you don't need a weatherman ...

the department of education told the washington post yesterday that not enough kids signed up for the program for an evaluation to take place this year. in order for the evaluation to meet the legislation's call for a randomized trial, there would have had to be more applicants than available spots, so that the "treatment group" could be chosen through a lottery. while this will be the case in some grades, it will not be the case in all.

what's weird about this? i've been trying to get details on the lottery for the past week and a half, getting passed around from one tight-lipped ED official to another. one said the information was "proprietary;" another said "I don't know if we're going to be
releasing that much public information." i spoke to the reporter from the Post who told me that he'd been bugging ED about this information for weeks, and they just decided to give it to him yesterday. according to one private voucher researcher with whom we communicated, this level of secrecy around a lottery design does not usually exist
even with contractors who are not publicly-funded.

what's with the secrecy? and what's with the timing? one answer, as eduwonk points out, is that this information is embarrassing to DC voucher proponents because it means that a) poor parents aren't clamoring to take part in an educational market, and b) WSF is going to give some of the vouchers to kids who are already in private school, potentially
those who were already receiving WSF private vouchers. they might have waited until now to release it so that it could be buried under the mounds of reagan-related news today, on a day when many DC offices (including mine) are closed. this is not as enticing an explanation as that they realized that we were sniffing around this issue and
wanted to release the info before we could come out with our suspicions (which were that they hadn't had sufficient demand). but probably a more likely one.