Word: vouchers
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...test scores were perhaps even more surprising. Voucher proponents have long argued that if students were allowed to leave failing public schools--for better-run and more disciplined private and parochial schools--their performance would improve dramatically. But the Indiana study found only minor differences between voucher students and public school students on a standardized fourth-grade academic-achievement test. Voucher students scored better than public school students in language and science, but the differences were, the study found, "relatively small." In the other areas tested--reading, math, social studies and "total battery"--voucher students did no better than their...
...Voucher supporters fault the study's methodology, attacking everything from the impartiality of the researchers to the conditions under which the fourth-graders were tested. Lydia Harris, a reading specialist at Hope Central Academy, says the examiners who came to the school "didn't have a clue," and administered the test during children's nap time. She also suspects the State Department of Education, which commissioned the study, may have wanted vouchers to come off badly because its bureaucratic inertia makes it resist systemic reforms like vouchers. Even the study's authors concede their results don't necessarily discredit vouchers...
Still, public school backers seized on the hard numbers in the Indiana study as proof that vouchers can't deliver on their lofty claims. "These results are absolutely astounding," says Richard DeColibus, president of the Cleveland teachers' union. "But no one takes any notice of it because it goes against their preconceived notions that private schools teach better." The fact that the Indiana study didn't give second thoughts to voucher supporters is proof, he says, that their foremost concern is not children, but promoting a conservative education agenda. "Why would they want to expand a system that is demonstrably...
However, the most troubling aspect of the Cleveland voucher experiment has nothing to do with test scores and everything to do with the danger that vouchers could undermine the role that public schools have played in American life. Public schools have long held the promise of being America's great equalizer, mixing students of different races, classes and religions in a single student body. At their best, public schools have united diverse groups of students, many of them immigrants, by passing on the nation's shared civic heritage, from George Washington to George Washington Carver. Public schools have the ability...
...Cleveland's voucher program threatens to replace the single-heritage credo of public schools with a system that teaches one faith in one school and a competing faith in another. That's because the hard truth of the city's voucher program is that the choice it offers parents is mainly a choice of religious schools. The problem is that Cleveland's vouchers are capped at $2,250--not unusual for a voucher, but far too little money to allow real choice in the private school market. A poor parent who wanted to use a voucher at the Hathaway Brown...