Washington's "Opportunity Scholarship Program" has gotten a lot of attention lately, what with Democrats in Congress moving to kill it and the Obama Administration seeking a way to lessen the blow to participating students. But there is life beyond the Beltway, and that's where debates over vouchers tend to be more nuanced and perhaps even more consequential. 
Take Wisconsin and our home state of Ohio, for example, which together provide vouchers for more than 30,000 students (compared to 1,700 in D.C.). In both states, Democratic governors are pushing new policies that would up the ante on "accountability" for private schools participating in the voucher programs. In Ohio, for example, Governor Strickland would require that every student in a participating private school sit for the state test, even if just a single student receives a publicly-funded voucher. (As Emmy reports, 94 of the program's 279 participating private schools enroll ten voucher-bearing students or fewer.)
Readers who follow Fordham's work know that we're not adverse to accountability. Far from it. We've led the charge for greater transparency and accountability in the charter school movement, and we've been open to more of those same qualities in the voucher context. But neither are we naive; we understand that if policymakers overreach with new requirements for private schools (as is being proposed in Ohio and Wisconsin), many of those private schools will simply decide not to participate, especially the ones serving just a handful of students. And you can't run a private school voucher program without private schools.
So what to do? How to get this balance right? To gather the best thinking, we surveyed twenty experts in the school choice world for their ideas. The result is our brand-new paper, When Private Schools Take Public Funds: The Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs. Erik Robelen of Education Week summarized it nicely:
The majority of experts surveyed agreed that participating private schools should not face new government regulations regarding their day-to-day operations, the report said. The survey also found common ground regarding parental information and program evaluation."Everyone sees the value of helping parents make informed choices by providing them with data about how well their children are performing," the report says.
The experts generally agreed that voucher programs as a whole should be evaluated by third-party researchers. But consensus broke down on the issues of making schools' academic results and information from financial audits public, the report said.
Indeed. Some of our experts thought that we should "let the market rule," and not require much school-level transparency or accountability. On the other extreme were those who said we should "treat participating private schools like charter schools," by requiring them to test all of their students with the state assessment and withdraw funding from those schools that don't meet certain performance targets.
In the end, we propose a sliding scale: Schools that draw the majority of their revenues from private sources should be treated more like other private schools, while those that depend primarily on public dollars should be treated more like public schools. Is this a fair compromise? Post your views below.
