Before law school, I was a teacher in the Mississippi Delta in a school district that was later taken over by the state. For two years, I bore witness to the damage that a struggling school system can inflict on children’s lives. The private school a few miles down Highway 82 might have offered a better education for my students—virtually all of whom were black and low-income—but its doors were barred to them by high tuition rates and its lingering heritage as a segregation academy.
Recently, the United States House of Representatives passed the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Reauthorization Act, which would reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). As the first federally funded school voucher program, OSP is commonly viewed as an unofficial model for school voucher programs around the country. Proponents of voucher programs like OSP claim that such programs offer students like mine an escape route from failing school districts by giving them the choice to attend higher-performing private schools. Twelve years after its inception, however, it is clear that OSP doesn’t provide students with any meaningful choices.
What Vouchers Don’t Do
As a preliminary matter, OSP vouchers don’t provide families with enough money to pay the tuition of elite private schools. Under the SOAR Act, the maximum amount that a student can receive for tuition from an OSP voucher is $7,500. According to the most recent data, 64 percent of the private schools participating in OSP charged tuition higher than the maximum amount. The choice that OSP actually gives low-income families, then, is whether to foot the bill for the difference in tuition or send their children to lower performing schools that charge tuition below the cap.
Given the disparity between voucher amounts and tuition rates at high-performing schools, it is perhaps unsurprising that OSP vouchers haven’t led to better academic outcomes for students. The General Accounting Office has published numerous studies of OSP. Time after time, the GAO has found no conclusive evidence that the vouchers program improves student achievement. Indeed, since OSP’s inception in 2003, it has been plagued by evidence that many participating private schools are worse than the low-performing schools the program is designed to help students escape.
What Vouchers Do
If voucher programs don’t provide students with meaningful choices or improve academic outcomes, what do they accomplish? Most directly, they funnel valuable resources away from already cash-strapped public school systems. OSP currently receives millions of dollars in public funding per year. If Congress added that money to the budget of D.C. Public Schools instead, it could be used to increase teacher salaries, improve facilities, and create programming at low-performing schools whose mission is to serve low-income students.
More disturbingly, voucher programs place our most vulnerable students in private schools that are beyond the reach of federal civil rights and disability laws. Once there, students of color and students with disabilities are deprived of the rigorous protection and support to which they are legally entitled. That is not likely to change: In a vote that split perfectly along party lines, the House rejected an amendment that would have required OSP-participating schools to abide by federal education laws.
Attempts to circumvent federal requirements regarding students of color are nothing new. Indeed, many American private schools—like the private school in the Delta town where I taught high school—were created as a direct attempt to avoid the Supreme Court’s historic desegregation order in Brown v. Board. Giving vulnerable students the “choice” to enter such environments without vital protections against discrimination is no choice at all.
What to Do About Vouchers
The way forward for OSP is clear: Fix it or forget it. Congress could design a voucher program that would do all of the things it claims this one does—that is, give students real choices about which schools they want to attend—while ensuring that students of color and students with disabilities are provided with the protections and resources to which they are entitled by federal law. OSP does none of those things, however. And by pretending that it does, Congress does a disservice to the very students and families it claims to be helping.
