WASHINGTON - Local parents are fighting to keep their children out of D.C. public schools but they need the community's tax money to do it. They took their voucher fight to Capitol Hill Wednesday.

They pleaded with lawmakers to save the $7,500 a year scholarships that let students escape failing D.C. public schools.

Latasha Bennett's son attends the private Naylor Road school. She pleaded not to send him back to public school. "He loves the teaching, he loves his teacher, he loves doing homework," said Bennett.

Tiffany Dunston was valedictorian of Archbishop Carroll High School and is now pre-med at Syracuse University. She says the voucher program was her ticket out of a bad situation.

"I would've been stuck in the same criminal, whole crime environment -- poverty," she said.

Opponents say vouchers undermine efforts to fix the public schools, favor Catholic schools and fail to significantly raise achievement levels.

An evaluation of the first three years of the program did show marked improvement in reading skills but not in math, prompting concerns that vouchers are not worth the money.

"Math, uh no statistically significant impacts observed," said Patrick Wolf of the Institute of Education Sciences study.

"That vouchers are the end-all-do-all for the problems of our school children. I don't think that they are," said Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill.

But supporters say the federally funded vouchers are a win-win scenario. They are no cost to the District and priceless for those who receive them.

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