Vouchers Found to Lower Test Scores in Washington Schools

Sunday, April 30th, 2017

Vouchers Found to Lower Test Scores in Washington Schools

Author: ERICA L. GREEN
Source: The New York Times
Publication Date: APRIL 28, 2017
Link: Vouchers Found to Lower Test Scores in Washington Schools

Stephan: I believe it is conceptually possible to design a wellbeing fostering voucher system, just as one could design a charter system. It wouldn't be very efficient, but it's possible. What's wrong with what Trump and DeVos want to do is that the systems they are talking about have profit not wellbeing as their first priority. As a result the effect is a diminishment of wellbeing as represented by the lowered test scores. The laws of social wellbeing cannot be faked.

Fifth graders at Excel Academy, a Washington charter school, which was visited this month by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Melania Trump, the first lady.
Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, House Republicans led by the former Speaker John A. Boehner have used school children in the nation’s capital as an experiment for school choice, funding a far-reaching voucher program to send poor children to private schools over the opposition of local teachers and unions.

Now, with Betsy DeVos, one of the country’s fiercest advocates of school choice, installed as education secretary, that experiment is poised to go national. But Ms. DeVos’s own department this week rendered judgment on the Washington school choice program: It has not improved student achievement, and it may have worsened it.

The examination of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only federally funded voucher […]

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