For many students, it is an exciting time of year. Students are returning to school to reunite with old friends, meet new ones, and, of course, learn many new and interesting things.
Some children, however, will be attending underperforming schools that stand in the way of students reaching their full potential. We owe it to students and their families to find ways to improve struggling schools.
Some lawmakers think the way to improve the nation’s struggling schools is to just keep throwing more taxpayer money at the problem. That approach has failed in the past, and nothing suggests it will work in the future.
In fact, the worst schools (in Washington, D.C.) spend twice as much per pupil then states with the best schools. I believe it’s time to try some creative solutions to help students. There are innovative approaches that hold a great deal of promise and have, in fact, yielded successes in places where they have been implemented.
One such approach is allowing low-income parents to have a choice of which school their children can attend. Students wouldn’t be locked into a specific school based on where they live; rather, parents could send their children to a better performing public school, or they could receive a voucher that could be used to pay the costs of a private or religious school.
In Washington, D.C., the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is a voucher program that provides federally-funded education vouchers to students in families that are at or below the poverty line. The program was signed into law four years ago and currently serves 1,900 students who receive up to $7,500 a year to attend a private or religious school. This program is very popular, with parents fighting to get their student a cherished slot. “More than 7,000 students have applied for scholarship,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently wrote in the Washington Post. “Eligible applicants represent nearly one in eight low-income District students.”
Secretary Spellings also reported that the students receiving vouchers have made improvements in their studies. According to Spellings, 90 percent of students have improved their reading skills in a manner “equivalent [to] two to four extra months of learning.” The program gives low-income families a real choice to send their children to safe, well-performing schools. As Senator John McCain recently stated, “When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet…minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children.”
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program embraces something that traditionally-run public schools too often lack: accountability. If parents in Washington decide that the voucher program is not producing the results they desire, they can send their children back to a different school. One of the results is that previously underperforming public schools change in order to compete for the students (since funding is based mostly on the number of students in the school).
Unfortunately, some lawmakers, including Senator Barack Obama, want to return to the old days by discontinuing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Undermining this program and others around the country will only harm low-income students who seek a quality education on par with the opportunities afforded to students from wealthier families. In fact, if Congress were to discontinue funding the D.C. scholarship program, 86 percent of the students would be reassigned to schools that did not meet “adequate yearly progress” goals in reading and math for the 2006-to-2007 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
A good education teaches people to think creatively in order to solve problems. Lawmakers should remember their school days and think creatively about new solutions to help today’s students. School vouchers have clearly worked for D.C., and I hope that lawmakers heed this success story and will support such school choice opportunities to even more students.
