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June 14, 2004
Follow-up: D.C. voucher numbers create mystery
Today's lesson: read the fine print. Two different reporters had two very different takes on the first numbers to emerge from the fledgling Washington, D.C. voucher program. As BoardBuzz noted Friday, the Washington Post's Justin Blum got the scoop on how many eligible students actually applied for a voucher. Bottom line: 1,200 eligible public school students and 521 eligible private school students applied. The non-profit group running the program expects to actually dole out about 1,000 vouchers to the public school kids and 200 to the current private school students. That means roughly 1,200 vouchers will be awarded for the coming school year even though Congress appropriated $14 million to award as many as 1,700 vouchers each school year.
Then on Saturday, an Associated Press article written by Derrill Holly began this way: "Demand for the nation's first federally funded school voucher program has proved overwhelming, officials said yesterday. The Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) said it had 2,650 applications from D.C. students seeking to leave the city's troubled public schools. The number of applications is more than double the number of spaces available." Huh? What gives? The A.P. article makes the Post article look wrong, doesn't it? The fourth sentence in Holly's article is actually the key. "About 1,720 of the students are eligible under residence and income guidelines." Aha. And there you have it. Many of the students that the A.P. seized on to make it appear that demand is extraordinarily high for this program are not even eligible for the program. In fact, 35 percent of the applicants proved ineligible, and, as the Post story noted, 30 percent of the eligible applicants already attend private schools.
Posted June 14, 2004 12:00 AM
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