DC Opportunity Scholarship Program - First Federally-Funded School Voucher System

On January 22, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the DC School Choice Incentive Act, creating the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP)—the first federally-funded private school voucher program in American history. Congress used its constitutional authority over the District of Columbia to implement a voucher experiment that would have faced fierce opposition in any state legislature with elected local representation.

The program provided vouchers of up to $7,500 (later increased) to low-income DC students to attend participating private schools, most of which were religious. Republicans in Congress imposed the program on DC over the objection of the District’s elected officials, including Mayor Anthony Williams (who ultimately accepted the compromise) and the DC City Council, which formally opposed the legislation. This pattern—imposing privatization on a majority-Black city without genuine representation—echoed colonial governance.

The Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations had advocated for a DC voucher program for years, viewing the District as an ideal testing ground due to Congress’s plenary authority and DC Public Schools’ well-documented struggles. The program was explicitly designed as a model for national voucher expansion, with proponents arguing that success in DC would demonstrate vouchers’ viability elsewhere.

However, rigorous federal evaluation by the Institute of Education Sciences found no statistically significant difference in reading or math achievement between voucher recipients and control group students who remained in public schools. The study followed students for four years and represented the gold standard of education research—a randomized controlled trial. Despite these null findings, Congress continued funding the program, and the Trump administration later expanded it.

The program’s persistence despite negative evidence illustrated how education privatization operates politically. The evaluations showed vouchers did not improve academic outcomes, yet the conservative infrastructure promoting school choice simply ignored unfavorable research while amplifying any study suggesting positive effects. The DC program became a permanent beachhead for federal voucher funding, surviving attempts by the Obama administration to phase it out (blocked by congressional Republicans) and receiving increased funding under Trump. The pattern established in DC—impose vouchers without local consent, continue funding despite lack of evidence, and use the program as proof-of-concept for expansion—would be replicated nationally.