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Means testing in DC

A fistfight is brewing over the D.C. voucher program:

Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District, intends to introduce legislation Thursday that would increase the income guidelines to 300 percent of the federal poverty line, from 200 percent, according to an aide in his office. The aide said a potential exodus of 150 students a year could threaten a federally mandated evaluation of the program, which has about 1,650 students.

Under the $14 million-a-year program, low-income District students in kindergarten through 12th grade receive scholarships of as much as $7,500 each to cover tuition and other expenses at private and religious schools in the city.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) blasted the plan to change the income guidelines and called for the Government Accountability Office to investigate the voucher program.

"The wholesale grandfathering in of all parents regardless of the circumstances of the increase in family income violates a cardinal principle of the voucher program and of every federal program for low-income families," she said in a statement Thursday.

Katie of A Constrained Vision offers a potential solution:

Thinking beyond the constraints of the federal evaluation, I think the lesson for voucher program design is that if you’re going to have means-testing, the benefit should phase-out as income rises, not drop abruptly to zero at a certain income threshold. And where programs do have sharp income cut-offs, private scholarship programs could serve a useful role helping voucher families make the transition.

Of course, the devil would be in the details as to precisely how and when that phase-out would take place.  But it could a little more workable than the all-or-nothing approach that presently exists.