Voucher Lawsuit Filed, Voucher Proponents Dissemble

Now that a group of 100 school districts have formally sued the state over the EdChoice Voucher program, it's time for voucher proponents to trot out their favorite canard -- vouchers give students of color opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. And to oppose vouchers is to oppose opportunities for students of color.

Total crock.

The reason this canard is so pernicious is simple: It's not true, and in fact, the opposite is true. Vouchers are disproportionately distributed to white students, leading to greater overall segregation in public school districts and communities of color with substantially fewer state resources to educate students in those communities.

This is the stat that voucher proponents love to quote, and it's what Greg Lawson (a guy I actually like personally, despite our profound policy differences on this and nearly every issue) from the Buckeye Institute articulated in the Dispatch story yesterday:

"Greg Lawson of the Buckeye Institute said the data on who takes vouchers varies from school to school, but overall more minority students use EdChoice. 

Ohio is about 82% white, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But 50% of the students who take an EdChoice scholarship identify as white or non-Hispanic, according to the Ohio Department of Education. 

'The choice is there for everybody regardless of what demographic box they check,' Lawson said."

What Greg and others "forget" is that EdChoice doesn't apply to every school district in the state. In fact, according to data from last school year, only 164 of Ohio's 613 school districts lost any state funding to the EdChoice Voucher transfer last year -- a $164 million deduction from districts' state aid. However, 95% of that funding came from just 38 school districts. Want to take a gander at the demographic makeup of those 38 districts? You guessed it. Overwhelmingly non-white. How overwhelmingly? 

Try 68% non-white.

Sounds a whole lot different from the 82% white stat Greg mentioned, doesn't it? In fact, of those 38 districts, only Wilmington was close to the 82% white stat.  

Why would he try to repeat the 82% stat when only 1 district in the entire state that loses substantial state aid to EdChoice fits that description?

Because if only 50% of the voucher recipients are non-white, yet the communities from which the students come are almost 70% non-white, it kinda kills the whole "giving people of color an opportunity" argument.

Yeah.

The lawsuit addresses this nicely by looking at community and school makeups. However, another way to look at it is at test takers because that's the only demographic data we have readily available for voucher recipients. As the Cincinnati Enquirer reported a couple years ago, so many voucher recipients were never in the public schools to begin with that large-scale demographic breakdowns are next to impossible.

Here's what we do know. In Lima, about 35% of students in the public school are white. Yet there are 5 private schools taking EdChoice vouchers from Lima -- all taking at least $242,000 or more from Lima City Schools' state aid. Here are their proportion of white EdChoice recipients: 

Temple Christian                    100% White

Lima Central Catholic            71% White

St. Charles                               82% White

St. Gerard                                80% White

St. Rose                                    34% White

Again, this demonstrates pretty clearly that vouchers, rather than granting students of color greater opportunities, instead are granting white students greater opportunities to leave their more racially integrated public schools and attend a more racially segregated private school option. And in the meantime, it's leaving districts with substantial majorities of non-white students with less state revenue with which to educate them.

Sounds like the program actually results in a bad overall outcome for communities of color, doesn't it? 

(Notice how voucher proponents never discuss the impact of their program on students who don't participate in it. I digress.)

This is not just a recent phenomenon, either. In 2002, Policy Matters Ohio looked at the Cleveland Voucher program, which at the time was the only voucher program in the state and served as the model for the 2005 creation of the EdChoice voucher. What did they find?

"Students in the voucher program, in addition to being more likely to come from private schools or from higher-performing public schools, are less likely to be African-American than students in the district at large. Just 53 percent of Cleveland voucher students were African-American in this school year, while 71 percent of Cleveland Municipal School District students last year were African American, according to a separate analysis by Catalyst and the Northern Ohio Data and Information Service at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs."

Seems that for more than 20 years now, legislators have known that vouchers are disproportionately going to white students, yet they have done nothing to address this. 

Someone might want to ask them about that.

Oh yeah. One more thing. It was interesting to read that not even the outrageously histrionic Aaron Baer mentioned in the Dispatch the whole original argument for the voucher program to begin with: it provides better options for kids in "failing" public schools. 

That's because we now know, thanks to more than a decade of comparative testing, that vouchers actually harm student achievement.

Even the Fordham Institute -- an avowed voucher proponent -- agreed in 2016 when it found that vouchers actually reduced student achievement. This was affirmed in 2020 when the Cincinnati Enquirer looked at test scores of voucher recipients and compared those scores with scores of students in the communities in which the private school resided. The paper found that 88% of the time, the public school students outperformed the private school students.

To voucher proponents now what matters now is the choice, not the outcomes from that choice apparently.

So let me bottom line this program: it leads to more racial segregation, deprives communities of color much needed state educational aid and provides less successful student outcomes. 

But hey, let's throw hundreds of millions more of our tax dollars at this thing. 

Maybe that'll help.

Or...maybe someone ought to sue.

Confronting EdChoice: A Chance for Public Education to Protect their Kids

You know I don't typically toot my own horn on this blog. I like to do my analysis, make my point (or points) and move on.

However, there is a crisis facing public education in Ohio. And that crisis is the EdChoice Voucher program. This is a program that when I left the legislature in 2010 cost taxpayers $60 million. It is now about $150 million, and it's only growing.

Unlike Charter Schools, when taxpayer money is used by private schools to subsidize their tuitions, the state doesn't audit how the money is spent.

But even worse than that, it hurts kids who don't take the voucher -- kids who tend to be less well off, less white and with more special needs.

Every kid in 3 of 4 Ohio school districts receive less state and local revenue because of this and other voucher programs. 

This is not just an issue for large, urban school districts. Only 1 poor, rural or small town district lost any money to EdChoice vouchers in 2010. It's now throughout our rural communities and the money has jumped from $10,400 in 2010 to more than $850,000 today. 

As districts face huge budget cuts in the coming school years, it behooves them to defend every dollar they can so their students have all they need to succeed. That's why the folks at Real Choice Ohio, which fought for years to help districts cope with charter school losses to great success, have started a series of workshops to help districts educate and inform parents nd their communities about the dangers of the EdChoice vouchers to their kids and other kids' futures.

The first pillar of these conferences deals with the overall problem facing districts and the kids theiy serve. I am helping to lead this pillar, complete with Power Point presentations and I will be moderating an all-star panel on the EdChoice and voucher problem next week.

Signing up is easy and cheap -- $100 for all 4 pillars, which covers 5 participants. I would urge any school district officials, teachers and parents who are concerned with the threat these voucher pose to public education to sign up and join us.

We must push back. Together. I look forward to working with all of you.

 

Vouchers Especially Hurt Poor Kids

As has been recently reported in the Columbus Dispatch and other places, a group of public education advocates is looking to sue the state over the EdChoice voucher system -- an argument I've been making for years.

But in the article, pro-voucher forces make a curious argument -- that those seeking to undo the harm voucher do to primarily poor and special need kids are actually trying to hurt those kids.

“It’s an all-time low for government school activists to try to rip low-income and special-needs students out of their schools right now,” said Aaron Baer, president of Citizens for Community Values. 

“It’s clear that this special-interest group cares less about what’s best for kids, and more about their own narrow social agenda. Ohio’s EdChoice program is a lifeline to tens of thousands of families. It allows underprivileged and underserved children the opportunity to find an education that best meets their needs.”

First of all, it's not "government school"; it's "public school", which means our school. None other than Thomas Jefferson described it this way in the Land Ordiannce of 1785. "Public school" were Jefferson's words.

But I digress.

Here's the problem. Yes. It's true that poor and special needs students get vouchers and attend private schools using them. However, in order for that to happen, poor and special needs students in the public schools who don't take the voucher are left with fewer resources for their educations because the vouchers exist.

This is why, for example, as a state legislator I always voted against the special needs voucher that eventually became the Jon Peterson Voucher program. Because it set aside 1/3 of the money the state spent on special needs students to serve 3 percent of the special needs kids. So the voucher program would leave 97 percent of special needs students with only 2/3 of the money they needed.

Let's look at Parma with its 47% economically disadvanatged and nearly 2/3 minority populations.

Prior to losing voucher money and students, kids in Parma were slated to receive $13,663 per pupil in state and local funding for their educations. However, once all the vouchers were removed from the district, along with the students, kids in Parma only got $13,426. That's a $236 per pupil loss in total aid, which means there wasn't enough locally raised revenue to make up for the revenue these kids lost to the state's voucher programs.

So while some poor and special needs students certainly got vouchers, far more poor and special needs students in Parma got $236 less than they needed because of the vouchers.

In fact, in nearly 3 of 4 Ohio school districts, every poor and special needs student got less overall funding because of the voucher.

But what about those 1in 4 districts that saw greater per pupil revenue because of vouchers, you may ask? Well in those districts, the reliance on local property taxes increased as much as 10 percent, forcing those districts to tax themselves at higher rates to make up for the lost state evenue brought on by vouchers (all districts had to do this to some degree).

So in these districts (which also tend to be poorer), the need to go for levies increased at a substantially higher rate. Need I remind everyone that the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four times that increasing reliance on local property taxes to pay for schools is unconstitutional?

I know I don't have to remind the folks who want to file this litigation because they're the same ones that won that major victory for kids in the late 1990s and 2000s.

So vouchers either directly harm poor and special needs students by cutting their overall education fudning, or force poorer communities to tax themselves at higher rates to make up for the loss of state aid from the state's voucher programs -- in clear violation of the Ohio Supreme Court's four rulings.

Oh yeah, and in 8 of 10 Ohio school districts where private voucher providers reside, the school district outperforms the private option by an average of 27 percentage points. When privates outperform districts, it's in 2 of 10 cases and by only 9 percentage points.

So not even the claim that these are better overall options for kids is true. But at leats those pushing for vouchers are willing to make sure that more than a million students in Ohio's public schools get fewer resources than they need. 

EdChoice vouchers could still grow. Even with a freeze.

Yesterday, Ohio's legislature passed their COVID-19 emergency package. And while there were some much needed and positive things in it (no standardized tests this year, no report cards), the bill also settled the contentious debate over what to do with next year's EdChoice perofrmance-based voucher program.

A bit of background. Next year, due to legislative changes, 1,227 school buildings would have been labeled by the state as "failing".  Families with students in those buildings could therefore receive publicly subsidized private school tuition vouchers to leave these schools. The problem for districts is the way this program is funded, the state removes state revenue meant for the students in the districts and instead provides a private tuition subsidy -- an amount that on average is abot $1,300 more per pupil than the student would have received from the state if he or she had remained in the school district. This forces many districts to use local revenue to make up the difference.

Also, it is obvious that more than 1/3 of Ohio school buildings are not "failing" students, as the current 1,227 building calculation would conclude. And legislators on all sides of the aisle agreed that the state report card that made this determination is fatally flawed.

However, families were gearing up by Feb. 1 to request vouchers for next school year based on the expanded school building list. The legislature put off that deadline to April 1 and included $10 million in state funding to help offset the cost of increased vouchers. They were hoping to hash out a plan to address this issue before that date.

Then COVID-19 hit and everything changed.

The solution included in yesterday's bill was essentially freezing the number of buildings at this year's 500+ buildings, and limiting new vouchers to siblings of current recipients and incoming kindergarten students, as well as any 8th graders who want to take the voucher in high school.

But it's all based on this current school year's building list -- which is still about double the amount of the 2018-2019 school year, but is far fewer than the 1,227 it could have been.

This solution also did not include the $10 million state infusion to help districts cope with the increase in vouchers.

So the immediate question became: Will this "freeze" really be a cost-neutral freeze on the program? Or do we still need an infusion of state cash to offset new vouchers?

Looking at the data, it appears we could be looking at an increase in voucher funding next year, but it could also be cost neutral. It all depends on how the math works out.

According to the latest state funding printouts, there are currently 3,264 kindergarten voucher students. In addition, there are an average of 2,324 voucher students in 12th grade this year.

The kindergarten students cost $4,650 per year. The 2,324 12th graders cost $6,000 a year.

So next year, we will drop off the 2,324 12th graders, but gain that same general figure in new 12th graders. Assuming the same level of kindergarten participation, we will still have 3,264 students taking kindergarten vouchers.

The bill passed yesterday makes provisions to allow students who could have taken a voucher this year but didn't, to take them next school year. Siblings of current voucher recipients are also able to take vouchers if they meet state criteria. We also may vary on different grade-level enrollment, which could affect the overall cost.

But the increase over this year's funding should be limited, if it occurs. Maybe $1 million or so at the higher end. Which sounds like a lot. But when the program costs $148 million, that's not a huge increase, especially considering how we could have been looking at a $100 million or more increase next school year if the school list had expanded to 1,227 buildings.

However, in districts like Cleveland Heights-University Heights, which have been hammered by vouchers, yesterday's "freeze" won't ease their challenge. They will still need a new money levy to handle their state funding losses to state-funded private school tuition subsidies.

So while the $10 million may not be needed statewide, the state does need to see how it can help alleviate the financial struggles many districts are having because of this EdChoice performance-based voucher. Especially since the program is based on a report card so wanting that it can't even be issued if a few standardized tests can't be administered for a couple weeks in April.

Facts Matter: A Primer on Private School Voucher Misinformation

Now that we're in the midst of a pretty contentious debate about the future of Ohio's school voucher program, I thought I would take a minute to address some of the misinformation I've seen online and on social media about this topic. Again, I am not in any way trying to attack anyone individually. I have just noticed several pieces of misinformation that folks seem unwilling to address or correct. So I thought I'd set the record straight.

What about the Kids in Limbo?
Lots has been made of the parents and students who were told this year that they were eligible for vouchers and now they may not be, depending on what the legislature does. In fact, they sued the state over this issue. Look, I feel for these parents. But for too long, state lawmakers have been obsessed with ensuring that the needs of the 10-12 percent of parents and students who excerise private or charter school options are met, while all but ignoring the fact that for 30 years now we've had an indequately funded system for the 90 percent of kids who are in public schools. The impact of these choice programs on kids whose parents choose to keep their kids in the public schools is not even an afterthought in a lot of these discussions. I have been encouraged that state Rep. Jones, who chairs the conference committee that held hearings into solutions for EdChoice, actually brought up this issue during hearings (which was a welcome change). But I would urge all involved to recognize that it's not just kids and parents of voucher recipients who are in the lurch -- parents of 1.6 million public school students have been in a 30-year-long lurch that has forced them to constantly raise their local property taxes to pay for the state's inability to effectively address their kids' needs.

Vouchers Save Districts Money
This is a major piece of misinformation, so let me deal with this in parts. First, according to the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, the average EdChoice voucher cost $4,922 in per pupil state funding last year. The average public school student received $3,583. That's a roughly $1,300 difference in state aid for the same student, depending on whether they took a voucher to go to a private school or not. What does this mean? It means for every voucher taken, on average, the district that lost that state funding will have to make up for the lost revenue with local property tax revenue -- last year it was about $30 million in local revenue just to make up for the state funding lost to EdChoice. Remember that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4 times that relying too much on property taxes to pay for schools was unconstitutional. The EdChoice voucher program forces school districts to rely even more on property taxes to fund the students who don't take the vouchers.

So.

Yeah.

Are there districts that receive more state money than the average voucher student? Sure. But there are significantly more districts that receive less. Only looking at the districts that receive more money while ignoring the majority of districts that don't is a classic case of cherry picking data.

This isn't the Districts' Money; It's the Kids' Money
No. It's the taxpayers' money. Being used to subsidize private school tuition. This talking point is well worn, but it is wholly inaccurate and misleading. All this voucher money is moving all taxpayers' money into private schools. That's the program. It's no single child or parent's money. It's all our money. 

Vouchers have been Ruled Constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court
While technically true, the system that Chief Justice William Rhenquist examined in 2002 bears no resemblance to the system currently in place. In 2002, there was one program costing $7.5 million, went to 4,523 students for a per pupil cost of $1,721, affected 1 of 613 school districts (Cleveland) and 129 of 3,796 public school buildings, or 3.4 percent of all Ohio school buildings.

If the current system is kept in place for next year, the cost for the state's now five voucher programs could reach $500 million, would go to more than 50,000 students at an average cost of about $6,800 per pupil overall, and about $5,000 per pupil for EdChoice, affect more than 85 percent of all school districts and 1,227 of Ohio's now 3,389 public school buildings, or 36 percent of all Ohio school buildings -- more than 10 times the building rate of 2002.

Rhenquist said in 2002 that

"[a]ny objective observer familiar with the full history and context of the Ohio program would reasonably view it as one aspect of a broader undertaking to assist poor children in failed schools … [t]he program here in fact creates financial disincentives for religious schools, with private, religious schools receiving only half the government assistance given to community schools and one-third the assistance given to magnet schools."

The statewide voucher program is nothing, I repeat, nothing like the one Rhenquist examined. The high school EdChoice voucher alone is $6,000 per pupil. The base aid amount for a public high school student is $6,020 per pupil. Where is that "financial disincentive" Rhenquist mentioned in his opinion again?

Money Should Follow the Student
While a nice talking point, this phrase is practically meaningless. Why do I say this? Because it is impossible to figure out how much money should follow each student to each school. The way money "follows the child" today is the amount of money it is estimated it should cost to pay for a student taking a voucher or attending a charter school is based on an arbitrary amount (voucher) or what the formula says a student schould cost in the district the student attends (charter). Both bear neither any relationship to the student need in the private school nor the far lower costs of educating students in charter schools. But even if you used some calculus based on student need where the student was going to attend, the amount will always be inaccurate because it will be an average of what an average student needs in a charter school or private school. So either too much or too little revenue "follows" the student to the school choice option. And currently, more often than not, far more state money flows to the choice option than the student would have received in the local public school they're leaving. Which, again, means that local revenue has to backfill the additional state revenue lost. This is something that not just I believe, it is something everyone who seriously examines our school choice funding acknowledges as a fact.

I Pay Taxes to Schools in Property Taxes, so Schools Do Fine
Again, the amount paid in taxes (unless you have a large house in a wealthy district) isn't enough to pay for the $6,000 high school voucher or $4,600 lower grade voucher, especially if more than one student takes the voucher. But even if it was, we pay for lots of public services we never use. I've never called the fire department, but I'm not going to say I shouldn't pay for fire services in my community. There are roads in Ohio I've never driven on, but I'm not going to demand money back that was used to pave them. I've never called the police, but I'm not going to demand money back from police levies. I've never used the Developmental Disabilities or Addiction Services our taxes pay for, but I'm not going to demand my money back because I haven't used them.

You get the point.

When I went through the public schools, thousands of families who didn't have kids in the schools paid for my education. And when my kids are no longer in the schools, I will pay that forward so other generations can be educated. The whole idea that "I shouldn't have to pay for schools unless my kids are in them" idea has been the biggest concern for me. Because if we continue to think like that, I fear for the complete collapse of our Social Contract that has made this the world's greatest economic superpower since World War II.

Private Schools are Better
There is just little evidence this is true, on the whole. Of course there are great private schools, just like there are great public ones. But both nationally and in Ohio, overall, especially controlling for poverty, public schools just perform better on state tests. In 8 of 10 Ohio school districts where private voucher providers reside, the school district outperforms the private option by an average of 27 percentage points. When privates outperform districts, it's in 2 of 10 cases and by only 9 percentage points. Again, there are caveats. Not every private school student is tested in Ohio, and it's only based on a single metric that's comparable between publics and privates. But the data indicate the private-is-better-than-public claim just isn't so, or is at least a lot more ocmplicated than a slogan.

Overall, there have been good discussions on both sides about this issue. However, the simple acknowledgement that these issues I've discusssed are actual facts will help the legislature more effectively deal with the issue. Operating with a false set of facts will simply get us a bad solution. And no one -- neither kids in public nor private schools -- should have to deal with that.

Legislature Ignores Cat 4 Storm to Avoid Cat 5

The Ohio Senate is about to vote out a so-called "fix" to Ohio's voucher explosion. However, it only really deals with the cliff that is approaching and ignores the fact that for many districts, the storm has already hit and at full force.

See, Ohio's voucher explosion is hurting districts this year. Next year, when the number of buildings eligible for vouchers could have jumped from about 500 to about 1200, would have been worse. But this year is (and this is important) still bad. The number of buildings did double this year. Just because it won't double again doesn't mean this doubling is great.

How bad is it? Well, $62 million more is leaving school districts for private school vouchers this January than left last January. And this "fix" will not slow down that increase. T
his has profound effects upon school districts, which in many cases had almost zero dollars headed out the door to vouchers just two years ago.

In addition, the loss of state revenue means school districts have to come up with local revenue to make up the shortfalls. In some cases, a lot of revenue. For example, in North College Hill outside Cincinnati, the owner of a home of median value in Ohio (about $150,000) would have to pay another $222 in property taxes just to make up for the ADDITIONAL $589,000 voucher loss between this and last year.

Here are the 25 districts that would require the most money from median home value owners in their districts to make up for the additional losses between this and last year. These calculations do not include money already headed out the door to private schools other than the increased losses this school year, which has been driven by the EdChoice debacle.

These districts run the gamut from urban districts like Toledo and Youngstown to small, more rural districts like Lowellville.

The voucher "fix" current under consideration would do nothing (I repeat) NOTHING to fix the current problem in front of our face.

Districts will still need to go to the ballot to make up for these additional losses. They're still facing massive new funding shortfalls with little to no state revenue to offset it.
This program is exacerbating the reliance on property tax issue that forced the Ohio Supreme Court to rule four times the way we fund schools violates the Ohio Constitution.

School districts must receive some sort of state funding relief from this onslaught by the voucher zealots who think that investing more and more in a program whose proponents say result in worst academic performance.

Just because you avoid a Cat 5 hurricane doesn't mean the Cat 4 you're standing in is a calm breeze.

It's still a hurricane.

And it's still dangerous.

State Data: 8 in 10 Public Districts Outperform Private, Voucher Schools in the Same Community

One of the remnants of House Bill 1 -- the landmark school funding and policy legislation during which I served as Chairman of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee -- was a provision that required all EdChoice voucher students to be tested the same as public school students.

This provision has allowed for there to be several years of testing data for some EdChoice students. The results are only posted if a certain number of students at a private school take vouchers. And only the EdChoice students at the private schools take the tests.

However, it is useful, I feel, to compare how students taking vouchers do vs. those who do not. The results are interesting. But there are several caveats:

1. The test results for voucher students only calculate the proficiency rate. Nothing on student growth. And nothing about how much over proficiency the students score. For example, public school students can rate Proficient, Accelerated or Advanced. But all voucher students get is whether they are proficient.
2. There are no test results for students in private schools who do NOT take a voucher. So the results I'm about to discuss do NOT necessarily indicate how the privates are doing overall. It is simply measuring how voucher recipients do and how proficient they are on state tests.

So here's how I did this comparison using 2017-2018 school year data (the latest available), given the caveats:

1. I looked at all private schools eligible to take EdChoice vouchers and sorted them by mailing address, then averaged their performance by that community. So, for example, I looked at the average proficiency rate of EdChoice students in private schools with a Cleveland mailing address.
2. I then compared their overall proficiency rate with the rate of proficient or better scoring students in the public school district that contains the private, voucher school. So all EdChoice students in private schools with a Cleveland mailing address compared with the proficiency rate of all Cleveland Municipal School District students.
3. In cases where more than one district covered the city listed in the voucher school address, I compared the proficiency scores for the voucher school (or schools) with the lower performing district that covered that private school
4. In cases of major urban areas (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown), I compared all the private voucher schools' performance with those mailing addresses with the major urban districts'. It should be noted, though, that several of these private schools are NOT in the major urban cities. They are in suburbs, but have mailing addresses in the major urban core. But I wanted to be as conservative as possible in this comparison.

Here's what I found:

• Of the 139 school districts that contain private schools taking EdChoice vouchers, 109 had better proficiency rates than the voucher schools. That means that 78% of the time, the public school district students outperformed the private school voucher students in the same community
• The average difference was 27 percentage points (for example, the difference between being 50% proficient and 77% proficient) -- a massive difference
• The average difference between districts that underperformed voucher buildings was a relatively paltry 9%. So districts outperformed voucher buildings at 3 times the scale of voucher buildings outperforming districts.
• Overall, the average proficiency rate in the public school district was 63.5%. The average proficiency rate for an EdChoice building was 44.4%

These data are especially important now that more than 7 in 10 Ohio school districts have at least one building eligible to have students take the EdChoice voucher. 

In nearly 8 of 10 cases, that student's choice to take a voucher will result in the voucher student attending a school where they are less likely to do well on state tests than the public building they left.

Given EdChoice supporters' claims that the program "rescues" kids from "failing public schools", one would think this data would give them pause. But we've known this for years -- that EdChoice does not improve student performance; it harms student achievement.

So we'll see if this new data changes any minds.

Ohio House Speaker Wants Voucher Fix as Vouchers More than Double in his County.

House Speaker Larry Householder, who famously is from Perry County -- the home of the state's school funding lawsuit -- announced at his year-end press gaggle yesterday that fixing Ohio's exploding voucher crisis will be priority No. 1 next year.

"We have failed badly as far as our report card system and our testing system in this state," he said.

That's quite an admission. And commendable. However, it has also been true forever. 

Our system has always been rigged against poor districts because as we now know, the "achievement gap" is explained exclusively as a poverty issue -- and always will be as long as it is standardized tests that states use to measure educational effectiveness. 

This isn't anything earth shattering that requires sophisticated statistical analysis. It's just good horse sense. 

Look at the list of the lowest performing school districts on state tests in 2005 and look at them today. 

They are the same districts.

So why is Householder so concerned about this now? I have a theory that I think will hold up: Now that this rigged report card is affecting his districts, he's starting to realize their awful impact.

What happened is that pro school choice advocates, led by their champion, state Sen. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, reached waaay out over their skis, culminating in this year's budget disaster (which we were first to point at at Innovation Ohio, and I and we had been warning about for years).

So now, districts are losing $60 million more in state aid this November to EdChoice vouchers (vouchers originally meant to "rescue kids from failing schools") than they did last November.

And over the last two years, the number of school buildings -- even in high-performing school districts like Solon, Upper Arlington and Worthington -- has skyrocketed.

While the number of buildings has climbed dramatically from about 9 percent of all school district buildings to more than 1/3 of all buildings in two years, the number of districts that now have to worry about losing state funding to vouchers has simple gone off like the Big Bang.

So now there are 424 of Ohio's 613 school districts with at least one building qualifying for vouchers. 

Last year, there were 31! That's right. In two years, the number of districts losing funding to vouchers will jump by more than 13 times!

This explosion is extraordinary and in many places a crisis. Why? Because two years ago these districts and their kids lost zero state funding to private, mostly religious schools, Now they lose money -- in some cases significant money.

See, it's not just the kids in the "failing" buildings who lose the state money that's transferred to private, mostly religious schools. It's the kids in the high-performing buildings as well. 

Because the transfer comes out of the district's state funding pot, not the offending building's. So every kid in the district loses state funding because of the transfer, not just the kids in the low-performing building. The system punishes the highest-performing kids in the highest-performing buildings just as it does the lowest-performing kids in the lowest-performing buildings.

So now kids in 70 percent of Ohio's school districts are losing state funding to private, mostly religious and completely unaccountable schools.

Remember, even pro-voucher advocates admit that the EdChoice program actually harms student achievement.

If you look at the counties where the relative shift in funding from public to private schools has jumped the most, it's all rural counties -- including Householder's home county.

As you can see, Perry is one of 12 Ohio counties who have seen their state funding to vouchers more than double between November 2017 and November 2019. Ohio has 88 total counties. 

It is these rural counties, which can't offset much state revenue loss because they raise so little on property taxes, where EdChoice state funding transfers are just killing districts. This, I think, explains Householder's urgency. It's hurting his community. 

All politics is local indeed.

There are many ways of undoing this damage. Not allowing voucher buildings in districts that are high performing overall is one. As is requiring that buildings must be low performing on more than a single report card measure before being voucher eligible. That way kids in the district don't lose state funding because a handful of kids aren't being served in a single district building.

But Householder really nailed what the heart of the issue is: the Report Card and standardized tests. So if he effectively fixes the root problem, kudos.

And while I really don't like what's happened with the voucher explosion this year, if that's what it takes for the state to once and for all put a stake through the heart of the state's rigged, unfair, inaccurate standardized-test-based accountability system? 

Well, I'll take it. 

It's about time.

Pro-Voucher legislator blames districts for voucher explosion. I call BS.

I should preface this by saying I served with state Sen. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, when I was in the House -- we entered the House the same year in 2007. I found him a sober, decent man. But he was obsessed with one thing -- making sure as many families sending their kids to private, mostly religious schools got as big a public subsidy as possible through the voucher system.

And wow has he been successful, as I noted a week ago and the Plan Dealer reported today. As the PD reported, these boosts to vouchers will end up coming back and costing us taxpayers even more than the voucher:

"Districts usually receive some state aid for students that use vouchers, even if it is less than what the district has to pay. But when students have never been in the district and never counted toward state aid calculations, (Cleveland Heights-University Heights Treasurer Scott) Gainer said, there’s no state aid for them to help offset voucher costs. 

Local property taxes, Gainer said, are essentially paying for the full $6,000 for most of the new high school vouchers. That has several districts where the same issue is occurring concerned that voters won’t pass school taxes they believe just pay for kids to go to private schools."

What was Huffman's response? Blame the districts. I kid you not. Blame the districts.

"State Sen. Matt Huffman, one of the strongest supporters of vouchers in Ohio, said some of the rules are subtle and have changed a few times. But districts should have known, he said, and should be blaming themselves for not improving their schools. 

He said school officials should just admit to the public: “We knew this was coming for six years. We just didn’t do anything about it.”

This is where I call BS.

How can I do that? Simple: Over the last decade, the state report card grades upon which these new voucher building designations are being based have been deliberately and artificially deflated for the state's school districts. And I'm increasingly convinced it was for this sole purpose: to ensure more districts and buildings are deemed "failing" by the state so more public money can be poured into private, mostly religious schools.

Don't believe me?

Look at school districts' overall grade performance since the 2012-2013 school year -- the first for the A-F state report card system.

Notice anything? Like a massive jump in D and F grades between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015?

Let me ask you a question: Does anyone -- and I mean ANYONE -- actually believe that between the 2013-2014 school year and the 2014-2015 school year school districts became more than twice as likely to "fail" kids?

Of course not.

This is a classic case of grade manipulation by state lawmakers. You'll also notice a steady decline in the rate of Fs since the high point of 2015-2016. Why were these grades so much worse? Because the state kept changing standardized tests. So teachers and students had no idea what the testing expectations were. Since they've remained the same, you can see a steady and precipitous decline in the rate of F grades, though the percentages of D and F grades remain far higher than the 2012-2013 school year.

To add insult to injury, a study examing the test performance of students who take vouchers found they did worse on state tests after taking the voiucher than before ... according to the pro-voucher Fordham Institute. But that doesn't matter to Huffman, whose hero is apparently the Titanic captain who kept plowing ahead, damn the iceberg.

Anyway, here's where Huffman struck gold for those who are taking a public subsidy to send their kids to private, mostly religious schools -- only 2 out of the three years' grades count to have your building designated "failing" from 2013-2014, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. And once the building is eligible for vouchers, every student who gets a voucher gets to keep it forever, even if the public building becomes the highest-performing in the state.

So when the two buildings in Upper Arlington, or the one in Solon -- two of the highest-performing districts in the state -- invariably stop being eligible for vouchers as they are now, the students who took their vouchers this year can keep getting them until they graduate high school 6-8 years from now -- removing as much as $60,000 in state money from these districts during their time in school.

These districts would have received only about $6,000 total for that student from the state, forcing local taxpayers to subsidize Huffman's Folly to the tune of $54,000 in local property taxes for each student.

So Huffman can keep claiming it's all districts' fault that these vouchers are wreaking havoc on district finances.

But it's all been a plan from the beginning:

1) Deliberately deflate district report card grades

2) Get as many buildings as possible eligible for vouchers

3) Market them like crazy to families in these districts so the rest of us taxpayers can subsidize their choices with our local tax dollars and/or fewer opportunities for our kids who remain in local school districts.

That's not a district performance problem.

It's Huffman's plan.

And has been all along.

It's official: Vouchers explode in Ohio

I was concerned this would happen after the budget was passed, but even I didn't think the absolute explosion that's happened to Ohio's voucher program would happen this fast.

How fast? Try a $47 million jump from last year to this year. Ohio school districts now lose $330 million to vouchers that pay for students to attend private, mostly religious schools. And the school year isn't even halfway complete. Another enrollment period happens after Jan. 1. So we may be looking at $350 million lost to vouchers by the end of this school year.

And this is just the voucher deduction. There a whole other explosion going on in the EdChoice income-based voucher program, but since it's not a pass-through deduction from school districts, it will be more difficult to track.

Despite that, some districts have been absolutely devastated by these increases. Take Scioto Valley Local in Pike County. Two years ago, they lost zero students to vouchers. Last year, they lost $9,720 to vouchers. This year? $103,600.

That's $100,000 that Scioto Valley had coming from the state two years ago that they no longer have. That's a lot of money to Scioto Valley. They only raise $148,000 for every voted mill they put on the ballot.

But it's not good really anywhere. Cleveland's losing another $6 million. Parma $2 million. Middletown $485,000.

And even wealthy suburban districts are getting hit.

Lakota Local in Butler County is losing $403,000 more. Gahanna in Franklin County is losing $355,000 more.

Rural districts are getting hammered too, with some losing more than 400% more money this school year than they did two years ago. And even though it's not millions of dollars, some of these districts only raise a few tens of thousands of dollars for every mill of property tax they can put on the ballot. So in relative terms, these dollar losses can be even more devastating than the millions more lost in some school districts.

What gives? Well, there are now more than 1,000 school buildings who have qualified to be a voucher building, which means at some point in their past or present they received a D or F on one of several report card measures between 2014, 2018 or 2019 (2015-2017 were classified as safe harbor years because of the many testing changes that occurred then).

But it doesn't matter if those buildings had As in everything else. If they received a D or F in two of those 3 years on overall performance, student growth, graduation, or the third-grade reading guarantee, they are now eligible to be a voucher building.

So now you have buildings in some of our state's wealthiest, highest performing districts eligible for vouchers. Like Parkside Elementary School in Solon, which is traditionally a top 5 or 6 performing school district in the entire state. Or Barrington Road Elementary School and Hastings Middle School in Upper Arlington.

These schools are all extremely wealthy. And now, the wealthy parents who send their kids there can qualify for public subsidies to send their kids to a private school.

I know. Crazy, right?

But not really. This has always been the plan. It's why Akron industrialist David Brennan started vouchers in the first place more than 20 years ago. His goal was to get the state to pay every student to attend Akron St. Vincent St. Mary's High School.

It looks like Mr. Brennan, who died last year, will finally get his wish thanks to the millions he and his acolytes spent on Ohio politicians since 1997.

Here are the top 25 districts in the state who have lost the most money between this year and last year to the voucher deduction:

And here are the 25 school districts whose increased deductions to vouchers have increased by the largest percentages between last year and this year:

New IO Report: More Money for Vouchers, Less Oversight of Charters

I have to admit, I was shocked at how quickly the Ohio Legislature and Governor forgot about the ECOT scandal -- the largest taxpayer ripoff in state history. Because the most recent budget that passed actually loosened regulations on charter schools.

More amazing still is the state's going whole hog in on Vouchers for families making as much as $100,000 a year. Just an unrelenting pursuit of the public funding of privately run schools. We've put out a new report at Innovation Ohio that details many of these provisions. But here's the most striking chart in the whole thing, as far as I'm concerned:

That's right. The average per pupil funding of private school students -- many of whom never really attended Ohio's public schools -- is now almost $2,000 more per pupil than the what the 1.7 million students in Oho's public school system receive.

Remember that in the landmark Zelman U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled Ohio's Cleveland voucher program constitutional, then-Chief Justice William Rhenquist said it was not a violation of the constitution's Establishment Clause because in large part the program was deisgned to help students in failing schools and the per pupil amount was a pittance compared with what public school students received from the state.

Now that 95 percent of Ohio school districts lose at least some funding to private school vouchers and the average per pupil funding for these programs far outstrips the average funding for public school students, it's right to wonder whether the current Ohio voucher program would meet muster under the Zelman decision.

House GOP Won't Move Voucher Expansion -- Trump's Signature Ed Policy Initiative

A House Subcommittee yesterday declined to move forward President Trump's proposal to invest $1 billion in private school vouchers -- a longtime policy darling of his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the only real Education Policy initiative President Trump has discussed. He announced the $20 billion plan last year at a then-poorly rated Cleveland Charter School.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies reported out a bill that did eliminate teacher support programs at the U.S. Department of Education -- a really bad outcome that will have long-term consequences for kids. But it did not head the nation down the road Ohio took 20 years ago.

Last school year, Ohio taxpayers sent about $568 million to private, mostly religious schools in the form of private school vouchers, busing, administrative cost reimbursements and auxiliary services. This despite the fact that several new studies show that kids who take vouchers do worse on achievement tests after they take the voucher than they did before taking it.

We at Innovation Ohio examined our state's voucher program recently and urged lawmakers to back off from more widely implementing these programs here and across the nation. While it looks like the subcommittee took heed of the mountains of evidence that demonstrate these programs hurt kids who take the vouchers and kids who don't because of the large sums of money these program eliminate from the public system, the bill still has a ways to go.

And the subcommittee did increase funding by about 8 percent for the department's Charter School Program (CSP), which in Ohio has not been very successful at expanding better educational options for kids.

Here's what we found in the report we did at www.KnowYourCharter.com last year:

• Of the 292 Ohio charter schools that received $99.6 million in federal aid, $30 million went to 108 schools that either closed or never opened
• Of those that failed, at least 26 Ohio charter schools that received nearly $4 million in federal CSP funding apparently never even opened and there are no available records to indicate that these public funds were returned
• The charter schools that have received CSP funding and received State Report Card grades in the 2014-2015 school year had a median Performance Index score that was lower than all but 15 Ohio school districts and would have been graded as a D

One very telling detail of the subcommittee meeting yesterday, though, was this final line from the74.org's account:

"Members did not discuss the school choice plans during the meeting."

Ohio Data: Vouchers Failing

I don't like writing these things. I really don't. Because even when a policy I think is folly actually works, I'm glad that kids are able to benefit.

But the latest data, both from Ohio and nationally, demonstrate pretty clearly that private school vouchers simply aren't working. In fact, they are making things worse for kids both in private, mostly religious schools, and those who remain in local public school districts.

At Innovation Ohio, we released a report today that details many of the issues. Among them:

• Vouchers now affect schools and children in 83 percent of Ohio’s school districts

• More than $310 million will be spent this school year sending public money to private, mostly religious schools through vouchers

• Including additional direct state payments and reimbursements made to private, mostly religious schools, more than $568 million in Ohio taxpayer money is going to support these schools

• Every Ohio student not taking a voucher, on average, loses $63 a year in state funding because of the way Ohio’s lawmakers have decided to fund vouchers ($63 is about $15 more per pupil than we spend statewide on instructional and non-instructional equipment combined. It’s about the cost of a new Amazon Fire tablet.)

• In an era of the state providing less funding for public schools, its insatiable investment in private school vouchers force local taxpayers to subsidize them with $105 million in locally raised money to make up for districts’ state funding losses to Ohio’s voucher programs

• Students who take vouchers perform worse than their public school peers on state assessments

• Some of the highest performing school districts in the state lose money and students to vouchers, turning the original intent of the program on its head

In Ohio, we call vouchers "scholarships". However these "scholarships" require no actual scholarship to acquire. There are no GPA or other academic requirements to receive a voucher. All that matters is if you meet the demographic characteristics. This is a voucher program.

The Ohio Senate and House are considering bills that would expand voucher eligibility to 75 percent of Ohio's school children, despite the overwhelming evidence these vouchers aren't helping. And, of course, current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a huge voucher supporter, and President Trump's initial budget calls for a $1.4 billion voucher expansion, with plans to move that up to $20 billion shortly.

And here's something I'm very curious to understand: if the Cleveland voucher program was deemed constitutional 15 years ago because it was small, was meant to "rescue" kids from "failing schools" and financially provided far less state aid to private, mostly religious schools (as Chief Justice William Rhenquist opined during the case), then would it now pass the same muster given that it's a $310 million program, takes money from some of the highest performing schools in the state, and some vouchers provide almost the exact same level of base funding as the state's public school formula?

We'll see.