In Middle Class or Middle of the Pack: What Can We Learn When Benchmarking U.S. Schools Against the World’s Best?, America Achieves draws attention to what the group describes as the relatively low achievement of U.S. middle class students on the mathematics and science portions of the 2009 Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) test and, based on this “wake up call to America’s middle class,” urges U.S. high schools to participate in a new OECD test so schools can compare their 15 year-old students’ performance with the average performance of 15 year-old students in other countries. The message American Achieves promotes is that such comparisons are valid and can help improve high school performance. The report does not provide evidence supporting this message; nor do PISA reports nor the broader literature on school reform. Overall, the report is not grounded in research but rather is an assertion that measurement, by itself, is an effective reform tool. The report makes no attempt to reveal how this particular test would be connected to specific curricula, strategies for teaching mathematics and science, or teacher professional development strategies. Thus, the report is of no utility to policymakers. 

The third-year evaluation of the federally funded Washington, D.C. voucher program shows that low-income students offered vouchers in the first two years of the program had modestly higher reading scores after three years but showed no significant difference in mathematics. The authors, however, interpret the results in ways that raise questions, given some of their own findings. The report downplays the implications of the subgroup results showing that higher reading scores for those offered vouchers were concentrated in among certain groups of students. Further, some of the most interesting results of the study were related to student choice behavior rather than increases in test scores. The report could have done far better in analyzing the results of the experiment by presenting them in a more nuanced fashion and by discussing the possibility of varied effects with different populations and in different contexts.

Suggested Citation: Carnoy, M. (2009). Review of “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program: Impacts After Three Years.” Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved [date] from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-evaluation-dc-opportunity