Steve Dyer is a veteran analyst of Ohio education issues, as a former legislator and think tank budget expert. He writes here about the latest expansion of Ohio’s failed voucher program. When an independent evaluation of the Ohio voucher program was previously carried out, it concluded that kids who leave public school to use a voucher lose ground academically. The evaluation was sponsored by the Fordham Institute. Do not be fooled by the misleading summary written by Fordham staff.
In this post, he shows where the money is coming from and where it’s going:
Now that the Ohio Legislative Service Commission has officially costed out the so-called “Backpack Bill”, we know for certain that this bill has nothing to do with “rescuing” kids from “failed” public schools. It’s all about publicly subsidizing the adults who can already afford to send their kids to private school.
The LSC analysis proves definitively that the bill would instantly provide public funding to about 90,000 Ohio students who do not currently receive it. It would be through vouchers, education savings accounts, homeschoolers (including those being taught Nazi ideology) and other various devices all adding up to an additional $1.13 billion. All while the legislature is talking about massive tax cuts and continues to short-change the needs of the 90% of students in Ohio’s public schools.
These are not students who are leaving public schools. These are students who are already in private schools, whose parents can already afford private schools and who attend schools that are not audited by the state to ensure they are actually educating a single student we’re paying them to educate.
Sounds like a great idea to me! I mean, Ohio’s never had an issue with privately run schools billing the state for millions of dollars to educate kids they never actually had, right? Oh yeah, except for the ECOT scandal that was about 40% bigger than the biggest public bribery case ever brought in the state.
It would be one thing if Ohio’s private schools were doing an awesome job. However, we know that about 90% of the time, kids in Ohio’s public schools test better than students attending private schools in the same cities. We also know that the students taking vouchers are significantly more white than the communities they are from.
At this point on the post, Dyer adds the data from different counties.
This Universal Voucher bill would put an additional $1.13 billion into a program that would provide taxpayer subsidies to adults who send their kids to unaccountable schools that perform markedly worse than Ohio’s public schools all while further segregating our kids and communities by race.
Open the link to finish the post and see the data.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“However, we know that about 90% of the time, kids in Ohio’s public schools test better than students attending private schools in the same cities.”
A false and invalid indicator of student learning and the teaching and learning process in general if I’ve ever seen one. What might be the cause of that stat? Test prep, test prep, test prep, c’mon say it with me TEST PREP.
And that is not a good thing.
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You are not wrong, but that’s not the point of the story. This is a massive transfer of public wealth to favored interests. That’s the story.
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The point of my post is to highlight the insanities involved in using false and invalid indicators to evaluate anything. Crap in Crap out!
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
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Guess I wasn’t clear. Testing is not the primary is subject of THIS post (scroll all the way up for reference). We have plenty of discussion on that topic. I’m old fashioned. If I had to make a triage decision about the systemic plundering of the public for private gain or the validity of testing — no matter how important the latter might be to me — I’d choose the former.
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Guess I wasn’t clear either. One needs to confront the absurdities, inanities and invalidities when confronting those who seek to privatize public education. One has to destroy their arguments, even if we don’t have the jack to have our voices heard as the privatizers have.
The start on any discussion of public policy should be that truth, sanity and validity are the main foundation. Anything else is a load of crap.
I guess sometimes one has to fight evil with evil, eh. . . NOT! Fight the evil of privatization with truth not evil. Using false and invalid indicators is using evil supposedly to counteract another evil. When one does that evil/bad/harmful policy, like privatization, almost always obtains.
So in essence by using their false metrics you are helping them succeed in that privatization. Just as implementing the standards and testing malpractice regime, thinking that one will be able to control the beast. How has that worked out???
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Oh, and I guess I didn’t realize that you are one of the thought control specialists here. . . “Testing is not the primary is subject of THIS post.” Thanks but no thanks for that gem of a supposed thought.
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Gotcha. You’re gonna make that dog hunt whether it wants to or not. And it only hunts validity of testing critters. Nothing else. Ever.
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Universal vouchers enable the fleecing of public schools in order to subsidize the tuition of the affluent students. Looking through the list of school districts, I also notice that about half the districts losing funds are Black/Brown majority and the receiving students are majority white. This is an anti-democratic “reverse robin hood” scheme.
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What is happening in Ohio and other red states is the fulfillment of the goals of the conservative Catholic and Christian theocracy.
“They’ve used … considerable resources to fund a host of think tanks, agencies, media outlets and even a major university department.” “The finances of plutocrats and the strategy of the right wing,” works in concert with, “the manpower and media of the Christian Right.” “States with pro-life GOP -controlled legislatures have millions pumped through Catholic groups”, that have agendas like the voter suppression campaign. The preceding, “They,” are “extremely conservative Catholics who either control or have access to enormous sums of money. They are closely connected to right wing intellectuals who provide useful language.”
(National Catholic Reporter, 4-13-2021, “Wealthy Conservative Catholics are the New Magestium …’they are the real locus of authority’ “.
The article’s author concludes with the following, “They’ve done it all without a word of interference from the individual bishops, the bishops of those states where their money is aiding the voter suppression cause or, from the USCCB…Know where your Church is headed and who’s leading the way.”
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In a speech reported by NCR, Tim Busch of the Napa Institute, described Catholic University as, “made great again.” Charles Koch and Busch were credited.
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So, the same folks who dump all over so-called “entitlements” like SS and Medicare/Medicaid, are the ones reaching out with greasy hands for those sweet tax dollars. Proving once again that only the rich are deserving of “entitlements”. Wow.
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