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The second year report on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (pdf) focuses on participation. It’s just an appetizer—the main course, a study of the effect of the vouchers on achievement, is coming next year—but this report still has some interesting stuff to chew on.

Participation increased in the second year, a sign that people like the program:

• More students applied for the scholarships (3,126 vs. 2,692), even though there were fewer spots available. The program is now operating at capacity.
• All the schools that participated in the first year returned for the second year, plus ten more schools, bringing the total from 58 to 68. That’s an increase from 53 percent of all District private schools to 65 percent. The enthusiasm of private schools suggests that, contra the fears of some school choice advocates, accepting vouchers does not impinge on their “privateness” with burdensome government regulation—at least not yet.

If you’re worried that vouchers create church-state entanglements:

• Of the 63 participating schools for which a religious affiliation could be determined, 28 are Catholic, 14 are religious but not Catholic, and 21 are independent.
• Of the 10 schools that joined in the second year, 6 are independent. (The others are non-Catholic religious schools.)

There’s mixed news on equity issues:

• In the first year, for some grades, fewer public school students applied than there were spots available, so some of the scholarships went to students already attending private schools—which offended the usual suspects. In the second year, however, no scholarships went to students already attending private schools.
• As designed, students from schools designated as “in need of improvement” received priority. About 40 percent of the scholarship applicants over the two years of the program were from schools in need of improvement, and they were more likely than other students to receive the scholarship.
• On the other hand, about 11 percent of applicants were from schools with achievement scores in the bottom quartile of all D.C. public schools, while almost one-quarter were from schools in the highest quartile.

And finally, there was good news for the data geeks:

• A high-quality statistical analysis of the effect of vouchers depends on being able to compare scholarship recipients to students who wanted a scholarship but didn’t receive one. The program was designed to allow for this setup: if more students applied than there were spots available at that grade level, the scholarships were awarded by random lottery. As a result, the first two years of the program produced 1,387 students in the “treatment” group of scholarship recipients and 921 in the “control” group of unsuccessful scholarship applicants. For the most part, the two groups are statistically similar. This sample size is large relative to other voucher studies, and “will be sufficient to detect Program impacts of at least a moderate and educationally meaningful size.”
• In other, non-jargony words, researchers will be able to conduct rigorous, meaningful analysis of the effect of vouchers.

After you digest all of that, start gearing up for next year’s report about vouchers and achievement. No matter what the conclusions, it will surely cause a ruckus. Can’t wait!

Katie Newmark is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. She blogs at A Constrained Vision.