The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program will at least live on another year.
Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman announced on Monday that they had reached an agreement with the Department of Education to renew the scholarships. The much debated program gives low-income students a route out of District of Columbia public schools and pays their way into private and parochial institutions.
“For eight years, this scholarship program has empowered low-income parents to choose the best learning environment for their children,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement. “Thousands of families have taken advantage of this scholarship program to give their children an opportunity to succeed in life, and there’s strong evidence that it’s both effective and cost-effective.”
The agreement ensures that the program, which was reauthorized last year, will be financed through the 2012-13 school year and that money will be available for current and new applicants, Mr. Boehner’s office said.
The program received 11,215 applications and awarded 4,900 scholarships from 2004 to 2012, according to the program Web site. About 1,600 scholarships were awarded for the 2011-12 school year, and about 1,200 students applied to the program for the 2012-13 year. The maximum amount of the scholarships is currently $8,000 a year for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and $12,000 for grades 9 to 12
Nearly 90 percent of students were black and from single-parent, low-income households.
“This program provides a lifeline to many needy children,” Mr. Lieberman said in a statement.
The program was established in 2004 during George W. Bush’s presidency. It stopped accepting new applicants in 2009. Then in 2011, Mr. Obama signed legislation that extended the scholarships as part of a broader budget deal that averted government shutdown. The bill, the Republican-backed Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act, or SOAR, authorized the Opportunity Scholarship Program at $20 million annually for five more years, with D.C. public schools and charter schools also receiving $20 million annually.
Mr. Obama’s latest budget request did not seek funds for the program, spurring outcry from Republicans.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement on Monday: “In partnership with Speaker Boehner, the Obama administration has agreed to grow the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program from the current enrollment of about 1,615 to approximately 1,700 students for the coming year to allow for a statistically valid evaluation of the program, as directed by Congress.”
He said that the administration did not want to disrupt the education of the students in the program. But, he added, “Beyond that commitment, however, we remain convinced that our time and resources are best spent on reforming the public school system to benefit all students and we look forward to working with Congress in a bipartisan manner to advance that goal.”
Nathan A. Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said the money used for the scholarships should go to D.C.’s public schools.
“We’re concerned with mechanisms which may remove money from traditional public education and place it into vehicles that fund private and religious-based educations at the expense of public education,” Mr. Saunders said.
Ultimately, he said, there are “not enough dollars to make sure every kid has a private or religious school experience.” He said the program walks around the school district’s problems rather than addressing them head on, which makes efforts to improve the schools even harder.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Vincent C. Gray said his office remains opposed to the program.
In a 2011 speech, Mr. Gray said: “What it represents is the use of the District and her 600,000 residents, once again, as bargaining chips in political negotiations and guinea pigs for the favorite social experiments of important Congressional leaders.”
Mr. Gray said Congressional leaders, Mr. Boehner included, push the program under the guise of “school choice.”
“We’ve now got 52 charter schools operating on 98 separate campuses across the District,” Mr. Gray said. “Education reform and public school choice are alive and well here in the District of Columbia. So why, in the name of ‘school choice’ would Congress choose to impose a private school voucher scheme on 600,000 people who have little say and no vote in whether the federal government institutes such a program or not?”
A 2010 Department of Education evaluation found “no conclusive evidence” that the scholarships affected student achievement. The evaluation split 2,300 students eligible to apply for the scholarships into two groups: those who received the money and those who did not. Then it examined test scores, graduation rates, perceptions of school safety and satisfaction over a four- or five-year period.
Students who used the scholarships earned reading and math scores that, for the most part, mirrored the scores of public school students. The report said the program did improve students’ chances of high school graduation by about 12 percent.
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