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| Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-IL) stands with AFC senior advisor Kevin P. Chavous, parent activist Virginia Walden Ford, and OSP students at a press conference in March of 2011. |
When Kevin Carey of Education Sector called the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) “purely
symbolic” and “fundamentally rhetorical” in a
piece published recently in The New Republic,
he was continuing a false, sad, yet unfortunately oft-used argument against education
initiatives that benefit children from low-income families.
Carey's description of the D.C.
voucher program as merely symbolic is an insulting description to the more than 1,600 students from some of the city's lowest-income families who, thanks to the program, attend the school of their parents’ choice. He suggests that the program was created merely to give the "impression" that lawmakers are serious about reforming education. But this program is about far more than impressions and
appearances.
The OSP helps more than 1,600
students, 92 percent of whom would otherwise be attending a school in need of improvement if not for their scholarship.Since the program was
created in 2004, more than 11,000 students have applied to participate. Parents of students who are in the program are satisfied with their child's new school at a rate of 92 percent. By those and many other measures, it's clear that the program works.
As Carey points out, the program has a high
graduation rate; but what he fails to acknowledge is that the graduation rate
is actually 91 percent—more than 21 percentage points higher than students who applied for and did not
receive a scholarship, and more than 30 points higher than the general D.C. public school population. Carey also fails to know the improvement in reading scores exhibited by the students in the program, as discovered by a 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. And according to
the program’s administrator, 89 percent of OSP graduates went on to enroll in a
two- or four-year college. The sheer number
of parents students interested in the program—despite special interests working to
limit its size and scope—coupled with increased academic attainment and achievement levels demonstrate that the OSP is far more than a literary tool.
