Stephen Dyer, former Ohio legislator, closely follows school funding in the state. After studying the latest budget, he realized that the Legislature was sending more money to private school students than to public school students. The Ohio legislature loves charters, Cybercharters, and vouchers. Apparently, the Republicans who dominate the Legislators don’t care about public schools. Nor do they care about accountability.
Dyer begins:
Look, I’m really excited that the Ohio General Assembly followed through on its promise to continue implementing the Fair School Funding Plan — the state’s second attempt at meeting its constitutional mandate to provide a thorough and efficient system of public schools for its 1.7 million students.
I mean, in nearly 2/3 of Ohio school districts, the state is already meeting or exceeding its promised funding amounts from two years ago. And while the lion’s share of the remaining shortage is felt in the state’s most needy districts (something I expressed concern about earlier this year), the fact that the state is actually starting to fulfill promises made to Ohio’s 1.7 million public school students is encouraging. Again, though, only if they finish the job, of course..
But the massive increase to private school tuition subsidies that accompanied the public school increase is a colossal turd in the punchbowl. How colossal?
Try this on for size:
Because the state increased the private school tuition subsidy to $8,407 per high school student, the state will now provide $210 more per student to parents whose kids are already in private schools than they will to public school students in Ohio’s urban core of Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo or Youngstown schools, which educate 173,000 students.
In fact, that $8,407 per pupil amount is greater than the per pupil state aid for nearly 8 in 10 Ohio students. A remarkable 1.13 million Ohio students will get less state aid than the parents of a private school student will receive next year.
Oh, and did I mention that not a penny of these tuition subsidies will be audited by a public entity? So we have no idea if the money is being spent educating kids or buying sweet rides for private school administrators. (Because that’s never happened in this state).
And the disparity is despite Ohio’s historic public school funding increase that occurred in this budget — again, a great accomplishment.
But man. This is crazy….
It would be one thing if vouchers (taxpayer provided private school tuition subsidies) provided better options for students. But study after study has demonstrated pretty clearly that even in urban districts, generally the public schools do better than the private schools — in Ohio, it’s almost in 9 of 10 instances that the public outperforms the private. Never mind that vouchers have also delayed critical investment in the educations of the 1.7 million Ohio public school students or added significantly to racial segregation.
Please open the link to read the rest of this shocking story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Blatantly sick.
Do read: PROPERTY by Valerie Martin.
LikeLike
Ohio elected government in Columbus is GOP, White, male and mostly Catholic. They feel superior to women and have disdain for gay people. They like religious schools because they reinforce patriarchy. The overwhelming amount of the state’s voucher money has been going to Catholic schools. People who support Catholic Churches should own the role their church has had in school privatization. Billionaires didn’t advance the cause without help.
LikeLike
I disagree somewhat that they feel superior. Except for the scapegoated “others,” they don’t govern in the interests of the people of Ohio at all.
LikeLike
An opposite to “feeling superior” would be that they view women as equals or better than they are. I speculate that a polling of women who interact with them would support my statement. Diane’s experience is not with those specific men but, she may have experience with a segment who has similar demographics. If she refutes my observation based on her personal experience, I’ll take the info. under advisement.
LikeLike
Stephen Dyer’s analyses of Ohio education shenanigans are as good as they get. As this one is. That’s why they all depress me so. Sometimes I have the feeling that I’m the only person in Ohio who thinks education, or at least the only ones are those that comment here. Despite substantive, factual, corroborated work consistently unveiling the disastrous situation seemingly concerns absolutely no one in this state. Certainly not in Columbus, certainly not in my school district or most of the adjacent ones, and certainly any person I have ever engaged in this topic.
And as successful as the opposition is constantly winning due largely to this seemingly uncontrollable progression to kill public education has been, we need to start asking ourselves why we are losing and why we act like the world if finally going to change because of some temporary victory? The problem, I fear, is not the profiteers, but us, the messengers. Diane has given us the template. We’ve done little-to-nothing with it. We are doing a piss poor job of getting our message across, building a constituency, and create a political narrative that is aggressively positive, unapologetic, and tied to the nation’s survival and future.
Dyer’s analysis should send chills down all our spines to wake us up of get us to finally shut up and take the inevitable consequences when they come. We are losing. We have been doing so for decades. There is no scenario that presently exists that is a realistic path toward achieving the kind of schools we know can be better and more responsive to each individual student. We have no national political strategy, no consistent tactics. And when the largest school district in my district hires a dubious new super who got his Ed doctorate from a now-defunct, for-profit, online grift factory (which might be the least controversial part of his resume), I predict in one-to-three years it will give the privatizers even more success in the future to finally make Ohio New Orleans-ized when it comes to publicly-funded education.
I always point to one example of success: the right to life movement’s annual DC lobby day. It has been going on since the 1970s, shuts down Capitol Hill and DC for a couple of days, and they are winning. Actually, they’ve won. It’s just a matter of time until the lemmings catch on. And we are making it so easy on them by using the same losing plan and issue neglect over and over again.
LikeLike
WordPress likes to change “is” to “if.”
LikeLike
Unfortunately, we’ve seen over and over that even those capable of critical thought are not immune from the cultish, brainwashing whims that are part of our new normal. Our daily toxic diet of regular and social media stew, along with a good dose of confirmation bias thrown in via the culture wars, has slowly and methodically replaced critical thought, instead of being strengthened, supported and developed. Regardless of where and how our collective minds were developed, we have seen historically how fragile and how easily the human mind can be twisted and manipulated. That being said, there is no easier way to achieve control than taxpayer-supported religious indoctrination through vouchers. GregB makes excellent points. Why are we losing the fight? Because we keep trying to spotlight the voucher/privatization badness, all of which is a now considered a feature, not a bug, for those creating this system and the $$$ that flows from it.
LikeLike
The New Republic, 2-3-2021
“The ascendance of conservative Catholicism in American politics did not happen by accident….Despite its waning moral and spiritual credibility, Catholicism is today the linch
pin of culture-war conservatism in the U.S.”
The title of the article is “Originalism is dead. Long live Catholic natural law. ” The following is a statement from the article, “Originalism’s real utility is its transactional value as a vehicle for other legal principles…(specifically) Catholic
natural law moral philosophy.”
Originalism is justification for the interpretation of common good by right wing wing Catholics as tax funding for Catholic institutions like their schools which SCOTUS has exempted from civil rights employment law. That exemption enables them to discriminate against women, Black and gay people and members of other religious sects.
LikeLike
There you go citing actual facts again! I would only add my repeated warning that constitutional law is being replaced by contract law. There will be no civil rights, only negotiated, legal agreements for more or less rights and privileges as long as a contract exists. Nothing could make religious fundamentalists and profiteers of anything salivate more. The death of public education will become the case study of note in MBA programs all over the country. Harvard will show them how.
LikeLike
Just learned Milan Kundera died. Huffpo has a quote of his that applies to our dilemma. Stupid people don’t value education for themselves or others. We live in a world where stupidity and chance are now aspirations. When we’ve had more information and experience than any humans in history.
“It seems to me that time, which continues its march pitilessly, is beginning to endanger books. It’s because of this anguish that, for several years now, I have in all my contracts a clause stipulating that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they be read only on paper and not on a screen,” he said. “People walk in the street, they no longer have contact with those around them, they don’t even see the homes they pass, they have wires hanging from their ears. They gesticulate, they should, they look at no one and no one looks at them. I ask myself, do they even read books anymore? It’s possible, but for how much longer?”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/milan-kundera-dead_n_64ae8756e4b0e5efaadf5107
LikeLike
Beautiful, Greg. Thanks for posting.
LikeLike
This is crazy…
It would be one thing if taxpayer
funded schools provided better options
for students.
But election after election,
has demonstrated pretty clearly
that generally the public schools
do NO better than the private
schools, at cultivating critical
thinkers…
LikeLike
Utah’s new vouchers are you he same way. About $7500 is spent per public school student, but each voucher is $8000. And the vouchers also cover home schools. And once a voucher is distributed, even when the child returns to public schools, the entire voucher remains with the private or home school.
LikeLike
Unfortunately, we’ve seen over and over that even those capable of critical thought are not immune from the cultish, brainwashing whims that are part of our new normal. Our daily toxic diet of regular and social media stew, along with a good dose of confirmation bias thrown in via the culture wars, has slowly and methodically replaced critical thought, instead of being strengthened, supported and developed. Regardless of where and how our collective minds were developed, we have seen historically how fragile and how easily the human mind can be twisted and manipulated. That being said, there is no easier way to achieve control than taxpayer-supported religious indoctrination through vouchers. GregB makes excellent points. Why are we losing the fight? Because we keep trying to spotlight the voucher/privatization badness, all of which is a now considered a feature, not a bug, for those creating this system and the $$$ that flows from it.
LikeLike
Another reason we continue to lose is due to the fact that policy is often build on a gigantic mountain of cash that flows into campaign donations. The will of the wealthy is what is being imposed on the rest of us, even when it makes no objective sense, like vouchers.
LikeLike
cx:built
LikeLike