Three years ago, the pro-charter, pro-voucher Thomas B. Fordham Institute published a study of Ohio’s voucher program. The study, conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik of Northwestern University is called “Evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program: Selection, Competition, and Performance Effects.”
The study concluded that the voucher program was failing to improve student achievement.
It said in its conclusions:
There appears to be positive selection, as measured by prior academic performance and family advantage, among voucher-eligible students into private schools as part of the EdChoice program. Although a substantial majority of the students participating in the program, as well as their peers remaining in public schools, tend to be from low-income backgrounds, those students leaving for private schools under the program tend to be more advantaged and higher performing than their peers who were eligible to participate in the program but who remained in public schools…the evidence regarding the effects of EdChoice program suggests that while higher-performing students tend to leave public schools to attend private schools under the EdChoice program, the students who remain in the public schools—at least, those public schools that were comparatively high achieving—generally perform better on statewide tests as a consequence of EdChoice vouchers being available to students in a school. On the other hand, those students who leave these comparatively high-achieving public schools to go to private schools appear to perform worse than they would have had they remained in the public schools (which we estimate to have improved as a consequence of the introduction of EdChoice). Together, it appears that EdChoice has benefitted the majority of students, but the students who actually left the public schools—at least those on the margin of eligibility—perform worse on statewide tests. Although test performance is only one measure of educational success, these findings suggest that a detailed exploration of the possible causes of the negative test-score results (for instance, which private schools participate in the program, policies on school-grade retention, test-curriculum alignment, and the like) may be warranted.
Thus, the students eligible to leave with a voucher do better if they stay in public school; the students who use the voucher, who come from more advantaged backgrounds, do worse in school.
This is the only statewide evaluation of the Ohio EdChoice Program, and not what one would call a ringing endorsement since those who use the voucher do worse in school than those who stay in public school and don’t use the voucher.
Such research did not impress the Ohio legislature. Under the prodding of State Senator Matt Huffman (R.-Lima), the state has expanded the voucher program, so that students in two-thirds of the districts across the state are now eligible to get state funding to attend a religious school.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer wrote that the voucher expansion will hit the budgets of school districts hard, districts that in the past were not part of the voucher program.
A year ago, no students in the Parma school district used Ohio’s main tuition voucher program to attend private schools.
This year, thanks to changes in state law, 359 students are using vouchers.
For families paying tuition to send their kids to Parma-area private Catholic schools like Padua or Holy Name, a $6,000 tax-funded voucher toward tuition is a huge help.
For the district, it’s a $2.1 million hit to the budget that impacts teachers, books and supplies for its schools.
Parma isn’t alone in facing new or increased costs to help students attend private schools. Changes to state law, have more than tripled the number of districts declared part of the voucher program, from 40 in 2018-19 to 139 this school year.
Next year, the program meant to help students escape being stuck in failing schools will grow further, to more than 400 districts, which represents more than two-thirds of the districts in the state.
Even Solon, always at the top of state test score rankings, has a school considered failing and whose students are now eligible for vouchers. Next year, add a school in each of the high-scoring Brecksville-Broadview Heights and Mayfield districts.
The change has school officials protesting and gathering to find ways to seek relief…
The use of vouchers within school districts is also increasing. The Cleveland Heights-University Heights schools saw 500 more students use vouchers this year than last year, mostly to attend Jewish schools. The district’s voucher bill increased by $3 million.
That change, said district Treasurer Scott Gainer, has the school board seeking a higher tax increase than planned this spring.
Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner, whose district is seeing a small bill this year, but faces a larger one next year, complained to the state school board last week about the hit that school district budgets are taking.
“There are school districts that are now expecting to lose millions of dollars in the course of one year as a result of the EdChoice [voucher] expansion,” Glasner said. “These are losses for which districts were unable to forecast or prepare.”
State Sen. Matt Huffman, one of the strongest supporters of vouchers in Ohio, said some of the rules are subtle and have changed a few times. But districts should have known, he said, and should be blaming themselves for not improving their schools…
Ohio has four “scholarship” or voucher programs that provide tax dollars to pay tuition at private schools, almost all of which are Christian schools. There is one program just for Cleveland, which was started in 1996, so Cleveland is not affected by the current changes.
The biggest is called EdChoice. Created in 2005 for students attending “underperforming” schools or who would be assigned to them, EdChoice has a student’s home district pay $4,650 toward tuition for kindergarten through eighth grade and $6,000 for private high schools.
Stephen Dyer, a former legislator in Ohio who writes a blog about education, called “BS” on Huffman’s claim that school districts should have known and should have been prepared.
Dyer says that the state rigged the grades and school report cards to produce failure and make more schools voucher-eligible.
This is where I call BS.
How can I do that? Simple: Over the last decade, the state report card grades upon which these new voucher building designations are being based have been deliberately and artificially deflated for the state’s school districts. And I’m increasingly convinced it was for this sole purpose: to ensure more districts and buildings are deemed “failing” by the state so more public money can be poured into private, mostly religious schools.
Don’t believe me?
Look at school districts’ overall grade performance since the 2012-2013 school year — the first for the A-F state report card system.
Notice anything? Like a massive jump in D and F grades between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015?
Let me ask you a question: Does anyone — and I mean ANYONE — actually believe that between the 2013-2014 school year and the 2014-2015 school year school districts became more than twice as likely to “fail” kids?
Of course not.
This is a classic case of grade manipulation by state lawmakers. You’ll also notice a steady decline in the rate of Fs since the high point of 2015-2016. Why were these grades so much worse? Because the state kept changing standardized tests. So teachers and students had no idea what the testing expectations were. Since they’ve remained the same, you can see a steady and precipitous decline in the rate of F grades, though the percentages of D and F grades remain far higher than the 2012-2013 school year.
To add insult to injury, a study examing the test performance of students who take vouchers found they did worse on state tests after taking the voiucher than before … according to the pro-voucher Fordham Institute. But that doesn’t matter to Huffman, whose hero is apparently the Titanic captain who kept plowing ahead, damn the iceberg.
Anyway, here’s where Huffman struck gold for those who are taking a public subsidy to send their kids to private, mostly religious schools — only 2 out of the three years’ grades count to have your building designated “failing” from 2013-2014, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. And once the building is eligible for vouchers, every student who gets a voucher gets to keep it forever, even if the public building becomes the highest-performing in the state…
But it’s all been a plan from the beginning:
1) Deliberately deflate district report card grades
2) Get as many buildings as possible eligible for vouchers
3) Market them like crazy to families in these districts so the rest of us taxpayers can subsidize their choices with our local tax dollars and/or fewer opportunities for our kids who remain in local school districts.
That’s not a district performance problem.
It’s Huffman’s plan.
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Last Saturday I was on Meryl Johnson’s radio show, based in Cleveland, where she was a teacher in the public schools for many years. Meryl is an elected member of the Ohio State Board of Education, and she is very concerned about the explosion of vouchers. She alerted me to this disaster. I pointed out that there is one possible silver lining. Until now, the suburban districts in Ohio could ignore vouchers and assume they affected only Ohio’s urban districts. Now the cost of vouchers will hit their school budgets and their taxes will have to go up so that a few students can go to religious schools, where they are likely to get a worse education than the one offered in their local public schools. Their own schools will now feel the pinch caused by vouchers. Maybe this is the wake-up call that is needed to create a statewide coalition to stop defunding the public schools that enroll the vast majority of students in the Buckeye State.
Meryl sent me a screen shot of the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Will this wake up the citizens of Ohio? Will they realize that they must raise their taxes to pay for vouchers for the small number who leave their public schools? Do they know that the students who leave for religious schools will lose ground academically?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unless public schools present a vision of change for the future, they WILL PERISH!
Whose vision? One vision? Many visions?
This is like saying to a person who is being robbed at gunpoint, do you have a vision for the future?
BEAUTIFULLY said!
We’ve had more than enough of oligarchs (and their minions) who think that they have the right to appoint themselves the deciders for millions of teachers, researchers, academics, curriculum developers.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
Visionary. One empowered to tell Proles what to do. See “thought leader” and “disrupter.”
caplee-
“Perish” is passive. When Wall Street targets Main Street with its weapon of choice- buying politicians, church leaders, media, think tank staff, etc., it’s the slaying of public schools. When schools have their funding taken away, it’s the starving of the common good.
The ed reformers now have such a nihilistic vision. Their vision is that if a child cannot be educated — can’t be helped — with limited resources, then he isn’t worth caring about at all.
The reformers did everything in their power to undermine public education, promising and swearing an oath that their only desire was to help those most failed by public education — the very poorest and most disadvantaged students.
It was all a lie. The reformers’ desire to help those kids was quickly abandoned when they realized that their lavish salaries would not continue if they admitted to failure.
Good people, better people, would have admitted to their failure and tried hard to figure out what might work for those children. But the ed reformers showed that they were never good people — the good people were those who walked away, like Diane Ravitch. The ones left were the worst of all, no different than the ones left in the Republican party when those with a modicum of morality have walked away. Their were greedy and hungry for power and if children suffered, they rationalized that those children were nasty and unworthy anyway and they simply were more than happy to throw them under the bus if that was necessary to achieve their goals.
We now have the lifeboat theory that some children are worthy of being educated and the others simply cost too much money that makes them expendable.
Public schools have a vision that all students have value. The ed reformers’ vision is that only some kids do.
When Karen Lewis was elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her (she told me and was widely quoted saying the same) that 25% of the kids in the Chicago school system weren’t worth educating.
On another occasion, when I was in Chicago, I sat at a dinner table with Karen and Bruce Rauner who was not yet governor. We debated charter schools. I told him about the many kids with high needs that were not wanted by charters and were excluded to boost their test scores. His answer: So what?
YES: a deeply frightening concept found inside the reformer base: since you “can’t” teach certain kids, your focus should only be on the percent considered a good investment
After all of that bad news, I was pleased to see that Columbus Dispatch front page. There was a time when you’d never see a headline like that.
Let’s see, there is an expression for this…what is it?
Oh yes: Throwing good money after bad.
It’s also worth noting that Ohio lawmakers neglected to get anything done for the public school students in the state- they were too busy delivering the ed reform wish list on vouchers.
Not all the lawmakers- some of them actually attempt to put some work in on behalf of 90% of families and students- but as long as we continue to keep an ed reform majority in the statehouse, public school students will get nothing.
Public school students were the dead last priority. Again. Session after session and no one lifts a finger on their behalf.
Fordham Institute and Koch-linked organizations evidently want Catholic schools to get tax money despite the fact that 66% of Americans want separation of church and state. In 2018, Fordham funded an education study and interpreted the results to mean , “We shouldn’t underestimate the power of religion…other schools have something to learn from Catholic schools…there is at least some evidence that attending Catholic schools may benefit all sorts of children.”
It’s a shame that the study (I don’t know if it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal) didn’t elaborate on the benefit that a bishop-related site identified- Catholic schools preserve civic order. Decades ago, the authoritarian Catholic church provided that benefit while 1,000,000 Irish died of starvation.
Whenever vouchers are put to a vote by the public in a referendum, they lose.
If Ohio allows referenda, friends of public education should fight to get vouchers on the ballot.
As I recall, Ohio voters rolled back John Kasich’s effort to eliminate unions by referenda.
The coffers and the labor that enabled the grassroots build-up of opposition to Kasich’s plan reflected a united effort by thousands in communities across the state. Maintaining citizens’ rights required great reserves of personal sacrifice and fortitude.
Do Fordham staff, who are paid handsomely, merely trot into the offices of influence in the state capitol and receive a warm welcome for the agenda of the richest 0.1%? The path for the oligarchs’ campaign is greased by the understanding about ALEC’s favors. Barbarians succeed because they bring an arsenal- vast amounts of money to run ads, unlimited money for paid canvassers, etc.
I read the paper about Ohio vouchers. Fordham wrote the foreword which included a summary statement about the benefit of competition. I saw nothing in the research provided in the paper that addressed or would lead to a competition “finding”. Media reported the “competition finding”, relying on Fordham’s version. The researcher and Fordham can advise the public if the paper’s foreword presents facts or “alternative facts”.
Ohio is similar to Indiana, most of the voucher money goes to Catholic schools. The irony is unmistakeable. In Providence, R.I., when Catholic schools had to compete with charters, the charters succeeded and the Catholic schools closed. So, the oligarchs’ end run for privatization is a tradeoff- taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for religion in decline and, in return churches deliver voters to the politicians of the richest 0.1%. A study reported in media showed that there are parishes in which the amount generated by vouchers is greater than the revenue from worshippers.
Shame on the churches and shame on state legislators. Sixty-six percent of citizens want the separation of church and state, which was a corner stone in the creation of the United States of America.
Fordham and the researchers assert that test scores improved in the voucher-eligible public schools because of competition, but I didn’t see any reason to think that was true.
Did the teachers in the public schools teach “harder”?
Did the students in the public schools study more?
Did the public schools double down on test prep?
I thought that was an unsubstantiated claim.
I’m curious how much agreement there is among university professors and those who determine research integrity, about inclusion of unsubstantiated assertions in the “findings” of papers’ forewords.
BTW- One function of research design is to corroborate or invalidate what one feels is true.
Trying to make the devil’s advocate argument, a finding could read, “Researchers believed before the study that competition improved result and, we have not found reason to reject nor accept the notion in this specific line of inquiry because our study was not set up with that intent nor did we pursue it.”
It’s interesting that sports fanatics can endlessly belabor all of the factors influencing a team’s win or loss. But, when they turn their attention to a subject that has dollars attached for seeing things a certain way, their lenses narrow.
Linda,
You know as much as I when it comes to explaining that bizarre conclusion that the kids who got vouchers did worse in school, but the kids in public schools did better–and it MUST have been because of the vouchers they didn’t use.
I would love to see this study’s methodology that led them to conclude competition improves learning. Many of the think-tank white papers flooding the media are not peer reviewed and they confuse correlation with causality.
These are all baseless assertions. Fordham needs a reality check. Less money for public schools prohibits them from doing their best work. Large class sizes and diminished capacity to serve needy students are no recipe for success.
By reality check- do you mean fewer oligarch dollars funding them?
A professor at a state university wrote a research paper for Fordham.
Fordham- “Still, the findings suggest three key takeaways…(third) we shouldn’t underestimate the power of religion.”
I’m skeptical that “research” purportedly focused on self discipline in one denomination’s schools and that lacked a plausible control group (authors’ self admission) and that relied solely on teachers’ assessment of student behavior would lead to a finding that was a sweeping generalization about the value of religion.
Thanks for this on Ohio and for sending around my piece on Massachusetts.
I have a post on Wed on Ohio vouchers but put comment on Dana Goldstein out today.
I am glad I saved mine, as my readers will get a two part dose first from you and then from me.
Ohio is deplorable. Thanks for covering our awful voucher situation.
Jan Resseger
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000
Great quote!
In my first stab at categorizing, by demographics (gender), the authorship of Fordham Institute research, I found in a subset, 21 reports. Fourteen of them had male-only authors. Of the remaining 7 reports, co-written by men and women, 5 had the men listed first. Only one of the reports had female- only authors. (The Fordham site has a cross referencing research listing of 14 topics and 6 content types. By chance, I chose first, “Teachers and School Leaders” and “Report”. The data in this paragraph reflects the info from that cross-referencing.)
Fordham singles out Catholic schools for praise. The record of the Catholic Church and women is well known. Is it surprising that Fordham would “select” a male professor (state university) for a project and that the project would lead to praise for Catholic schools?
When I was on the Fordham board a decade ago, I was the only female. When I left, they replaced me with another female.
No more.
It’s a boy club.
IMO, “Christian” men (Catholics and evangelicals) decided to rig the system to assure that their brothers (mostly white) who have ethics of convenience (if any) get jobs where they are protected from competition -more than 65% of the population excluded.
The men aren’t embarrassed because they know within themselves that entitlement in the job market is their easiest, if not, only, path to well paid employment.
The Fordham Institute is like other belief tanks with a publication arm that offers in-house and contracted reseaech, not up to the rigors of a peer reviewed publication. Same for many reports from the ed reformers.
Right. They give their dogma a veneer of validity by running correlation analyses on reams of test data. With so much data, they’ll find a correlation somewhere, or sneak in those weasel words “approaching significance” & spin-out their predetermined conclusions.
This should be a required course for reporters & politicians: Calling BS in the Age of Big Data
A compelling correlation study – awards form DeVos’ Dept. of Ed. (principal investigator assignments, grants to directors of university ed “centers”, etc.) linked with faculty who get grants from Walton, Arnold and/or Fordham.