On May 5, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee told a symposium on innovation in education that she doesn’t care whether education providers earn a profit if they are effective. “Textbook companies, food service companies, they all don’t do a whole lot of great stuff but they all make a ton of money off of kids,” she argued. Rhee later added that for her the “bottom line” for her is

a) “what is this organization going to deliver,”
b) “what guarantees are they going to make,” and
c) “how are they going to fit into our overall plan.”

She argued that opponents to for-profits in education were creating “sort of a false kind of dynamic” meant to “villainize a few of these for-profit organizations.”

However, when asked what type of innovative methods she’d like to see get additional funding, Chancellor Rhee did not mention the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. Instead, she pointed to programs such as City Year and Wireless Gen. (Research has shown that the DC voucher program improves some participant’s reading skills).

“I think that we have some things going on in the District right now that I think, with some of the entrepreneurial partners that I think have a tremendous amount of promise,” she said, encouraging philanthrophic donors to invest in somewhat risky education innovations. “I think in some ways education philanthropy has kind of become a sector where they only want to invest in the sure things, right? If it was a sure thing, we’d fund it with the public money, right?,” she said, continuing, “We have to ensure that the philanthropy continues to be able to take a risk on things that, you know, we’re not sure whether it’s gonna work out or not but we have reason to believe that it’s heading in that direction…”

According to Washington Post writer Bill Turque, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) invited six OSP program detractors to a hearing on the voucher program, including “Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who do not oppose vouchers but have been cautious in their public statements” but none of these potential witnesses chose to testify.

(The Chancellor’s office told Turque that Rhee had not received an invitation).

He criticized the hearing as biased, writing “The Senate’s most outspoken support of the D.C. voucher initiative orchestrated more than two hours of uniformly glowing testimony for the program at a committee hearing yesterday and said the dissenting voices he invited turned him down.”

“On May 6, 2009, President Obama announced that he would support a proposal to allow current students to remain in the program through graduation, but not new students,” stated Lieberman on May 13, according to his official statement. “That I suppose is a step forward, but with all due respect, in my opinion, it’s simply not enough. If the Opportunity Scholarship Program is not working, it should be terminated for all children. If it is working well enough for the children who are continuing in the program until they graduate from school, then it should also be continued for new generations of students.”

He continued, “I do want to state for the record that we invited no less than six witnesses to come and testify about their alternative perspectives on this program and not a single one accepted our invitation. I say that with regret, because I wanted to hear both sides.”

Witnesses testifying at the hearing were

• Latasha Bennett, a parent of a current OSP recipient,
• Tiffany Dunston, a former OSP student,
• Ronald Holassie, a current OSP student,
• Anthony A. Williams, a former DC Mayor,
• Bruce Stewart, the Head of School at Sidwell Friends School, and
• Dr. Patrick J. Wolf, one of the DoE report’s authors. Wolf is the endowed chair of school choice at the University of Arkansas.

An earlier article by WaPo writers Turque and Shailagh Murray deliberately understated the measured merits of the program. “The Department of Education recently issued a three-year analysis of student achievement under the program that found limited gains in reading and no significant progress in math. But the White House concluded that moving the children back to public schools amounted to an unnecessary disruption,” they wrote.

The study reported that “Overall, those offered a scholarship were performing at statistically higher levels in reading-equivalent to 3.1 months of additional learning-but at similar levels in math compared to students not offered a scholarship.”

In a Heritage Foundation report scholars Dr. Shanea Watkins and Dan Lips point out that this evaluation also “reported that students who had been participating in the program the longest had made greater progress than the control group in reading – a gain that amounted to nearly two school years worth of additional learning.”

As the DoE study put it, “There were also positive impacts for students who applied to the Program with relatively higher levels of academic performance, female students entering grades K-8 at the time of application, and students from the first cohort of applicants.”

“These impacts translate into 1/3 to 2 years of additional learning growth,” stated the study. “However, the positive subgroup reading impacts for female students and the first cohort of applicants should be interpreted with caution as reliability tests suggest that they could be false discoveries.”

Another aspect of the study less frequently discussed is that 82 percent of voucher-receiving students who chose to enroll in a private school chose a faith-based one. 59 percent of private school enrollees attended an Archdiocesan Catholic private school, even though Catholic facilities constituted only 39 percent of the private schools available to program participants.

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