Attrition & subtraction

Education | D.C.'s voucher program failing under not-so-benign neglect | Emily Belz

Luke Sharrett for WORLD

WASHINGTON—In a city where public schools graduate 70 percent of students (a 20 percent increase from 2006), where students have some of the worst scores in the country, and the government spends the third-most per pupil of any state in the country, the federal government is ending one small program that has raised student reading scores and parent satisfaction in its five-year existence.

Over a three-year period, a Department of Education study showed that students in the Washington, D.C., voucher program moved four months ahead of their public-school counterparts in reading skills, and the lead researcher from the study, Patrick Wolf, said the program showed the "largest achievement" of any federal education experiment that has undergone similar studies.