In Ohio, as in every other state, most children go to public schools. You would think that their elected officials would work hard to ensure that their district’s public schools are well-funded. In red states like Ohio, you would be wrong. Safe in their gerrymandered districts, Republicans are shoveling money to charters and vouchers, not public schools. Their generosity to nonpublic schools ignores the long list of scandals associated with charters, as well as their poor performance. Nor are Republicans concerned by the lack of accountability of voucher schools, not to mention their discriminatory practices.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Capital Journal’s Susan Tebben reported: “Ohio House Democrats have laid out a plethora of bills targeting the education system in the state, impacting everything from teacher pay to oversight of private school vouchers and the overall funding of the public school system…’Our principles are pretty clear on that front,’ said House Minority Whip Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. ‘There is no better investment we can make in the future of our state than investing in the education of our students, and that every kid, no matter which corner of the state they grow up in, deserves a world class education.’
There is a problem, however, blocking most pro-public school legislation. Only 32 of 99 Ohio House members are Democrats, and in the Ohio Senate, only 7 Democrats serve in a body of 33 members. Due to gerrymandering, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the district maps that are being used today, but the Court did not enforce its ruling. This means that, except in the state budget where compromises sometimes are demanded, most of the Democratic priorities languish. In the recent budget, the legislature enacted a second stage of the three-budget, phase-in of a new public school funding formula, but it was accompanied by a universal private school tuition voucher expansion.
Here, according to Tebben, is what has happened to a bill to prioritize and protect the new public school funding formula:
“At the top of the (Democrats’) list is House Bill 10, which seeks to hold legislators to the six year phase-in plan that was assigned to the Fair School Funding Plan, legislation that funds public schools based less on property values and more on the needs of individual school districts. HB 10 is a bipartisan bill which simply ‘expresses the intent of the General Assembly to continue phasing in the school financing system,’ which was inserted in the 2021 budget bill, ‘until that system is fully implemented and funded,’ according to the language of the bill. The bill was introduced in February 2023 and quickly referred to the House Finance Committee, but has not seen activity since.”
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican supermajority won’t commit to the eventual full funding of the state’s public school system because, they say, revenue projections are unsure in the context of growing privatization and years of cutting taxes in budget after budget.
Ohio’s gerrymandered Republican legislators instead operate ideologically and far to the right. After Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to deny medical care for transgender youths last winter, legislators immediately overrode the veto. Far-right bills from the American Legislative Exchange Council and other bill mills, and bills endorsed by the extremist but powerful Columbus lobby, the Center for Christian Virtue, now housed in the building it purchased across the street from the Statehouse, dominate legislative deliberation and get lots of press.
Kikandi Lukambo has reinvented himself many times in his life.
After war forced him, his parents and siblings to flee their home in the Congo, he became a tailor, catering to the fashionable ladies of Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Nearly a decade later, in 2015, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program resettled Lukambo in Columbus. He quickly found a job with a perfume manufacturer, then at a distribution warehouse.
Recently, he founded a transportation business that shuttles other immigrant workers — including people from Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere — to and from their workplaces in Greater Columbus.
Sitting in Kivu Transportation Services’ small office in the Northland neighborhood recently, Lukambo, 37, spoke of his gratitude for the opportunities Ohio has afforded him.
“(Ohio) has a very good reputation of employment,” he said. “We have the best life here.”
Lukambo, who became an American citizen in 2022, also found love locally. Four months ago, he and his fiancée Wedny Dauphin, an immigrant from Haiti, became parents to a baby boy.
Foreign-born people like Lukambo and Dauphin have been essential to Columbus’ population growth and economy in recent years, according to new government data and local economists.
Because native-born Americans are having fewer children and are moving away from Ohio, the state’s population shrunk by about 13,000 between mid-2020 and mid-2023. But it would have shrunk by about 61,000 more if it weren’t for the flow of immigrants moving in, according to Census Bureau estimates.
Mark Partridge, an urban economist at Ohio State University, told The Dispatch that population expansion comes with certain growing pains, such as greater demand for housing and public services like schools.
But he said immigrant-driven population growth is a “first-order factor” benefitting the region’s economy — in contrast to shrinking cities like Youngstown, where relatively few immigrants settle.
“Population growth drives demand for businesses. … And (likewise), population growth (increases) the supply of workers that firms want to hire,” he said.
“It’s easy to scapegoat immigrants. … However, if it wasn’t for immigration in a state that struggles retaining population like Ohio, we would have much faster population loss. Once you start losing population, it’s pretty easy to turn into a vicious cycle downward.”
Lukambo had never driven a car before moving to the U.S. nine years ago. Soon after arrival, he and his brother paid another Congolese refugee $1,000 to teach them how to drive so they could get to work, he said.
While his job at a warehouse provided some stability, Lukambo dreamed of starting his own business. At first, he thought of starting a language school for other immigrants, since he speaks English fluently. But then he realized that very few of his potential students would have a means of transportation to get to class. This insight led him to start the transportation company, which now has contracts with a sawmill in Newark, the refugee resettlement agency Jewish Family Services and elsewhere.
Lukambo and Dauphin drive vans for their company while also working other jobs — Lukambo is a weekend supervisor at a Macy’s warehouse in Groveport, and Dauphin works for Cheryl’s Cookies in Westerville.
“I don’t really take time off,” Lukambo, who works seven days a week, said with a chuckle.
Bill LaFayette, an economist who owns the local consulting firm Regionomics, told The Dispatch that immigrants are good for the economy in part because Columbus-area firms are in desperate need of workers.
“Our employment growth has been somewhat stunted since mid-2022, just because there aren’t enough workers,” LaFayette said. “(Immigrants) tend to be younger than the population as a whole, and they tend to be more likely in the labor force.”
LaFayette said that immigrants are also significantly more likely than native-born people to become entrepreneurs.
“My guess is that (is because) they have pulled up stakes and moved to a completely different part of the world, and they are inherently risk-takers,” he said.
He pointed to Morse Road as an area with an abundance of immigrant-owned businesses, which he said retain a greater percentage of their sales revenue within the local economy than national chains.
Studies also show that immigrants are a boon to the local tax base.
“Whether you come from Cleveland or Calcutta, you still need a place to live,” he said.
Skeptics of immigration sometimes raise concerns about immigrants taking jobs away from native-born people, but LaFayette said this is not a concern in central Ohio, at least not right now.
“Our unemployment rate’s barely above 3%. … All you’ve got is pretty much frictional unemployment — people going from one job to another,” he said. “We need everybody we can get.”
Partridge, the Ohio State professor, said economists still debate the size of this effect, though most agree it is small. He believes that low-wage workers are most affected, but “it’s not a massive effect.” On the other hand, he said immigrants often come up with innovations or insights that help firms expand into markets abroad — boosting wages for high-skill workers.
As Columbus’ foreign-born population continues to grow, Lukambo hopes to expand his business by partnering with more employers and by offering driving classes for newly arrived immigrants.
“I’m under obligation to help other people — because I don’t like to see people struggling the way I struggled with at the beginning when I came here,” he said.
Lukambo said many of his relatives and friends from his refugee camp in Uganda resettled elsewhere in the U.S. But when they come to visit Columbus, he makes the pitch for them to relocate here — which, increasingly, they accept.
“(Congolese) people used to say, ‘Ohio is like a village. Ohio is not a really good state.’ But with time … a lot of refugees and a lot of immigrants are coming here. … With the economy, you can be at least successful with one job, and you manage your time and you feel like you are having a good life,” he said.
“Ohio is growing.”
Peter Gill covers immigration and new American communities for The Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America here:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
George Will is widely viewed as the dean of conservative opinion writers. He has been writing a regular column for The Washington Post for years, extolling conservative ideas and manners.
But he is repulsed by Donald Trump. Will does not like Trump’s policies, his crudeness, his vile behavior, his incivility, nor his lack of knowledge. I agree with him about that. Conservativism can’t be represented by people who have no ideas other than hatred’s, nor should they be represented by people lacking dignity.
Needless to say, Will doesn’t like the candidates who style themselves to be as vulgar as Trump.
In this column, he excoriates Kari Lake, who is running against Congressman Ruben Gallego for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat in Arizona, and businessman Bernie Moreno, who is running for Senate in Ohio. Will doesn’t want the Republicans to lose control of the Senate but as I read him, he would rather lose the Senate than see these two vulgarians elected.
He writes:
PHOENIX — From Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken for every pot” (1928) to Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” (1984), some campaign slogans have been humdingers. The slogan of Republican Kari Lake’s Senate campaign could be: “Oh, never mind.” Here in Arizona and in Ohio, GOP Senate candidates force conservatives to choose between awful outcomes: the consequences of losing the Senate, or the disappearance of the conservative party.
Running for Arizona’s governorship in 2022, Lake practiced the kamikaze politics of subtraction. Today, she says she was joking when she told John McCain voters — they elected him to two House and six Senate terms — to “get the hell out” of a GOP event. McCain voters were not amused. She lost, then mimicked her hero, saying that her election was stolen. Courts disagreed.
Today, she seems intermittently aware that many Arizonans are weary of her high-decibel imitation of Donald Trump’s sour, self-absorbed, backward-looking, fact-free, sore-loser, endless grievance tour. So, she sometimes seems to say of her protracted harping on 2022: Oh, never mind.
In Ohio, Bernie Moreno is running against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
Bernie Moreno once called Trump a “maniac” and a “lunatic” akin to “a car accident that makes you sick.” He scoffed at Trump’s claims of election fraud and called the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “morons” and “criminals.” But Trump, like a marsupial, has tucked Moreno into his pouch, and the amazingly malleable Moreno calls (as does Lake) the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” and says the 2020 election was “stolen,” Joe Biden should be impeached and Trump is swell.
Moreno, who projects the Trumpkins’ chest-thumping faux toughness, disdains bipartisanship. Evidently, he plans to advance his agenda with 60 Republican votes. There have not been 60 Republican senators since 1910…
The nation no longer has a reliably conservative party of sound ideas and good manners. If conservatism is again to be ascendant in their party, Republicans must stop electing the likes of Lake and Moreno. They would join other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas, from industrial policy (government allocation of capital, which is socialism) to isolationism. And whose unconservative temperaments celebrate coarseness as an indicator of political authenticity and treat performative poses as substitutes for governance.
Gallego and Brown are mistaken about much, but they are not repulsive. Conservatives can refute them and, by persuading electoral majorities, repeal or modify progressive mischief. The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for “squishes,” a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.
The current version of Moreno says: About my talk regarding the maniac, lunatic, sickening-car-accident Trump? Oh, never mind. Moreno and Lake are useful, if only as indexes of today’s political squalor. Neither, however, should be a senator.
The editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer were taken aback by the facts reported about vouchers by their reporter Laura Hancock (posted in previous time slot). The Ohio legislature expanded vouchers so almost every family is eligible, even if they never sent their child to public school. The editorial board believed that vouchers were supposed to help poor kids escape low-performing schools, and they urge the legislature to return to the original purpose.
What is disappointing about this editorial is that it fails to recognize that the original purpose of vouchers has already proven to be a disaster. In the only statewide evaluation of vouchers, sponsored by the choice-friendly Thomas B. Fordham Institute, poor children who took vouchers fell even farther behind their peers in the public schools they left. (See summary, on p. 7, concluding that students who left public schools for voucher schools performed worse than if they had remained in their public school).
This finding—that voucher students who leave public schools perform worse—has been replicated in every voucher program. Voucher students don’t go to elite private schools. Typically they go to voucher schools that do not have certified teachers and that are allowed to discriminate on any grounds.
Voucher scholar Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has assembled the powerful negative effects of vouchers on kids who transfer from public schools. The results in Ohio are the worst.
I wish the editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer had seen these data before they wrote the following editorial. The facts are in: Vouchers don’t help poor kids who leave struggling public schools.
Last June, when the Ohio House passed Amended Substitute House Bill 33, the two-year state budget, sending it to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature, House Majority leadership celebrated the “landmark” expansion of EdChoice school vouchers, loosening income caps to make voucher benefits available to all Ohio families.
“Along with funding public education, the budget makes a landmark investment in school choice with a universal voucher program,” the statement from House Republican leadership said. “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools. By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”
Instead, parents in affluent communities like Rocky River, Westlake and Bay Village with kids already in private and parochial schools appear to have taken immediate advantage of the new eligibility rules. Families of four up to 450% of poverty levels (that is, earning up to $135,000 a year) now qualify for full taxpayer-funded vouchers, and those making more money qualify for partial vouchers.
Ohio’s legislature, to be true to its stated school-choice motive, should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on state report cards to set the standard.
Cleveland.com’s Laura Hancock looked at before-and-after numbers and found that students on EdChoice vouchers shot up from 16 to 309 in the Rocky River school district; 41 to 581 in Westlake; and 13 to 229 in Bay Village.
Hancock then compared public-school enrollment trends to judge if this was primarily a move out of public schools, or a subsidy for kids already in private and parochial schools.
The evidence points strongly to the latter. Rocky River public school enrollment dropped by only 22 students, not 309. Bay Village enrollment dropped by 30 students, not 229. Westlake schools recorded 19 fewer students this year compared with last academic year — not 581. Similar patterns were seen in other affluent school districts, from Strongsville and North Royalton to Brecksville-Broadview Heights.
By contrast, in the Cleveland public schools, where more than 8,000 students now get school vouchers through the much-older Cleveland school voucher program, which dates to 1996, those on EdChoice vouchers increased only slightly, from 9 to 28.
In even more impoverished East Cleveland, EdChoice recipients dropped from 12 last academic year to less than 10 this year.
And the money is now almost gone.
“The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,” Hancock reports. “As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.”
Advocates of the universal voucher program suggested to Hancock that, as word gets out, more people will use the vouchers as intended next school year, to switch from low-performing public schools to a private or parochial option.
But it seems unlikely those now on the EdChoice expansion vouchers would be displaced to make room for lower-income students.
In other words, lacking conscious, targeted efforts to make sure low-income Ohioans in poor-performing schools primarily benefited, Ohio’s EdChoice expansion as implemented was not the school-choice program Statehouse leaders promised.
The data suggest instead it became just a big taxpayer subsidy for those students already in private schools.
That should outrage every Ohio taxpayer — and every parent of students in struggling districts who were supposed to benefit.
Also raising red flags were the absence of reciprocal obligations on the part of private and parochial schools taking these taxpayer-funded vouchers to show they are a higher-quality alternative to public schools.
The lack of transparency and data-reporting guardrails forces parents making “school choice” for academic reasons, rather than out of religious or other motivations, to blindly assume that a private or parochial school is the best choice, without actual data on educational performance.
This is particularly troubling given Ohio’s history of funding for-profit charter schools without such guardrails. That’s how the now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow managed to make off with $117 million in wrongly paid taxpayer funds, based on a 2022 state audit — mostly for falsely reporting students ECOT never had.
The General Assembly needs to revisit its universal vouchers program to ensure that this nearly $400 million in Ohio taxpayer money is buying true school choice as promised for students mired in poor-performing public schools who most need quality alternatives.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The number of Cuyahoga County students receiving state-funded scholarships to attend private schools has skyrocketed this year after state lawmakers expanded a voucher program, but state data suggests that doesn’t necessarily mean more kids have opted out of public schools.
Across the county’s 31 districts, the number of students receiving tuition payments in the EdChoice-Expansion scholarship — one of five school voucher programs run by the state, and the one lawmakers expanded over the summer to give at least partial tuition payments to families of all income levels— has increased nearly four-fold, from about 2,500 students last year to nearly 9,200 this year.
Those districts, however, have not seen a corresponding loss in student population, indicating that most of the families newly benefitting from the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools, rather than fleeing a school district besieged by violence or bullying, mediocre test scores or other problems.
The data cut against arguments lawmakers and advocates have made over the years that vouchers are necessary to give families a chance to choose private schools over the public school district where they live.
In Rocky River, EdChoice-Expansion scholarships were nearly 20 times higher on Feb. 1 than last year. In Bay Village, they increased 17 times. Westlake’s increase is 14 times higher, according to an analysis of state data by The Plain Dealer / cleveland.com.
The number of students across Ohio who are attending private schools on state-funded scholarships spiked this year because the legislature — in the two-year budget bill signed by Gov. Mike DeWine — removed income eligibility caps for EdChoice-Expansion. Last year, the cap was 250% of the federal poverty level for a scholarship, or $75,000 for a family of four. Now, there are no income caps, although families only get partial scholarships when they earn above 450% of the poverty level, or above $135,000 for a family of four.
Full scholarship amounts are $6,167 for grades K-8 and $8,407 for grades K-12.
Enrollment losses in Cuyahoga County district classrooms, however, are more modest than the jump in private school vouchers. State data shows that families that live in the boundaries of suburban district schools— some of which are among the best performing in the state — but may have never set foot in a public school now are receiving vouchers.
Enrollment in Rocky River City School District fell by just 22 students between last year and this year, even though the number of kids receiving vouchers shot up from 16 to 309. In Bay Village City School District, there are 30 fewer students, despite a voucher jump from 13 to 229. Westlake City School District has 19 fewer students; vouchers in the district spiked from 41 to 581.
In the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, the number of kids receiving EdChoice Expansion vouchers increased from nine to 28 this year, a miniscule number compared against its student population of more than 32,000. But students in Cleveland also are eligible for the Cleveland Scholarship, which has no income caps, and is the oldest in the state, having been established in 1995. As of Feb. 26, there were 8,218 students in the Cleveland Scholarship program.
State legislatures these days tthjnkbthat they should pass laws telling teachers how to teach reading and what to teach in social studies. The latest example comes from Ohio, where the far-right legislature is in the midst of mandating a course on capitalism.
Denis Smith, retired educator, writes:
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, our republic is on fire. And that’s not being hyperbolic.
Incendiary language is now the norm in Congress and across the nation, further fanning the flames of overheated rhetoric in an election year. Indictments pile up against a former president, along with criminal trials looming in multiple jurisdictions. Perhaps even more ominous, jurors, judges, and election workers are being threatened with harm by extremists across our land.
But that’s only the short version of a narrative about a country at the brink, where democracy is threatened by the specter of authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, back in Ohio, the legislature has examined the state of the state and determined that in today’s volatile world, there is a pressing need to modify public school curriculum by teaching … capitalism.
That’s right. Ohio Republicans have decided that teaching about capitalism is more important in troubled times than strengthening student learning opportunities about democracy. Yes, learning about capitalism is more important for Ohio students than the critical need for media literacy and increased research and critical thinking skills in an age of artificial intelligence and fake news.
Add to that the importance of teaching about character and caring about others, a key cornerstone of character education.
To Republicans, whose former House Speaker and former state party chair are now serving prison sentences, along with their twice-impeached presidential front runner facing 91 felony criminal counts, there appears to be no pressing need for young people to learn more about personal ethics, citizenship, and the importance of character.
But we probably should know that when it comes to Republicans, caring about the needs of others might be tantamount to socialism.
After the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 17 by a margin of 64-26 on Feb. 7, a measure which calls for the addition of teaching about capitalism in high school financial literacy standards, one Democratic legislator told the Cincinnati Enquirer/USA Today Network that adding capitalism to carefully crafted financial literacy classes only dilutes the amount of content students can learn in this important course of study designed to prepare students for assuming adult roles and functions.
‘This bill is one part partisan message, one part ideological warfare and one part a poor fix’ to Ohio’s financial literacy class requirement, said Rep. Joe Miller, D-Lorain, a former social studies teacher who instructed students on the principles of capitalism.
The educator and legislator, now serving his third term in the Ohio House, is quite savvy in knowing the usual lockstep behavior of Republicans, none of whom voted against the bill. An additional observation by Miller might have also been influenced by knowing the tired rhetoric of one of the bill’s co-sponsors in the Ohio Senate, Andrew Brenner, who famously said in 2014 that public education was “socialism” and should be privatized.
The Enquirer piece continued, saying Miller worried opponents of the bill would be labeled socialists in future campaigns.
With Brenner and Senate President Matt (“we can kind of do what we want”) Huffman, it’s only a matter of time before they use the words socialism and socialist, along with other Republicans, as tired descriptors for the noun Democrat.
Come to think of it, if the titular head of the Republican Party is constantly complaining about witch hunts, what if we soon find out that the latest supply chain issue generated by the GOP might result in a shortage of witches? If they do run out of witches, look for socialist hunts in this election year.
Jan Resseger reports that the wild expansion of vouchers in Ohio has worked as predicted: they confer public money on students who already attend private and religious schools. They do not benefit children who are poor. The claim that they would “help poor children escape failing schools” was a hoax.
Maybe voucher advocates believed it thirty years ago, when no one knew how vouchers would work. But now we know. The evidence from every state with vouchers shows the same result: the overwhelming majority of vouchers are used by students who never attended public schools. The more states expand vouchers, the more they subsidize affluent families. And the poor kids who take vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools.
She writes:
The Cleveland Plain Dealer placed Laura Hancock’s expose about Ohio’s wildly expanded school voucher program on the front page above the fold in Sunday’s paper. It is good to see this dangerous threat to public schooling—inserted into the state budget with minimal public discussion—receiving the attention it deserves.
Hancock’s message? Ohio isn’t helping poor kids in public schools, the original promise of Ohio’s first voucher program in Cleveland in the 1990s. Instead, the new vouchers are a gift to middle income and wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private and parochial schools:
“The number of Cuyahoga County students (students in greater Cleveland) receiving state-funded scholarships to attend private schools has skyrocketed this year after state lawmakers expanded a voucher program, but state data suggests that doesn’t necessarily mean more kids have opted out of public schools. Across the county’s 31 districts, the number of students receiving tuition payments in the EdChoice-Expansion scholarship… has increased nearly four-fold, from 2,500 students last year to nearly 9,200 this year. Those districts, however, have not seen a corresponding loss in student population, indicating that most of the families newly benefiting from the vouchers were already enrolled in private schools rather than fleeing a school district.”
Hancock profiles, for example, three of Cleveland’s middle and upper income suburbs where the vouchers now serve as a tuition-reimbursement entitlement for families of students already paying private school tuition: “Enrollment in Rocky River City School District fell by just 22 students between last year and this year, even though the number of kids receiving vouchers shot up from 16 to 309. In Bay Village City School District, there are 30 fewer students despite a voucher jump from 13 to 229. Westlake City School District has 19 fewer students; vouchers in the district spiked from 41 to 581.”
Hancock lists the ten Ohio public school districts with the largest growth in students accepting a voucher under Ohio’s huge expansion of school vouchers this year. Three are exurbs of Cleveland; one is a shared exurb of Cleveland and Akron; one is an exurb of Akron; one is an exurb of Columbus, and four are exurbs of Cincinnati. In every one of these districts, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education, the median income is far above the state’s median of $41,132.59. In Indian Hill, a Cincinnati suburb, the median income is $96,508.50. Median income in Hudson, part of suburban Cleveland and Akron, is $82,183.00, and in Olentangy, a Columbus exurb, median income is $79,892.50.
Why are the ten school districts with so many students taking vouchers for the first time all wealthy suburbs? Hancock explains: “because the legislature… removed income eligibility caps for EdChoice-Expansion. Last year, the cap was 250% of the federal poverty level for a scholarship, or $75,000 for a family of four. Now there are no income caps, although families only get partial scholarships when they earn above 450% of the poverty level, or above $135,000 for a family of four.”
Hancock adds that the state is giving away a whole lot of money in each voucher: $6,167 for grades K-8 and $8,407 for grades 9-12. Thomas S. Poetter, a professor at Miami University of Ohio, who recently edited the new Vouch for This!, adds that the vouchers are worth more than the state school funding formula has established as the base cost public schools are expected to spend per student—the amount that includes the state and local contributions required by the school funding formula. Poetter writes: “(T)he fact remains that the state will be spending more per pupil on individual children in private high schools with its voucher program… than it will for individual public school students across the state… That has been the case for nearly the entire life of the EdChoice ‘Scholarship’ program (it’s a voucher program) but it really hits home with the high figures coming at us in the new budget. And just think of all that could be done in our public schools to better our offerings… if we weren’t sending more than $1 billion a year into private hands to be used in ways that none of us would ever approve of in public education….” (Vouch for This!, pp. 130-131)
Hancock quotes Troy McIntosh from the Ohio Christian Education Network and the Center for Christian Virtue enthusing about the new voucher expansion. She quotes Senator Andy Brenner, Chair of the Ohio Senate Education Committee, explaining that families ought to get the vouchers because they are paying taxes and therefore ought to get a personal reward for their children. She adds that after the voucher expansion, “the Catholic Diocese of Columbus is looking to potentially build schools in areas that currently don’t have a Catholic school.”
Hancock’s article omits one urgently important issue with Ohio’s new voucher expansion: over half the state’s counties are rural and entirely lack a private school where students might potentially carry a voucher. The expansion of private school tuition vouchers will shift the distribution of money from the state’s school foundation budget away from the state’s rural school districts because private school tuition vouchers can be used only by students in areas where private schools exist—places with larger and more concentrated populations. In a report last year for the Ohio League of Women Voters (You should scroll down and then download report.), Susan Kaeser explains: “Most of the public school population is concentrated in Ohio’s 8 largest urban counties, and so is the private school population. The 8 largest counties have 46% of the public school population and 71% of the private school students… Public education is the only consistently available education choice in Ohio’s 46 small counties, those with less than 8,000 public school students… Private schools across these 46 counties serve a total of only about 7,000 students.” “Rural taxpayers underwrite private choice in the state—but not where they live.”
Hancock reminds readers that “over 130 public school districts… are suing the state over the constitutionality of the vouchers.” Coincidentally on Sunday, the Plain Dealer also published a commentary by William Phillis, Executive Director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, which is a co-plaintiff with the public school districts in the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit. Phillis provides the history, beginning in 1819, of Ohio’s efforts to establish and support public education. Our system of public common schools, Phillis reminds us, is protected by the language of the 1851 Ohio Constitution in Article VI, section 2: “Convention delegates crafted language that required the legislature to secure, by taxation, a thorough and efficient system of common schools and clarified that religious sects or other sects shall not control any part of school funds of the state.”
The school voucher explosion for the wealthy that was slipped into Ohio’s FY 2024-2025 state budget last summer epitomizes what we were warned about last year in the conclusion to The School Voucher Illusion, edited by experts Kevin Welner, Gary Orfield, and Luis A. Huerta and published by the Teachers College Press: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)
The leadership of the Ohio legislature decided, without consulting the voters, to shift significant funding from public schools, which the overwhelming majority of students attend, to private schools, which are wholly unaccountable to the state.
It is an enduring puzzle as to why Republican-led legislatures in states like Ohio, Arizona, and Ohio demand strict accountability from public schools but no accountability from private schools that receive public money.
William Phillis, formerly a Deputy Commissioner of the Ohio Department of Education, puts a price tag on state subsidy of private schools: $1 billion.
One billion tax dollars per year will be going to private schools with no public audit.
In addition to non-public administrative cost reimbursement, auxiliary services, and student transportation services, the state will be providing a billion dollars per year for private school vouchers. There is no provision in Ohio law to audit private schools. Is this the way state government should treat taxpayers? Voucher expenditures will escalate year after year and the state is giving private schools an open checkbook without any financial accountability.
It gets worse. Some state officials are planning to authorize the use of tax funds for private school facilities with no public oversight. What are state officials thinking?
Ohio taxpayers need to wake up to chicanery concocted by state officials in Ohio.
Diane Ravitch's blog 