Washington -- AAUW responded to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released today which highlights the shortcomings of the $12.9 million Washington Scholarship Fund program, the country’s first federally funded K-12 voucher program. The program, intended to give low-income families living in Washington, D.C. the option of using $7,500 toward private school tuition, lacks the needed systems, procedures, and internal controls essential to responsible administration, according to the GAO report.
“AAUW is pleased that the GAO’s study exposes the truth behind the bluster of the Washington Scholarship Fund program. Our nation’s children deserve a safe, high quality education, which this voucher program is failing to provide.” Said Lisa Maatz, AAUW Director of Public Policy and Government Relations. “Further, taxpayers deserve better fiscal accountability and adherence to program goals.”
Now in its fourth year, the controversial voucher program was passed by Congress in 2004 as the D.C. Choice Incentive Act and was given $150,000 in federal and foundation grants. In 2006, this amount increased to $12.9 million. The program currently includes 1,900 students and 58 participating private schools.
With such a rapid expansion, WSF had little time to design and implement the needed systems, procedures, and internal controls for managing such a major increase in its operations, and the program has been conducted without sufficient accountability mechanisms to govern the use of taxpayer funds, according to the GAO report.
While the program was supposed to prioritize recruiting students from schools in need of improvement, most of the students in the program do not fit this profile; in fact, scholarships were awarded to students who already attended private schools. The report also found that many of the participating schools conduct classes in unsuitable learning environments by teachers lacking bachelor’s degrees. In many cases, parents were not informed of these deficiencies.
“AAUW stands firmly by the belief that the country should provide an excellent education for all children, not divert taxpayer money to fund private school vouchers for a few,” said Maatz. “We believe vouchers fly in the face of our national commitment to public education because they siphon scarce public funds to private or religious schools that are not accountable to the public or responsible for following critical civil rights laws. As such, we strongly oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.”
In light of this troubling report, AAUW hopes Congress will not only perform appropriate oversight of the program, but also seriously reconsider both the merits of the current program and the idea of renewing it in future years.
Read the GAO’s complete report.
Learn more about AAUW’s position on school vouchers.
For more information or to schedule an interview with AAUW Director of Public Policy and Government Relations Lisa Maatz, please contact Samantha Slater, Senior Media Relations Associate at 202/785-7738, slaters@aauw.org or Ashley Carr, Director of Communications at 202/785-7745, carra@aauw.org.
