In interpreting the impacts of the OSP, it is useful to examine the characteristics of the private schools that participate in the Program and the extent to which students offered scholarships (the treatment group) moved into and out of them during the first 2 years.
School Participation
The private schools participating in the OSP represent the choice set available to parents whose children received scholarships. That group of schools had mostly stabilized by the 2005-06 school year. The schools that offered the most slots to OSP students, and in which OSP students and the impact sample’s treatment group were clustered, have characteristics that differed somewhat from the average participating OSP school. Only 11.2 percent of treatment group students were attending a school that charged tuition above the statutory cap of $7,500 during their second year in the Program (table 2) even though 39 percent and 38 percent of participating schools charged tuitions above that cap in 2005-06 and 2006-07, respectively.4 Although 55 percent of all participating schools were faith-based (35 percent were part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington), nearly 80 percent of the treatment group attended a faith-based school, with more than half of them (53 percent) attending the 23 participating Catholic parochial schools. The average OSP student in the treatment group attended a school with 196 students—somewhat smaller than the average of 236 (2005-06) and 242 (2006-07) students across the set of all participating OSP schools.
While the characteristics of the participating private schools are important considerations for parents, in many respects it is how the schools differ from the public school options available to them that matters most. In the second year after applying to the OSP, students in the treatment and control groups did not differ significantly regarding the proportion attending schools that offered computer labs (93 and 92 percent), libraries (83 and 87 percent), gyms (70 and 66 percent), and art programs (90 and 86 percent). Differences in school characteristics between the treatment and control groups 2 years after they applied to the OSP that were statistically significant at the .01 level included:
Student Participation
As has been true in similar programs, not all students offered an OSP scholarship actually used it to enroll in a private school. For students assigned to the treatment group, during the first 2 years of the Program (Figure 1):
The reasons for not using the scholarship varied. The most common reasons cited by parents whose students declined the scholarship and completed surveys were (Figure 2):
Students who never used the OSP scholarship offered to them, or who did not use the scholarship consistently, could have found their way into other (non-OSP-participating) private schools, public charter schools, or traditional DC public schools. The same alternatives were available to students who applied to the OSP but were never offered a scholarship (the impact sample’s control group). Both the treatment and control groups moved between public (both traditional and charter) and private schools or between SINI and non-SINI schools. As a result, over the 2 years after they applied to the OSP: