WaPo: Study Confirms Vouchers Superior to Public Ed Monopolies

As if it's any surprise to most of us. What is surprising to me is that this appeared in the WaPo of all places today: Study Supports School Vouchers. From the piece:

A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.

Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.

What the WaPo piece doesn't say is the vouchers cost just a quarter of what each student gets through a public school monopoly. So even if the worst case is no educational benefit, the cost of education would drop by 75%. Wouldn't that be something to behold in and of itself? I pointed out this little tidbit in a prior post (Vouchers vs. D.C. public schools):

(D.C. public school funding) is $28,813 per pupil... education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” ... Just goes to show that throwing money at the problem makes the problem worse, not better. So one has to wonder why the Obama administration is targeting the program for termination. I mean - it's all about educating the children, right? Right??? Heck - even WaPo took the dems to carpet for targeting the program.

A cheap proposal was offered this morning in the freep (A Reasonable Plan on School Choice in MI) related to Michigan which would open up school choice and at the same time save the state money in a time of recession. A win-win, right? Wrong. The MEA won't go for it. nor will our current governor. The result? Kids in DPS are stuck in DPS, such as it is...

Being that this is tinfoil hat-wearing WaPo, it should tell you something. Here's the fear from the dems: since the program is a proven success at a fraction of the cost, it threatens the monopoly and thus the unions that line the pockets of the dems. In addition, they lose control of their indoctrination centers to ram left-wing ideology into young minds. Here's Arne Duncan's statement from the current WaPo piece:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement that the Obama administration does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.

"Big picture, I don't see vouchers as being the answer," Duncan said in a recent meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters. "You can pull two kids out, you can pull three kids out, and you're leaving 97, 98 percent behind. You need to help all those kids. The way you help them is by challenging the status quo where it's not working and coming back with dramatically better schools and doing it systemically."

Uh - isn't that exactly what vouchers do? Challenge the status quo? What specifically does Duncan, or the Obama administration, want to do with a D.C. public school system that already has “more money than God?” So far, just platitudes. Meanwhile, the kids will suffer under Democrat tyranny. The Washington D.C. school district can at least point out one and only one positive: at least they're not DPS.

HT: NRO