Louisiana school voucher program earns a D for 2016

Danielle Dreilinger:

Measured like a school district, the Louisiana Scholarship Program earned 61.4 on a 150-point scale, Dunn said. That would be a D on the state public school report card, and worse than any public school system except for those in St. Helena Parish, Morehouse Parish and Bogalusa. No voucher program earned an A.

The individual school scores measure only the voucher students, who take state tests, and not the school as a whole. To protect students’ privacy, results are not published for schools with low voucher enrollment.

Thirty percent of the schools big enough to be counted earned less than 50 points, the equivalent of an F. They currently enroll about 15 percent of this year’s 6,695 voucher students. That’s according to fall 2016 figures.

New Orleans voucher programs skewed lower than their peers in the public Recovery School District, which serves mostly low-income children, according to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune calculations.