Kids.
Susan Phillipis is the excutive editor for Connect for Kids.