Stephen dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who has been consistently critical of state funding for charters and vouchers. In post after post, he has documented waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds, as well as the damage done to the state’s public schools.
In this post, written after the election, he predicts that the state’s voucher program was grievously wounded by the election results.
Please open the link to read it in full.
He writes:
Well that was something, wasn’t it? Tuesday, I mean?
I’ve taken a few days to write about it because I didn’t want to get too emotional when analyzing what this victory would mean for Ohio’s education policy landscape. And reduce my (happy for once!) use of 4-letter words.
Tuesday night was a kind of wipeout for Ohio Republicans we haven’t seen since I won my state house seat in 2006. And Tuesday’s shift followed a very similar pattern to the one I was part of — break the Republican supermajority in the year ending in a 6 and set up the next general assembly cycle for the year that ends in 8 for making the majority a real possibility.
But one thing we didn’t have in 2006 was EdChoice — at least not in its current form. Then-Speaker Jon Husted (yeah, THAT Jon Husted — the one with the ass) created the program in the 2005 budget, so by the 2006 election, it had only been in place a year.
The other thing we didn’t have in 2006 was a Texas (yes, THAT Texas) Republican massacre that was driven in large part by rural backlash to private school tuition subsidies. Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa actually made undoing Texas’ $1 billion voucher program her No. 1 topic in her victory speech, even over data centers.
How does this matter for Ohio?
Let me explain.
The Ohio Supreme Court, which is now 5-2 Republican, not the 7-0 Republican sweep the pro-voucher people were so cocky about encountering after the 10th District Court of Appeals found EdChoice unconstitutional last month, is much less friendly to the idea of simply using politics to rubber stamp EdChoice.
While there are still more Republicans than Democrats on the Ohio Supreme Court, now the plaintiffs only have to convince 2 of the 5 remaining Republicans to kill a program that Tuesday cost Texas Republicans every statewide office and the statehouse.
Now the legal arguments of the case match the politics: EdChoice is unconstitutional and horrible politics.
In addition, Ohio’s new Democratic Attorney General John Kulewicz will still have to be on the case because as the Attorney General, he is obligated to defend the Department of Education. But he swears an oath to uphold the Ohio Constitution. Think he might be a little more concerned about the EdChoice program’s clear violation of the Constitution’s no religious sect can control education money provision than the current AG was?
My guess is he will.
So EdChoice advocates have gone from thinking they had the Supreme Court in the bag to uphold their outrageously expensive and unaccountable taxpayer private school giveaway to now questioning whether the advocate for their side — the Ohio Attorney General — will even fight that hard for it. All in a political environment that saw Texas turn midnight blue because of a program similar to EdChoice.
Think they’re sweating this a little?
They are.
Here’s how their primary X fighters are taking the results. Not well…..
So they are already talking about legislative compromises to throttle the program. And they’ve already given up on the AG supporting the program, throwing the future arguments on the anti-public school, out-of-state advocates trying to turn Ohio into their little pet ideological project.
Here’s the bottom line: At this point, I think the Acton Administration could take the EdChoice program out of the school funding line item where it currently resides, put it in its own line item, and zero out that line item, killing the program. Then, it could take that taxpayer money and, instead of giving it to unaccountable private schools, fully fund special education or poverty funding in the Fair School Funding Plan, which would reduce the need for local property taxes.
I don’t think they’d get nearly the pushback everyone expects.
Would a greatly weakened Speaker Huffman, if he’s even Speaker next year, hold up a budget that will lower costs for Ohioans so he can keep sending billions of those same Ohioans’ tax dollars to unaccountable, mostly religious private schools in the wake of the Texas devastation and losing Ohio’s supermajority?
When we know that we’ve had to spend $35,000+ for every additional private school student that EdChoice created — paying more state per pupil funding than all but 8 of Ohio’s 1003 Public School Districts, Charter Schools and Joint Vocational Districts spend in local, state, and federal per pupil funding combined?
Dare him.
There’s precedent, you know.
In 2009, Gov. Ted Strickland did this exact thing — zero out EdChoice. And as Chair of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee on House Finance, I inserted it back into the budget so we could establish the Evidence Based Model of school funding — the Fair School Funding Plan’s antecedent.
Next year, we don’t have to sell anything to get a new, constitutional public school funding formula the way I had to do. We have it in place. All we need is the money. EdChoice is costing about $1 billion a year. That would go a long way toward funding the needs of Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students.
Would Huffman put his majority at risk to keep giving billions to private schools with zero public accountability? After what happened to Texas Republicans when they did that? After what happened to his Caucus Tuesday?
After the prospects for the EdChoice lawsuit to succeed at the Ohio Supreme Court — according to EdChoice advocates themselves — have become far better?
Look, I don’t want to give anyone false hope here. There’s no guarantee that EdChoice is done. Public education advocates have to keep fighting and reminding everyone of just how insane, out of control and unaccountable this program has become. Just as we’ve been doing for years now.
Open the link to finish the post.
