UPDATE: The Post-Gazette now says not so fast.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

HARRISBURG -- School voucher legislation is poised to pass the state Senate as early as today, following a lengthy committee debate Monday over amendments from the bill's opponents.

The measure, which has drawn both fervent support and opposition, would make low-income students eligible for vouchers toward their tuition at a public or private school outside their district. A provision approved Monday would expand that eligibility to some middle-class students in the program's fourth year.

Attempts to limit the program's eligibility, require districts to tally up how much vouchers cost them, and allow students to opt-out of religious classes at their new school all failed in the Appropriations Committee.

The last-minute spending deal among Congressional leaders adds money to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are reporting. The revival of the scholarship is a top priority of House Speaker John Boehner, who has sponsored a measure that passed the House last month. That was just about the time the White House issued a statement asserting that the scholarship has proven ineffective.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid said of the eleventh-hour negotiations: “We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama, we did it because it’s been very hard to arrive at this point. Both sides have had to make tough choices.”

From today's Denver Post:

After months of study, roiling controversy and emotional debate, the Douglas County school board Tuesday night unanimously approved a groundbreaking plan to help pay tuition for hundreds of students to attend private schools.

The pilot program, which will be reviewed each year, would make up to 500 students eligible to receive $4,575 to attend a private school in the 2011-12 school year ...

... The district estimates it would save about $3 million by having 500 fewer students. The district would pay about $2.29 million in voucher scholarships, but when CSAP and other expenses are deducted, the district might actually net $402,500.

After some residents complained that all but one of the 14 eligible private schools within the county are religion-based, the district revised its proposal, expanding the boundaries to include a more diverse group of private schools.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer devotes considerable attention to the impact school vouchers have on public schools. At a time when opponents to publicly funded private learning options are lobbing rhetorical hand grenades in several states, particularly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Inquirer reporter Adrienne Lu offers this fair-minded assessment:

While studies are relatively scarce, the early opinion among researchers appears to be that vouchers have done little, if any, harm to student achievement in public schools and in some cases have spurred small improvements on standardized-exam scores in public schools.

As evidence, Lu cites Northwestern University researcher David Figlio, who recently found that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship boosted the academic performance of the public schools faced with the threat of losing students to the program.  Figlio and co-researcher Cassandra Hart had highlighted that, no matter what measure they used (the closer private schools are to a public school, the density of private schools within five-miles of a public school, etc.) the effect was generally the same:

Although these effects are relatively small, they consistently indicate a positive relationship between private school competition and student-performance in the public schools, even before any students leave for the private sector. That is, these results provide evidence that public schools responded to the increased threat of losing students to the private schools.

In an interview with the Inquirer, Figlio rightly cautioned against looking at vouchers as "the magical pill that's going to turn the U.S. into Finland," but he made clear that, for any state considering a voucher program, "there's very little to be afraid of."

There are 1.2 million empty seats in Catholic schools across the country and we’ve been in dialogue with Catholic educators in Florida and nationally about how to fill them. Our colleagues at the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), headquartered at the University of Notre Dame, are helping lead this effort and have identified tax credit scholarships as part of the solution.

In Florida and several other states tax credit scholarships have become a growing source of income for Catholic schools. In the 2009-10 school year, Florida Catholic schools received $12,647,900 in tax credit scholarship funds, or approximately 11 percent of all the Florida tax credit scholarship money distributed that year.

But while tax credit scholarships are a big help, whether to convert existing Catholic schools to charter schools is dominating the discussion. A handful of Catholic schools have converted to charters in the last two years and these conversions have generated intense debate within the church and throughout the school choice movement. Many Catholic educators think converting a Catholic school to a charter strips all traces of Catholic education and identity from that school, while others argue Catholic education is about a set of core values and attitudes that can be modeled and taught in a charter school even if the crucifix is taken off the wall. (more…)