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For those students, $13,500 should go a long way.

You're assuming that the entire $13,500 actually gets spent in D.C. classrooms. SoftballMominVA has shown on several threads that a good chunk of that money actually goes for lawsuits and to send special education students to extremely expensive private schools because the special education department in D.C. has been incompetent and/or corrupt for years.

An interesting point...the really "top-notch" private schools in the D.C. area, including Sidwell Friends, St. Albans, etc., cost well over $20K per year per student.

Bottomline, for me:

Washington DC public schools are the third most expensive public schools in the country, per student.
Washington DC public schools are the fourth worst in the country, based on graduation rates.

I'm saying that Washington DC public schools are broken, and they need to do something -- anything! -- different. Vouchers seem like a possible way forward.

After a two year study, the education professionals are saying that vouchers don't work. You seem to not like vouchers. I'm assuming that you are an education professional.

Have you got a plan to fix this?

I think the dollar amounts assigned to students in voucher programs are just as meaningless as the dollar amounts assigned to students in regular ps programs. They mean nothing. Our school district nets something like $6,700 annually for each K-8 student enrolled. The only part of that money that actually touches the kids is the building upkeep and the teacher's pay. My three boys just passed through kindergarten, 3rd and 5th grade. Not one of them had an actual textbook this year--not one. Teachers have one master copy of workbooks (math, language arts, social studies, geography, etc) and they have to photocopy each lesson for every student. Teachers supply the copy paper because the district won't. Teachers have to use a code, just for them, in order to use the copier--their usage is monitored. One copy of every lesson has to be given to the principal, and the number of lessons has to tally the copier usage or the teacher is in hot water. Flabbergasting minutiae. A lot of folks on this forum love to rail against ps teachers, and I'm not saying they walk on water, but the amount of crap many of them have to put up with is just unreal.

As for the $6,700...I'd love to know where it went, because it didn't go into the classroom.