A Battle in D.C.

Vouchers have never been shown to improve student achievement or school performance.

In recent months, most of the headlines out of Washington have been about the battle over the budget. As a result, another important battle has been nearly ignored. I mean the one concerned with how to fix the District of Columbia's beleaguered school system. The biggest issue here is a proposal by some congressional Republicans to introduce vouchers, which would use public money to pay for D.C. students to attend private schools and public schools in other jurisdictions. Vouchers are touted by supporters as a panacea. The truth is, they have never been shown to improve student achievement or school performance either in the U.S. or in any successful system abroad.

Many readers may not realize that vouchers are part of proposed changes for the D.C. schools because the grants are called scholarships rather than vouchers. That terminology is important. A few years ago, D.C. citizens turned down a voucher referendum by a huge vote. So congressional supporters call their voucher proposal by the more generally acceptable name of scholarships. But vouchers they are, and they represent an attempt to force on D.C. what voters have already said they do not want.

he argument you most often hear is that vouchers would help poor students escape from lousy schools -- and who could deny these youngsters whatever help they can get? Well, there are approximately 80,000 students in the D.C. schools, and many of them are poor. The proposal will fund vouchers for 3,000. Which students will get vouchers? Will they go first to poor children with real academic or behavioral problems and to those with serious handicapping conditions? The answer depends on the private and suburban schools to which students apply, and there is no reason to think these schools will admit all comers. They will be free to choose students using any criteria they like -just the way they are now. And they will be unlikely to accept students with real problems. After all, they have parents who are paying tuition -- or hefty tax bills for exclusive suburban schools -- precisely because they want to shield their children from other youngsters who have such problems.

The students who get the go-ahead will be those who are already doing pretty well and could be the nucleus of a good student body -- if we went with a reform that would help the schools improve. With vouchers taking out the best students, the D.C. schools will get worse. Test scores will go down; the percentage of students who are disciplinary problems will rise; and people who are already discouraged with public education will get a further push to give up on it.

The evidence is that vouchers do not work even for the youngsters who get them. Voucher supporters have talked up their scheme for so long that some people probably think vouchers have been a big success. They haven't. The voucher experiment in Milwaukee, involving under 1,000 children a year for a period of five years, is the largest one to date. It has done nothing to improve either the achievement of the voucher students or students in the system as a whole. And there is no reason to think it will.

But suppose instead of trying to help a few students escape the school system, Congress bent its efforts towards fixing the D.C. schools so all the D.C.'s students could benefit.

What creates good schools is no mystery. We can see it if we look at the high-performing school systems of other industrialized nations and at some of the U.S. schools that have begun to turn themselves around. These schools have a core curriculum that embodies high academic standards. They have effective discipline policies to ensure that their classrooms are safe and orderly places where children can learn. They have promotion and graduation policies that honor and demand real achievement from students. And they have solid professional development programs to assist teachers in helping students meet these high standards.

These reforms do not sound sexy or "innovative," but they are absolutely basic and, unlike vouchers, we know they will work. We also know that parents and the public support them. When they are in place, they will improve education for all the students in the system.

There is more at stake here than the future of the D.C. schools because congressional leaders promise to push the solution they arrive at in D.C. in cities all over the country. If Congress ignores the reforms that are needed -- high academic standards and safe and orderly classrooms -- and insists instead on their so-called scholarships, they will speed the demise of public education instead of taking a leadership role in restoring it.