A bipartisan legislative oversight committee asked the company that administers the state’s education freedom account program to release standardized testing data submitted by its students.
“I think assessment data is important,” said Republican Rep. Rick Ladd, the chair of the Education Freedom Account Oversight Committee.
Unlike other educational options in the state that receive government money, no data is made public on the academic performance of students who use education freedom accounts.
Ladd joined the two Democratic members of the committee, Sen. Suzanne Prentiss and Rep. Peggy Balboni, in calling on the program administrator, a company called the Children’s Scholarship Fund, to aggregate and release testing data that families are required to submit. The other Republicans on the committee, Sen. Ruth Ward and Rep. Kristin Noble, did not express an opinion.
“These kids might be doing fantastic, so if that’s the case, let’s show that,” Balboni said.
Families receive an average of almost $5,000 per child through the program, which they can spend on private school tuition or other educational expenses.
Since starting in 2021, the program has grown each year. The removal last year of a family income cap for eligibility led enrollment to double to 10,636 students.
As state spending on the program has increased, calls for its oversight have grown, though they have primarily come from Democrats. The Republican-controlled House rejected a bill last month that would have required that the program administrator report testing results to the Department of Education.
Ladd’s participation in the request for data could mean it carries more weight. In addition to serving as chair of the oversight committee, he leads the House’s education finance committee and is a prominent member of his caucus.
Matt Southerton, the Children’s Scholarship Fund’s director of policy and compliance, said the challenge of releasing the data it already has is primarily logistical.
Students in the program have three options to satisfy the education attainment record requirement. They may take a national standardized test, the state test administered to public school students or they may maintain a portfolio of their work.
Last year, 2,359 of the 5,765 students in the program submitted a test score of some type, according to Southerton. But the problem, he said, was that their results came from 17 different tests.
“We can aggregate that data,” Southerton said. “I’m just not sure our sample sizes are going to be very relevant.”
He asked for technical assistance from the Department of Education on what methodology should be used to release the data.
Nate Greene, the department’s director of education and analytics, said studies have explored how to link scores across different standardized test, but he said there are “a lot of challenges and difficulties in comparing different assessments to each other.”
Southerton said 1,127 students took the California Achievement Test; 398 took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills; and 439 took the NWEA assessment.
Of the students who did not submit a standardized test, 978 maintained a portfolio and 1,815 submitted a report card, Southerton said.
The statute does not permit families to submit a report card to satisfy their educational attainment record requirement. Ladd recommended that the organization stop accepting report cards.
The education freedom account law already requires the Children’s Scholarship Fund to make any nationally-standardized test results available to the Department of Education upon request. Results from the state-administered SAS test are exempt from that requirement.
In response to a public records request earlier this year, however, a department employee said it had never received any testing results from the organization during the program’s five years of existence.
A spokesperson for the department did not answer whether any requests for the data had been made but not fulfilled. She also did not respond to a question about why the department would opt against requesting the information, despite being allowed to do so.
The oversight committee’s request was informal and did not come with any timeline. The committee is scheduled to hold its next meeting on June 8.