Giving Compass' Take:

· The Cato Institute discusses the relationship between school vouchers and safety based on the results of federal evaluations of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. According to recent reports, students involved in the program say they feel safer at schools and haven't been threatened with any kind of physical harm.

· Do private schools really provide a safer environment for their students?

· Read about the D.C. school voucher results.

At a bare minimum, schools should keep our children safe while classes are in session. New evidence suggests that private school choice can help with that.

The second-year results of the federal evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program just came out. The OSP is a federally funded school voucher program that allows low-income families in D.C. to use public education dollars to cover private-school tuition for their kids.

The rigorous study by the U.S. Department of Education found that using a voucher to attend a private school increased school safety for students. And the positive effects were huge.

Students that won the voucher lottery and attended a private school were over 35 percent more likely to report that their schools were very safe. And parents of voucher-using students were about 36 percent more likely to report that their children were in very safe schools.

In addition, the study found suggestive evidence indicating that students that won the lottery to attend a private school in D.C. were 7 percent more likely than their public school peers to report never being threatened with physical harm at school.

Read the full article about school vouchers and safety by Corey A. DeAngelis at Cato Institute.