Two years into a controversial school-choice voucher program in D.C., research released Monday shows no difference in test scores between scholarship recipients and students not participating in the program.

The data also lends credence to claims that the vouchers aren’t working for the lowest-performing students involved, officials said.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was established as the first of its kind nationally in January 2004 as a way to provide private-school education to lower-income students looking for new ways to thrive and learn. On average, students get federally funded scholarships totaling $7,500 annually, which they can use to attend a private institution.

At this point, program participants on the whole are not yet distinguishing themselves academically, based on the report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

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“There are no overall test differences in the two groups of students,” Institute Director Grover Whitehurst said.

U.S. Department of Education officials, in their analysis, emphasized that certain subsets of students receiving vouchers are being positively affected.

For instance, students who have been in the program from the start fared slightly better on reading than their peers who are not getting vouchers. The same is true for students at the upper end of the academic spectrum. Yet students at the lowest academic levels are not yet being helped, according to the data.

“For children way behind, they may be outside of the possibility of being able to fully take advantage of it,” Whitehurst said.

This is the second progress report conducted by the institute to gauge how well vouchers are working. Its release comes as lawmakers are deciding whether to continue federal funding for the vouchers.

Next year researchers will have much more data available so that they can assess whether voucher students are staying in school longer than non-recipients and whether differences are evident in graduation rates and college participation statistics.

As part of the report, researchers also found that 26 percent of students who won vouchers in a lottery turned down the money and opted for another form of schooling.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com