By admin 
More than two years after South Carolina began subsidizing the education costs of thousands of private and homeschool students, there remains no reliable information about how participants in the state’s school voucher program are performing.
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The committee tasked with analyzing various aspects of the state’s $83 million Education Scholarship Trust Fund shared this week that a long-delayed report on the academic performance of 2024-25 voucher recipients could not be completed.
The Education Oversight Committee, whose evaluation of participant performance was supposed to have been published last year, said it had not received enough reportable data from the S.C. Department of Education to make credible conclusions about the program’s efficacy.
“Before the program’s effect on student learning can be appropriately reported, the data describing that learning must be more complete, more accurate, and more transparent,” the EOC wrote in a released Monday.
The committee, which has been assured a more robust 2025-26 dataset from the department, will defer analysis of the program’s inaugural year until December, when it plans to release a report examining the first two years of voucher student achievement.
The assessment data snafu is the latest in a series of issues that have plagued the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund and raised questions about the Department of Education’s administration of the burgeoning program, which provides taxpayer-funded scholarships to K-12 students enrolled outside their zoned public schools.
In April, an independent state oversight agency launched an investigation into the program at the request of lawmakers frustrated with the department’s decision to grant scholarships to home-educated students.
Legislators have also raised alarms about applicant screening and participant spending. More than a third of first-year recipients withdrew or were removed from the program due to eligibility concerns, most of the money spent went to purchase electronics and instructional supplies, and at least one voucher recipient was later charged with defrauding the program.
State Rep. Neal Collins, an outspoken voucher critic, said the latest delay in releasing participant achievement data reinforced his long-held concerns about the program.
“The fact that there is insufficient evidence to fully evaluate the program from two years ago should concern supporters and opponents of vouchers alike,” the Pickens Republican said in a statement. “Regardless of where someone stands on the underlying policy, transparency and accountability should not be optional when public funds are involved.”
The Department of Education has defended its implementation of the program, while acknowledging that “data-quality challenges” impeded the evaluation of first-year participants.
In a memo published in response to the EOC’s recent review, the department traced its issues back to the South Carolina Supreme Court’s 2024 decision prohibiting the use of vouchers for private school tuition, which it said compounded the existing challenge of implementing a complex first-year program.
The midyear modification to the nascent program forced the removal of independent schools from the department’s reporting and payment system and shifted responsibility for submitting assessment results to parents.
Because parents submitted results in various unwieldy formats, such as screenshots and non-standard files, compiling and validating the data was extremely time intensive and made reporting delays “unavoidable,” state Superintendent Ellen Weaver told lawmakers earlier this year.
The department said the limited number of usable results — only 286 of the nearly 3,000 students awarded vouchers that year submitted “suitable” assessments — was not indicative of systemic data collection failure, but rather attributable to program attrition, statutory testing exemptions and the EOC’s analytical screening criteria.
For that reason, the department said it viewed the issues identified in the EOC’s report as “useful confirmation” of process improvements it had already identified and implemented ahead of the 2025-26 school year.
“The first year of ESTF was truly a ‘Year Zero’: a new program implemented under extraordinary circumstances and substantially disrupted midway through its first operational year,” the department’s memo reads. “The 2025-26 program is operating under a different statutory framework, with stronger processes, better data collection, and lessons learned from that first year already incorporated into implementation.”
Voucher student data too limited to yield reliable conclusions
Since 2024, the General Assembly has appropriated more than $200 million to the Education Scholarship Trust Fund, which this year will distribute $7,634 scholarships to 15,000 qualified students across the state.
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Recipients can use the money for a variety of educational purposes, including tuition, tutoring, technology and transportation.
When crafting the voucher law — first in 2023, and again two years later following the S.C. Supreme court decision — lawmakers included a variety of accountability measures, including a requirement that scholarship students take “nationally norm-referenced” assessments to track their academic progress.
The assessments don’t have to be identical to the ones taken by public school students, but they must be approved by the Department of Education, aligned to state standards and include a linking study to allow for comparison to public school students.
Participating schools must ensure students in grades 3 through 12 are tested annually and submit their results to the department. The department, in turn, is tasked with collecting all test results and transmitting them to the Education Oversight Committee for analysis.
The Department of Education first provided assessment data to the EOC in late February, roughly two months after the committee’s inaugural report was supposed to have been published.
Since then, committee staff have been working with state education officials to clarify questions about the assessment records received for 798 unique students.
As recently as July, a committee spokeswoman said the agency planned to release its analysis in mid-September. But as time went on, it became clear the dataset was simply too small to yield a reliable analysis, officials said.
After whittling down the records to remove assessments not approved for the program or taken by too few students, scores for students in grades not required to test, tests taken outside the 2024-25 school year and records with clear errors, the committee was left with just 286 reportable results.
“We just feel like that’s underpowered for what we need to have, and really unlikely to serve as a reliable basis for conclusions about student outcomes,” EOC executive director Dana Yow said in an interview last week.
To improve the data reporting process going forward, the committee made numerous constructive recommendations to the department.
Suggested improvements included permitting only state-approved, standards-aligned assessments, submitting assessment data through the same system used by public schools and examining assessment integrity statewide.
In response, the Department of Education said it had already implemented or was in the process of implementing multiple program improvements, including several advised by the committee.
The agency now encourages participating schools and families to use state assessments when practical, requires independent test administration for non-state assessments and routes voucher program data through the state’s Ed-Fi system, according to its memo.
Officials at both agencies said they expected the data collection and transfer process to proceed more smoothly in the future and confirmed that 2025-26 voucher student assessment data had been successfully exchanged over the weekend.
“With the first year of a program like this you’re going to have challenges,” Yow said. “It was the first year for us, too, so it takes time and it’s a process. We feel like we’re in a good place right now.”
As of Tuesday, state education officials had provided the EOC assessments for 6,544 students in grades 3 through 12, and were working directly with families and schools to retrieve scores for another 1,485 students whose results were not included in the initial submission, spokesman Kinard Lisbon said.
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