DC Vouchers: Bang for the Buck

Standardized test scores aren ’t what they used to be. FromA Nation at Risk in 1983 toCommon Core around 2010, they were close to exclusively how we assessed whether students and schools were succeeding. But over the years the monomaniacal focus on test scores increasingly grated on schools and families, and with the Common Core threatening to put everyone on the road to the exact same standards and tests, there was a political revolt. At about the same time an empirical revolt was brewing,withincreasingevidence that schools ’ test scores may not correlate all that well with other important outcomes, ranging from college attendance to health. Which brings us to the latest evaluation of the Washington, DC, voucher program.After the first two reports in the three-installment series found negative test score effects it waseasy to be disappointed, even while realizing that test scores are very cramped measures, and the DC voucher program was functioning in a district where choice, once you add in charter schools and choice among traditional public schools, was the norm. Choice is still the norm —78 percent of students who applied for vouchers but did not receive them nonetheless went to schools other than those to which they were assigned—but now test scores for DC voucher students are statistically indistinguishable from those of applicants who did not receive vouchers.So DC vouchers are a test-score wash. But they are a plus in many other areas, including reducing chron...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs