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In the report conducted for the Illinois State Board of
Education by WestEd, Empower Illinois said researchers compared
low-income Invest in Kids scholarship recipients to all Illinois
public school students, rendering the results meaningless
because they lack proper context.
“Our issue with that is in the Invest in Kids Act, in the
literal law, it says that they are supposed to compare our
low-income scholarship students to public school students of a
similar socioeconomic background and they did not do that,”
Empower Illinois Executive Director Bobby Sylvester said.
Sylvester said according to Illinois State Board of Education
data, Invest in Kids recipients outperformed their low-income
counterparts in nearly every category.
An ISBE spokesperson said the independent research organization
that conducted the report was unable to collect demographic data
on scholarship recipients, so it could only compare averages of
all scholarship recipients to averages of all public school
students.
“ISBE has not conducted any validation of the results, so we
cannot comment on the study except to echo WestEd in urging
caution in interpreting the results, since the data limitations
prevented any apples-to-apples comparisons,” said Jackie
Matthews, executive director of Communications with ISBE.
The Invest in Kids program was allowed to expire in December,
but Sylvester is confident that Illinois lawmakers will address
the program this spring.
“We know that legislators have been hearing from many of the
scholarship parents who are facing some really difficult choices
now that the rug has been pulled out from underneath them,” said
Sylvester.
Since the program’s inception, nearly 41,000 scholarships have
been awarded statewide.
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