Louisiana Educator: Voucher School Losers Win on Getting a Better Education

Louisiana Educator: Voucher School Losers Win on Getting a Better Education:

Voucher School Losers Win on Getting a Better Education

Desperate to save the sub-standard voucher program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars, John White's crack public relations specialists have put out a highly misleading press release claiming that the voucher students are really improving more than regular public school students on state tests. But White's friend, Will Sentell of The Advocate refused to give him the usual biased reporting on this privatization scheme.

You see, even with all this alleged improvement in test performance, the voucher schools perform just a smidgen above the performance of the Baton Rouge RSD charters and the Louisiana RSD charters that are the lowest performing schools in the state! So for children to transfer from mostly C or D public schools to go to a private school scoring at a D- level is not anything to brag about. But White's PR experts are under orders to always try to slant the reports to somehow portray almost total failure as dramatic progress!

Here is the truth: Research scientists from Berkeley, Duke and M.I.T. did a comparison of all students who asked to transfer to voucher schools in Louisiana in the past year. Since there were not enough seats available, a lottery was held and some students were denied access to the voucher schools completely at random. Then the researchers averaged the scores on state tests of the students who missed out on being selected for vouchers with the students who won the voucher lottery. What they found is that on average, the students who lost the lottery, performed better on state tests than did the voucher students. There is no amount of spinning of this data that can show that the voucher schools were a better choice for those children.

But here is one other important fact that is often overlooked by the media in reporting the small amount of progress of voucher students over a few years. Voucher schools have the same Louisiana Educator: Voucher School Losers Win on Getting a Better Education: