Stephen Dyer crunches some Ohio numbers and discovers something extraordinary about using vouchers.
About three years ago, I wrote about the interesting phenomenon that the longer an Ohio kid takes a voucher, the worse they do on state tests.
As I started looking at this year’s most recent education data, I decided to examine this again. What I found left me simply gob smacked. That’s because the situation today is far, far worse than it was when I last looked at it.
How much worse?
How about this:
On all proficiency tests, students getting a voucher for one year or less overall1 are about 75% proficient. Three years later, they’re 54% proficient.
That’s a drop of nearly 1/3!
What’s that like in comparison with school districts? That 75% proficiency rate is about what public school students in suburban Cloverleaf Local Schools in Medina County receives. The 54% proficiency rate is about what public school students in Appalachian New Boston Local in Scioto County receive. A reminder that the number one determinant of test score success is the income level of the test taker.
Just for reference, about 40% of Cloverleaf’s students are economically disadvantaged and their community’s median income is $76,271. New Boston is 99.997% economically disadvantaged and their median income is $39,525.
So at the end of three years, voucher students’ performance drops from that of a typical upper middle class suburban student to that of a typical poor, Appalachian student. Put another way, the voucher students’ first-year scores would rank in the top 1/4 of all Ohio Public School Districts; their third-year scores would rank in the bottom 1/5 of all Ohio Public School Districts.
Not great.
It’s even worse if you dig into the individual scores.