From pilot program to policy
How school vouchers exploded in Ohio
More Ohio children are using state dollars to pay for private education than ever before.
What started as a $5 million pilot project to rescue Cleveland kids from “failing schools” is now a statewide voucher system serving 69,000 children that could cost taxpayers more than $628 million for the 2021-2022 academic year.
“I double-dog dare you to find another area in the Ohio budget that has experienced such a sky rocketing increase,” said Dan Heintz, a history teacher at Chardon Local Schools near Cleveland.
But Ohio isn’t an anomaly. It’s been a banner year for school choice advocates across the country.
At least 50 bills were introduced in 30 states, according to a national nonprofit called Ed Choice. Even deep blue California has an initiative being drafted that would move state dollars into savings accounts that parents could spend on private tuition.
School choice advocates say that’s the future. They want Ohio and eventually the country to give a voucher to any kid who wants one.
“People are cutting their cable and buying individual channels and personalizing what they want for their own entertainment,” said Greg Lawson, a research fellow at the conservative Buckeye Institute. “It’s about choice. It’s about empowering folks. People want choice in their food, in their entertainment. Education should be that too.”
Ohio’s constitution promises “a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.” Public school advocates say those words are a mandate to fix underperforming schools - especially the ones that seem perpetually stuck on the Edchoice scholarship list.
Seventy percent of Ohio’s vouchers come from 21 of its 610 school districts. The majority of those students live in poverty and all but one of those districts are majority-minority.
“Either the way we designate schools as failing is inaccurate, or we are allowing our Black students to attend failing schools,” Heintz said. “It’s the antithesis of social responsibility.”
How vouchers grew
Ohio’s first statewide school voucher program started in 2005 as a way to help “poor kids in failing public schools” get a quality education, according to articles published at the time. About 3,000 scholarships were used the first year.
For the 2021-2022 school year, about 69,000 students are expected to use one of the state’s five voucher programs. Ohio will also supply their school buses and a series of reimbursements for administrative and auxiliary costs.
The total cost to Ohio taxpayers will likely exceed $628 million.
“There’s just something wrong with that,” Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper said. “Even though the money might not be directly taken from a school district right now, there is still only so much state money allocated for education.”
And the rules that govern eligibility get a little more expansive every year.
At first, only students assigned to schools in “academic emergency” – the state’s lowest rating – for three consecutive years could apply for a voucher.
A year later it became schools in either academic emergency or academic watch for three years. Six months after that, the requirement dropped to two of the last three years.
In 2013, lawmakers created an income-based scholarship for all kids regardless of their home district. Then, they removed the requirement that kindergartners be enrolled in their local public school first and later expanded it all the way up to high school students.
Today, roughly half of Ohio’s families are eligible for an income-based voucher because the limit for a family of four $65,500 of annual household income.
Vouchers a better choice for some but not all
Rolling back Ohio’s school voucher programs would be difficult.
Taking away a coupon worth $6,000, $12,000 or even $18,000 a year is not something elected officials are eager to do.
In fact, hundreds of families packed into overflowing meetings rooms in January 2020 when state lawmakers debated whether Ohio’s list of underperforming schools had gotten out of control.
One of those moms was Kate Schwartz.
Her daughter had mental health problems coupled with learning disabilities that left her struggling through public school in Toledo. But when she took an Edchoice scholarship to go to Central Catholic High School, she thrived.
“She is a child that went from a 1.7 (grade point average) in 8th grade to currently carrying almost a 3.0 GPA,” Schwartz said. “I can tell you that she would not be doing this well without Central Catholic.”
But most kids who use Edchoice scholarships perform worse on state standardized tests than their public school peers, a 2020 investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer found.
In 88% of Ohio cities where vouchers are used, the data showed better test results for the public schools. And when it came to Ohio’s eight largest cities, five of the districts (Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati) reported higher proficiency levels.
Akron City Schools had the biggest difference, scoring nearly 8 percentage points higher than the private schools in its area.
Public school advocates say that’s because many of the schools on the voucher list aren’t failing. The criteria for getting on the list is wrong, not the schools.
“I believe that public schools are underfunded,” Cleveland Heights-university Heights teacher Karen Rego said. “And part of the reason they are underfunded is because we are paying for these rich children to go to private school.”
Moving for a voucher
In Rego’s district, southest of Cleveland, the majority of students identify as mixed race or minority but 91% of the school vouchers go to white students who attend a handful of religious schools.
“They are not poor. They are not unhappy with what we’re doing,” Rego said. “Most of those families never intended to come to Cleveland Heights. They came here to go to their own school without paying anything.”
Any kid zoned for an eligible school qualifies for a voucher regardless of income. But folks like Cropper, Rego and Heintz think most Ohioans haven’t stopped to think about what that means: Kids live in million-dollar homes while taking money from the state.
“They are not being rescued from a failing school,” Heintz said. “They are being recused from a tuition bill. Period.”
The end of public education
Ed Choice’s national research director thinks the people who say school choice is going destroy public education are a bit like Chicken Little who always thought the sky was falling.
“I think many of them are convinced that if all kids could get vouchers tomorrow, they would all leave public school,” Mike Mcshane said. “I just don’t think that’s true.”
His nonprofit’s own surveys have found that 45% of parents would still choose their assigned school.
He doesn’t see school choice as this us versus them competition.
“Does the Indian food restaurant compete with the Mexican place down the street,” Mcshane said. “Kind of but not really.”
We don’t bat an eye when students pick one college over the other. Why should their earlier years be any different?
“I think people are confusing the idea of public education with one particular kind of delivery system,” Mcshane said. “We want a system that is accessible to everyone that instills our children with the knowledge they need to be successful. To me, public education is how we achieve that goal.”
The looming lawsuit
Democrats say the state has an obligation to public education and spending more than $2 billion on private school tuition over the last decade detracts from that goal.
“I went to private schools, I taught at private schools, I sent my son to a private school, and it was by my choice,” Sen. Teresa Fedor, D-toledo, said. “I did not expect the public to pay for it.”
Fedor believes the way Ohio expanded these programs violates the state constitution. And a coalition of 75 Ohio public schools led by attorney Bill Phillis are planning to sue over it.
According to Phillis, rescuing poor kids from failing schools districts was “just a ploy.” “The voucher proponents really never cared about poor kids in poor districts,” Phillis said. “It’s really about getting public money to provide a private education.”
What happens next?
Phillis hasn’t filed his lawsuit yet, but Republicans already have a bill to create a universal voucher system here in Ohio.
Even the strongest supporters of House Bill 290 conceded that it’s a long shot at best during this General Assembly.
It’s more of a test balloon than an actual plan for funding universal vouchers, Lawson said. Ohio would have to change the way it taxes (lower property taxes, raise state taxes) and that would probably require a constitutional amendment.
Still, it’s not a completely farfetched idea. Florida, Indiana, Arkansas, Georgia and Maryland have all expanded their voucher programs in the last year.
Mcshane thinks recent school board fights over issues like masks and vaccines have pushed more people – even more Democrats – into the school choice camp.
“Opinions are so split on these issues, but schools have to come up with one decision,” Mcshane said. “We’re starting to realize that we don’t necessarily have to have this one system that we all fight over.”
Anna Staver and Grace Deng are reporters for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.