That's what the headlines should say about this recently released study on Washington's federally-funded school scholarship program, though they probably won't. That's because, as the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) summary states, the study "found no significant differences in student achievement between those who were offered scholarships to attend a participating private school and those who were eligible for, but were not offered (as assigned by a lottery) a scholarship." But wait, there's good news:
However, being offered a scholarship may have improved reading test scores among three subgroups of relatively more advantaged students: those who had not attended a School in Need of Improvement (SINI) school when they applied to the program, those who had relatively higher pre-program academic performance, and those who applied in the first year of program implementation.
Here's what you need to know that the media (not to mention anti-voucher groups) will neglect to tell you: in tiny programs such as D.C.'s, it's really hard to find "effects" because the sample size is so limited. Participants have to do dramatically better than the control group in order for researchers to detect a statistically significant difference. So the fact that impacts were found for three subgroups (whose members make up 88 percent of the program's participants, according to the Department of Education's press release*) is pretty darn impressive.
But hey, Fordham now has its own fully-credentialed Research Director, so I'll let Amber take it from here.
* This is the kind of context (or spin, if you like) that would have been helpful when IES released its infamous Reading First study. What's ironic is that Margaret Spellings's press office did a great job on today's report release and was totally MIA on Reading First--even though Spellings herself is lukewarm about vouchers and fanatic about phonics. Maybe, on Reading First, Spellings has something to hide.
