Though still in its early stages, the Washington Scholarship Fund, a pioneering program of private assistance to enable poor children in Washington, D.C., to attend private schools, has received its first outside assessment. A new report from Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance provides mostly good news for the burgeoning movement to give privately funded tuition vouchers to students who would otherwise attend horrifically underperforming public schools.
After seven months in their new schools, second- through fifth-grade D.C. students who received the scholarships are scoring modestly better on standardized math tests than their public-school peers. Reading scores were statistically similar between the two groups. Sixth- through eighth-grade private-school students, however, scored lower on reading tests than public-school students. Math scores among the two groups were basically the same. "Students in their middle years," the report suggests, "have found it difficult to adjust when moving from a public school to a private school."
What accounts for the differences in performance between the age groups? Perhaps the answer is discipline. According to the Harvard researchers, "Suspension rates reported by parents for younger students are similar in private and public schools, . . . but considerably higher in private school than in public school for students in grades 6-8, 20 percent as compared to 3 percent." Thus, "whereas younger students attending private schools are more likely than public-school students to say students are proud to attend my school, the opposite results are attained for students in the middle years." In other words, the older kids are bummed out that they're going to tougher schools than the ones they left.
Parents, on the other hand, are thrilled. The study points out that "46 percent of private-school parents gave their school an 'A,' as compared to 15 percent of public-school parents." And in an age when school safety is on the minds of parents and politicians alike, 60 percent of private-school parents said they were "very satisfied" with school safety, while only 20 percent of public-school parents said the same. The report is obviously preliminary, but it strongly suggests that students should be exposed to a solid academic environment as early as possible. If the educrats keep dragging their feet and avoid real reform, students will pay the price.