The Dc Opportunity Scholarship Program PDF Download

School choice remains an important part of the national discussion on education reform strategies and their benefits. While a variety of policies encourage parents' selection of schools for their children--for example, charter schools, magnet schools, and district open enrollment--scholarships that allow students to attend a private school have received the most attention. The U.S. Congress' passage of the District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003 in January 2004 provided a unique opportunity not only to implement a system of private school choice for low-income students in the District, but also to rigorously assess the effects of the Program on students, parents, and the existing school system. This report describes the first-year impacts of the Program on those who applied for and were given the option to move from a public school to a participating private school of their choice. The report contains the following key findings: (1) 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; (2) The program had a consistently positive impact on parent satisfaction and their perceptions of school safety; (3) 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; and (4) 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 year. Following an executive summary, this report divides into five sections: (1) Introduction; (2) Early Implementation of the Program and the Sample for the Impact Analysis; (3) Research Methodology; (4) Impact of Being Awarded a Scholarship, One Year After Application; and (5) The Effects of OSP [DC Opportunity Scholarship Program] Scholarship Use and Private Schooling. Appendices include: (1) Comparison of Public School Students Entering Grades K-5, Cohorts 1 and 2; (2) Study Power; (3) Treatment of Observations with Incomplete Test Score Data; (4) Construction of Parent and Student Satisfaction Scales; (5) Imputation for Missing Baseline Covariates; (6) Calculation of Sampling and Non-Response Weights; (7) Additional Detail on the Analytic Methods for Estimating the Impact of Using a Scholarship and of Attending a Private School; (8) Detailed ITT ["intent-to-treat" approach] Tables; (9) Parent and Student Safety and Satisfaction--Detailed Tables; and (10) Benjamini-Hochberg Adjustments for Multiple Comparisons for the Disaggregated Index Items. (Contains 69 tables and 15 figures.) [This report was prepared by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, U.S. Department of Education.].