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Is School Choice Gutting Ohio’s Public Schools?

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Ohio has five school voucher programs, with EdChoice (established 2005) the most far-reaching. The maze of laws governing Ohio’s vouchers has allowed them to steadily expand, and Ohio’s public schools (and the taxpayers who fund them) appear to be paying a big price for choice.

The EdChoice program is supposed to be providing an escape hatch for students in underperforming schools, but that hatch has become barn-door sized. Stephen Dyer at Innovation Ohio finds that the voucher bite of public school funds has jumped $47 million since last year. According to Patrick O’Donnell, reporting for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, individual districts are seeing new, huge losses. A year ago, there were zero vouchers being used in Parma school district; this year there are 359, to the tune of a whopping $2.1 million.

The number of districts affected in 2018-19 was 40. This year, it’s 139. The list of eligible schools for 2020-21 runs to twenty five pages, with almost 50 schools listed on each page. These are schools that have been deemed failing by the state, using a complicated formula that can be triggered with just a couple of low scores. Further complicating the matter is the safe harbor given to districts in order to adjust to changes in testing. Report cards from 2015, 2016 and 2017 don’t figure in, but now, because three years have to be considered, school report cards from 2013 and 2014 do count.

An exodus of voucher students leaves stranded costs in the public school; buildings still have to be heated, and textbooks can’t be handed in for refunds. If voucher students don’t leave in neat increments from specific grades, the public district may not easily be able to downsize. If you have already bought food and presents assuming all ten grandchildren will be there for Christmas, and it turns out that three are going to Disneyland instead, your costs don’t instantly decrease. A recent study in Pennsylvania found that stranded costs can last for at least five years.

But a change in Ohio’s voucher law is even more punishing, because as of this year, a student’s family gets a voucher even if that student never attended the public school at all. Districts are facing a loss of millions of dollars with zero decrease in their enrollment.

The impact is staggering. Toledo’s voucher costs increased by $5.7 million. In smaller districts, the dollar amount might not seem impressive, but Scioto Valley’s increase amounts to a 965% jump in voucher costs.

As with most voucher programs, the state does not track the demographic data of students who use vouchers. But as Dyer points out, the increasingly tight standards have resulted in even wealthy, high-performing districts, ending up on the voucher-eligible list, making many wealthy parents find themselves eligible for vouchers.

While we don’t know exactly who uses the vouchers, we know where they use them. Ohio vouchers are used almost exclusively for private religious schools (97% in 2015-16). You may be able to get a voucher; that doesn’t mean a private school will be open to letting you use it. In the meantime, Ohio taxpayers are funding private religious institutions.

It is the same old problem of school choice; how can a community fund multiple parallel school systems for the same amount of money that used to fund a single system. Either taxes must be increased, or public school programs must be cut. Of course, the other alternative would be for legislators to stand up and say, “We think that school choice is so important that we are going to raise your taxes to make it work,” but to date, no legislator has shown that kind of nerve. Perhaps none have that kind of courage, or perhaps the slow starving of public schools is a feature, not a bug.

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