Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who keeps track of the budgetary impact of school choice on the state’s public schools. Despite multiple voucher programs, 85% of the state’s 1,000,000 children attend public schools. Dyer’s blog is called Tenth Period.

Ohio’s State Constitution contains explicit language supporting public schools and equally explicit language barring the public funding of religious schools.

Article VI of the Ohio State Constitution says:

“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.”

Nothing ambiguous there, but Republicans in Ohio ignore or creatively distort the State Constitution.

He writes:

So I came across an interesting piece of information today. Since 2021, Ohioans went from unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of a little over 3 in 10 private school students to more than 8 in 10 today.

At an astounding pricetag of a 313 percent increase — at least — in taxpayer subsidies¹.

Yes, Ohio’s private schools have seen an enrollment increase. However, that 22,000 student increase represents barely 1 percent of the 1.9 million students enrolled in all Ohio schools this year. 

And the funding has vastly outstripped the rate of unconstitutional voucher growth — resulting in a nearly 20 percent per pupil funding increase for private schools.

So get this.

State leaders have spent the last 5 years increasing unconstitutional voucher spending by $600 million, demonizing public education, putting on a full-court press to convince people to take unconstitutional vouchers and that’s netted them … barely a 1 percent increase in the private school share of Ohio’s school enrollment?

Pretty awful ROI, don’t you think?

Especially when you consider that by unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of mostly wealthy people like Les Wexner, the state is literally funding a separate, second educational system in direct contravention of the state constitution. 

And it has meant they have been unable (unwilling?) to fully pay for the state’s school funding formula for the 85 percent of students attending Ohio’s public schools. The state’s public school funding comes out of the same budget pot as its voucher money.

So the only way for voucher proponents to convince any good-faith judge or group of judges that they are not funding a second, unconstitutional and unaccountable² school system is to actually shrink the number of vouchers.

Which they’ll never do.

This fact, as much as any, helps explain state Rep. Jamie Callender’s recent attempt to bully the suing school districts into dropping the case— a threat from which he has (kinda) weaklybacked down.

For if these suing school districts continue to stand strong, Callender and his overlord, Speaker Matt Huffman — lawyers, both — know they are screwed.

Legally speaking.

Footnotes:

1. I’m only including the two EdChoice programs and the Cleveland voucher program because those are the ones at issue in the current lawsuit. These numbers are, obviously, higher if you include the autism and special needs vouchers. Also, as with every current year data analysis of vouchers, the funding numbers are estimates because we don’t have readily accessible current year dollar figures for the vouchers, just the number of students whose schools are now eligible to get them. So I multiplied last year’s per pupil amount for each of the voucher programs to reach the $861.6 million figure. It’s probably going to be more because per pupil voucher funding always increases.

2. Remember that not a penny of the $8 billion+ we’ve spent on unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies since 1996 has been audited.