The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) conducts unbiased large-scale evaluations of education programs and practices supported by federal funds; provides research-based technical assistance to educators and policymakers; and supports the synthesis and the wide spread dissemination of the results of research and evaluation throughout the United States.
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Highlights from NCEE (Archive)
The DC School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 established the first federally funded private school voucher program in the United States, providing scholarships of up to $7,500 for low-income residents of the District of Columbia to send their children to local participating private schools. The law also mandated that the Department conduct an independent, rigorous evaluation of what is now called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), to assess the impact of the program on academic achievement, school safety, and other outcomes. The impact evaluation is a randomized controlled trial that compares outcomes of eligible public school applicants randomly assigned to receive or not receive a scholarship through a series of lotteries.
The fourth report, Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After Two Years, contains the following key findings:
- No evidence of a statistically significant difference in test scores between students who were offered an OSP scholarship and students who were not offered a scholarship. 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
- Overall, the program had a positive impact on parent satisfaction and their perceptions of school safety.
- Students who were offered OSP scholarships did not report being more satisfied with school or feeling safer in school than those without access to scholarships.
- This same pattern of findings holds when the analysis is conducted to determine the impact of using a scholarship rather than being offered a scholarship, taking into account the approximately 20 percent of students who were offered but chose not to use their scholarships the first two years. Another analysis examining the effects of attending a private school (regardless of whether an OSP scholarship was used) versus a public school, also found results consistent with this pattern.
