This fall, 10,000 Utah students will start on a new education venture in Utah — each student’s family will have access to $8,000 to spend on private and homeschooling. Their $8,000 voucher was made available by legislative appropriations of over $80 million the past two years.

The Utah Fits All website has a public list of over 450 eligible providers — schools and service providers — on which the vouchers can be spent. For a private school with more than 150 students to become an eligible provider, the school must submit a financial audit, meet federal anti-discrimination law and do a criminal background check on employees. Smaller enrollment private schools are excused from the financial audit.

The online handbooks for parents and for schools and educational service providers give helpful guidelines for what expenses are legitimate, which are forbidden and which would need pre-approval. The program’s rules and regulations are structured to account for the expenditure of these public funds.

That is not enough. The Utah Fits All Scholarship lacks educational accountability. While Utah school children in school districts and charter schools take annual assessments which provide educators and families information about student’s academic abilities and progress, Utah voucher students are not required to take those tests.

We will not get that important information from Utah’s voucher students. Every year, students receiving Utah Fits All vouchers are required to “compile a portfolio” describing their educational “opportunities and achievements” for that school year and submit it to the program administrator. As an option to the portfolio, parents can request that their child be given a national test, an industry certification test, the ACT, SAT or ASVAB.

This minimal level of accountability for voucher-using students is not universal. There are more than 60 educational voucher programs in 31 states and Washington, D.C. Thirty-five of those private school choice programs in 20 states have some sort of testing requirement for students receiving financial aid to attend private schools. Utah is one of 13 states that have no testing requirement for any of their students receiving state dollars to attend private schools or to support homeschooling.

Research studies in states that require students who use vouchers to take the same tests that public school students take show that vouchers don’t automatically improve student performance. Published research in Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana showed voucher students in those states performed more poorly on state tests than did students with similar characteristics who remained in public schools.

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