Trump lauds DC voucher program at school choice function

Dive Brief:

President Donald Trump touted the District of Columbia's voucher program during a program celebrating school choice held at the White House Wednesday, according to Education Week and ABC News.
The DC program is the country’s only federal voucher program, and it came under criticism last week after the Institute of Educational Sciences released a report indicating students who used the vouchers saw a math performance drop, though parents felt the schools were safer.
Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are fierce proponents of school choice, and the president allocated more than $1 billion to support it in his own budget proposal — though the Congressional budget did not earmark specific school choice funds in its own proposal.

Dive Insight:

With Trump’s election, a renewed interest in school choice was a foregone conclusion, and his initial proposed budget fit this approach. In addition to more than $9 billion in federal education cuts, it allocated $1.4 billion to promote school choice, including money for charter schools and potentially investing in voucher programs. The Congressional budget did not include significant measures to strengthen school choice despite continuing to fund the DC program. Vouchers are not viewed as favorably as charter schools when it comes to the range of school choice options, so it is possible that in negotiations over the upcoming FY2018 budget, Trump and DeVos will prefer to work on charters rather than wage what could be a costly battle on the efficacy of vouchers.

Voucher programs continue to receive mixed results from studies, though the recent analysis of the DC program included worrisome results. Literacy results between students who took vouchers and those who did not were mostly level, and math performance actually dropped among voucher students. The DC data is the only possible measurement of how students respond to a federally-funded voucher program, so it could be a more significant bellwether as Trump determines whether to invest in vouchers beyond that program alone.