Stephen Dyer is a very insightful and reliable analyst of school issues in Ohio. He used to be a legislator. He reads bills and budgets. He keeps everyone informed about the intellectual fraud that perpetuates the diversion of public funds to failing charters and voucher schools. In this post, he dissects a recent paper by the Fordham Institute, which is an outspoken advocate of school privatization. Fordham, writes Dyer, said the quiet part out loud. A few years ago, Fordham funded a study by David Figlio on vouchers in Ohio that showed their negative effects, but they try to ignore their own study.
Dyer writes:
There’s been some news coverage today of Fordham’s latest foray into fantasy — a study they claim proves EdChoice vouchers are perfectly fine and dandy for kids and taxpayers.
However, tucked away in one of their “findings” is a kind of startling admission — that EdChoice forces local school districts to rely more on property taxes to pay for educating the students in public schools.
“Combined with the decrease in enrollments, this dynamic led to a 10-15 percent increase in local revenue per pupil.”
I’m sure the study’s author(s) had no idea what they had just done. But those of us who have been saying the same thing for years sure did. This is an admission that EdChoice means that students not taking EdChoice vouchers have to rely more on local, voter approved property taxes to pay for their educations — the exact thing that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled four different times made Ohio’s school funding system unconstitutional.
“The overreliance on local property taxes is the fatal flaw that until rectified will stand in the way of constitutional compliance,” ruled Justice Alice Robie Resnick in the 4th and final DeRolph decision in 2002.
So it was nice of Fordham to admit this. However, the report went on to spend a lot of time trying to minimize the potentially existential lawsuit Ohio’s voucher program faces, as well as mocking me and others as “Chicken Littles” (because those with a winning argument always use ad hominem attacks to strengthen their position).
The study blows minimal to zero impacts on student success into enormous justification for increasing taxpayer subsidies for private school tuitions. As Michigan State’s Josh Cowen put it: “First and most important: the study presents a ton of zero impacts and tiny effects. Mostly this is a #schoolvouchers report about statistical noise, packaged as a win.”
Exactly.
Take the information on segregation. The study compares the racial makeup of voucher students with the statewide racial makeup of Ohio students. The study’s author, Stephane Lavertu of Ohio State University (who taxpayers paid $132,968 in 2019 to educate students) was very careful to only compare the racial makeup of EdChoice recipients with public school students “statewide”.
Because he knows that EdChoice voucher students don’t come from every district. They come from majority-minority districts.
There are 95 districts that lose 10 students or more to EdChoice. In 76 of those districts, accounting for 87% of all vouchers given through the program, a higher percentage of white students take vouchers than there are in that district.
The average difference between white students taking vouchers and white students in those 76 districts was 76.2%. That means that in the districts where 87% of voucher students come from, voucher recipients are 76.2% more likely to be white than their public school counterparts.
My friends, that’s White Flight. Like, obvious White Flight.
Dear reader, do these data suggest — as Huffman wants you to think — that these segregation issues are “isolated examples”?
If 87% of voucher recipients are more likely to be white than the districts they come from, is that really “isolated”? Or is it “systemic”?
I mean in Huffman’s own district of Lima, Temple Christian takes 100% white voucher students. From a district that’s 35% white….
The vouchers worsen segregation. The students in voucher schools do worse on state tests than the public schools they left. What is more, “voucher students do worse on state tests the longer they take the voucher.”
A lose-lose, for students, for public schools, and for the state.
Nonetheless, despite failure, the state Teoublican legislature wants more vouchers and more failure!
Please open the link and keep reading this important post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And the end would be dumbing down the population even more?
Recent SCOTUS behavior suggests that when a law appears on the face of it to be unconstitutional, but the conservative majority want it anyway, they simply declare a new constitutional interpretation, however implausible.
Which indicates that the Constitution doesn’t stand up up to modern day scrutiny.
The fact that a claim and its opposite can be derived from the Constitution (which we see when the judges have divided “opinion”) shows that it’s flawed. It’s a rather simple logical theorem which says that if both a claim (or statement) and its opposite (negation) can be derived from a given logical system, then every claim can be derived from it.
So when the first contradiction in the Constitution was discovered (the first time SCOTUS had divided opinion), from that contradiction every other contradiction can be derived. No SCOTUS is needed anymore. What they do is simple theater for which they get a big salary.
Here is a simple example for how a single false statement leads to all possible statements: let’s say 0 = 1. From this we can conclude that any number is equal to any other number. For example, let us derive that 1=2. Let us add 0 to both sides of 0=1; we get 0+0=1+0. But 0=1 so on the right hand side we get 1+0=1+1=2. So 0+0=2, that is 0=2. But then, since 0=1, we get 1=2.
This is what the SCOTUS does: they take a contradictory precedent and then derive two different opinions from it for another case. But you can derive any number of opinions for any other case.
It’s a theater. For a properly formulated Constitution, there is no need for SCOTUS. You just need computers to check the validity of a claim.
People do not need a degree in economics to understand the flawed assumptions behind privatization. Vouchers in particular make no academic sense. They will result in working class paying more to underwrite the tuition for affluent students in segregated private schools, and they will harm the opportunities and education of those attending public schools. Vouchers are wholly political in nature while pretending to be about school choice. The main goal is to transfer wealth from the working class to the already affluent. Vouchers are largely a form of class warfare hidden behind bogus rhetoric on education.
I’m sure Fordham will correct that “mistake” soon!
Reading he article in the Dispatch Dyer linked was interesting. Dyer said, “Two-thirds of the kids getting vouchers have never been in the public school system.” But Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, told the USA TODAY Ohio Bureau that opponents of the voucher program use these “isolated examples” to “light the fuse that says racism then everyone is supposed to run for cover.” I never knew two thirds of something were isolated incidents. I thought isolated incidents were more, uh, isolated than the, um, supermajority. Huh.
“A few years ago, Fordham funded a study by David Figlio on vouchers in Ohio that showed their negative effects, but they try to ignore their own study. ”
They don’t care about the result of the study because from their viewpoint, vouchers have two positive effects for which no study is needed to confirm:
1) They take money away from public schools, and that may lead to their demise.
2) They give tax dollars to religious schools.
Both of these should be unconstitutional.