An Ohio legislator has proposed lifting the income cap for private school vouchers, so that 74% of all families in Ohio would be eligible to use a voucher to attend a religious or private school.
The cost estimates of this proposal range from $70 million to $1.2 billion (if every eligible student were to use a voucher). The assumption–or hope–is that not every eligible student would use a voucher because there are not enough seats available in nonpublic schools. Presumably there would be an explosion of new private schools to take advantage of the money.
This is money that would be transferred from public schools to nonpublic schools. The public schools would essentially be defunded to favor religious and private schools.
The irony in this enthusiasm for vouchers in Ohio is that the voucher-friendly conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently released a study showing that students in Ohio who take vouchers to enroll in nonpublic schools actually lost ground academically as compared to their peers in public schools.
Does anyone in the Ohio legislature look at evidence?
Does Ohio want to destroy its future?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
crossposted at OpEd news: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Ohio-New-Voucher-Bill-Cou-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education-Vouchers_Fraud_Money-170415-29.html#comment654665
with this comment whites embedded links at the site.
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“Evidence Shmevidence”
It ain’t about the evidence
It’s ALL about the money
So, even if it makes no sense
The dollars flow like honey
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C’mon!
Evidence is for snowflakes.
There’s no reason to let facts get in the way of ideology.
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Unless the citizens of Ohio stand up and fight privatization, more money will go to privatization and less to public schools until they collapse. People need to organize and start voting against those captured by privatization. Voters need to threaten their jobs. If people don’t care about public education, public schools may become a mention in a museum, and no longer a reality. To quote Joni Mitchell,” Don’t it always seem to go, That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
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Ohio Republicans gerrymandered the state making it impossible to practice democracy.
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The Democrats talk about challenging gerrymandering. Unless they do more to challenge the ruthless Republicans, they may sleep walk into oblivion or a third party system.
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When it comes to practicing democracy, Democrats are like my 12 year old nephew and his saxophone.
He keeps promising that he will practice “tomorrow”, but never does.
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My opinion- the Democratic Party hierarchy, either has marching orders to lose or, they are ideological Republicans in a Trojan horse.
The busiest 3 days in Capitol switchboard history were opposition to DeVos. The Democratic politicians’ response is to studiously ignore it.
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Paving paradise destroys more value than it brings.
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According to William Phillips who leads the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding,
“ (SB 85) that would provide almost universal school vouchers across Ohio.
The Legislative Service Commission (LSC) estimates that 74% of Ohio students would be eligible to participate under the terms of the SB 85 voucher proposal. The LSC Fiscal Note and Local Impact Statement indicates if all students would opt for vouchers the net cost to the state would be $1.19 billion per year.”…..
“Private schools in Ohio already receive more state funds per pupil than scores of public schools.” Phillips points out that: “Ohio’s constitutional responsibility is to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools and has no constitutional directive to provide vouchers or privately-operated charters. “
Phillips knows that Ohio has a variant of the Blaine amendment: “The general assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state;
but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.” Ohio Const. Art. VI, § 2.
The Opportunity Scholarship program is funded with dollars from the state budget, not district allocations for public schools. It consolidates three scholarship programs (the Supreme-court tested Cleveland Scholarship Program, and two EdChoice Scholarship Programs into a single income-based scholarship program. The bill leaves in place two scholarship programs for students with disabilities, the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarships and the Autism Scholarships.
in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris(2002), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Ohio voucher program that gave state funding to low-income parents, allowing them to use the funding to send their children to any private school participating in the program. Even though the vast majority of the participating private schools were Catholic, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause permitted the program because parents could choose freely among participating religious schools, participating private secular schools and public schools. By offering parents such choices, the state had remained religiously neutral.
The sponsor of the Ohio’s new voucher/scholarsip bill, Matt Huffman, has been diligent in scheduling meet-ups to inform Catholics about the program and in getting publicity for the bill. https://www.ohiocathconf.org/News/ohio-opportunity-scholarship-program-seeks-to-expand-parental-choice
For anyone interested in voucher/choice programs for religious education,
this website offers state-by-state references to School Choice and State Constitutions. Be aware that this report is from proponents of tax-supported religious education. The report is from ALEC-American Legislative Exchange Council- and The Institute for Justice, the latter self described as the “National Law Firm for Liberty.” One the cases the Institute of Justice is working is about the exclusion of religious schools from the school choice program in Douglas County, Colorado. http://ij.org/case/douglas-county-religious-exclusion/
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(In Ohio’s office of Fordham, some of the staff graduated from the state’s public universities. Maybe the employees weren’t legacies to elite schools or, couldn’t afford private tuition?)
What can you say about the ideology of the scamps at Fordham? In the past few years the Board of Wright State University (public university) steered the institution like a business and, now it has run aground with $25 mil. in debt and lawsuits and federal investigations covering the horizon (worst financial loss in Ohio public university history). The Chair of the Ohio Senate Education Committee (Peggy Lehner) defends the Board and Kasich allows his lax appointee to stay at the wheel of the Concordia ship. Hilariously, yesterday, Kasich”s man compared the Board’s incompetence and the alleged crimes of greed that brought down the school, to the adversity that the Wright Bros. faced in the invention of flight. NO KIDDING.
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Glad I don’t teach in Ohio anymore, too.
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They’re missing the point, religious and private are just that; NO PUBLIC taxpayer money should ever be used or taken away from the public sector for this.
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Ed. rephorm “philanthropies” drag down GDP?
In Ohio, with the 70% truancy rate at the state’s largest contractor schools, fewer students are educated and tax dollars are wasted, the result of political advocacy by groups like Fordham.The overhead and salaries of the rephorm groups are tax shelters for the richest 0.1%. Does Chester Finn have a defense?
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