Photo by Adam Fagen
This morning, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will have a markup of reauthorization of a contentious school voucher program that offers scholarships to low-income families for students to attend private and religious schools in the District.
Many D.C. leaders believe the program is ineffective and unnecessary, while some favor its benefits to D.C.’s public education system.
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, also known as SOAR, was established in 2004, and it’s the only federally funded voucher program in the country. In addition to providing $40 million annually to D.C. public and charter schools, it currently provides tuition to about 1,100 D.C. students who attend alternative institutions.
Serving Our Children, the organization that runs the program, announced last month that it expects the program to expand by “hundreds of new students” under the Trump administration, according to The Washington Post.
SOAR is the country’s solitary program of this type because there’s “limited support for vouchers” in Congress and the nation, so Republicans have decided to “abuse their power over a jurisdiction they view as defenseless,” according to a statement from D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has no voting rights on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Norton’s statement, which she plans to read before the committee today, says that the program is unnecessary because D.C. has a “robust public choice system” where nearly 50 percent of public school students attend charter schools, and 75 percent of public school students attend out-of-boundary schools that they’ve selected.
Several councilmembers, including D.C. Council Education Chair David Grosso, are also speaking out against the bill. In a letter to Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz, who chairs the committee charged with oversight of D.C., eight councilmembers point to U.S. Department of Education research that show the program “has not lived up to its original goals.”
The department found that over a four-year period, the use of a voucher had no statistically significant impact on overall student achievement in math or reading or students’ motivation to learn and participate in extracurricular activities, among other things. In addition, most of the schools offered don’t cater to students with special needs, which has led some parents to drop out of the program and others to decline scholarships altogether, according to the department’s research.
And a Washington Post report found that hundreds of students use the money to attend schools that are unaccredited or in unconventional settings, like a family-run K-12 school that’s housed out of a storefront and a Nation of Islam school that’s based in a former home in Deanwood.
The letter was signed by At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, At-Large Councilmember Anita Bonds, Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray, and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White.
It urges Congress to phase out the program, which Norton also suggests. However, they believe that it should still support students who currently benefit from the program until they graduate high school.
Grosso also objects to former mayor Anthony Williams having a role on a D.C. education task force over his advocacy for vouchers and endorsement of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. “The school voucher program that Ms. DeVos publicly supports and campaigns for and Mr. Williams endorses, would deeply undermine the quality of education children can receive in the District of Columbia,” Grosso wrote in a letter to have Williams removed as the co-chair. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser opted to keep Williams on the task force.
Bowser and the councilmembers who didn’t sign the letter aren’t fighting the program because of the dollars it provides to D.C. public and charter schools, according to The Washington Post. “It’s a delicate balance in the District that I think is a model for choice across the nation,” Bowser said on Tuesday, the Post reports.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson agrees. “I want as much money for DCPS as possible,” Wilson told DCist at forum in Deanwood last night.
The hearing is taking place at 10 a.m. at the Rayburn Building.
