Congress is set to expand a school voucher program that was found to hurt student performance

Vouchers are a major component of that mission because they repackage public funds, in the form of tax dollars, as a kind of gift certificate that kids can use to pay for private education.

In theory, vouchers could improve the quality of a child’s education by allowing them access to schools they couldn’t afford to pay for without a subsidy. But a growing number of studies have found that vouchers actually yield negligible, and potentially harmful, effects.

For instance, analyses carried out in Louisiana found that voucher-using students in the 50th percentile in math had dropped to the 26th percentile by the end of the first year. The second year saw modest rebound, but still well below the starting point. Similar drops have been recorded in Indiana and Ohio.

The Washington, DC study revealed students fell by about 5.4 percentile points in the national distribution of math test scores. Reading scores also fell, but by an insignificant amount. On the heels of those experiments, critics are claiming the data may indicate that voucher programs aren’t just ineffective but potentially harmful.

“I am always disappointed when Congress intervenes in DC local matters, and I think this is one of those areas where it is extremely consequential,” David Grosso, a Washington DC council member, told the Post.

The DC voucher program is the only one of its kind that receives federal funds to support school vouchers. All other programs receive state-allocated money.

As part of its recommitment to the DC vouchers, Congress has also called for a less rigorous approach to future studies about its effectiveness.

Currently, studies compare voucher recipients to kids who applied for vouchers but didn’t receive them. This is the accepted gold standard: comparing an experimental group with an identical control for whom the conditions don’t change.

The new standards would compare voucher recipients to kids with “similar backgrounds” in the local public and charter schools. Experts regard this as a generally weaker comparison since not all public-school students fit the same profile as kids whose parents feel they need vouchers.

Secretary DeVos reacted to the reauthorization positively, saying the study’s limited findings didn’t necessarily reflect the progress made in DC private schools since 2004, when the program began.

“The study released today found that DC OSP parents overwhelmingly support this program, and that, at the same time, these schools need to improve upon how they serve some of DC’s most vulnerable students,” DeVos said in a statement. “We should demand excellence from all of our nation’s schools, regardless of their type.”

However, as The Atlantic’s Leah Askarinam points out, nothing in the report backs up DeVos’ claim that parents or students overwhelmingly support the program.

“The program did not have a statistically significant impact on parents’ or students’ general satisfaction with the school the child attended,” the report stated.