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.

Ohio Senate Tries to Sell Cuts as Increases

I'm growing weary of writing this stuff, but the Ohio Senate has once again misled Ohio taxpayers by claiming increases in school funding. The Senate's version of the budget bill actually cuts funding to Ohio's 613 school districts by about $70 million over the Ohio House's meager addition.

All the Senate has done is revert the funding levels to what Gov. John Kasich proposed, which represented about $900 million less in total, inflation adjusted dollars over this biennium compared with the budget that passed during the Great Recession.

Once again, I also have to take issue with Randy Gardner -- a Senator with whom I worked pretty well while I was in the House. He and his friends always tout how there is an historic level of state aid going into public schools.

What he fails to address is that while the state aid funding line has gone up, the overall aid has not kept pace.

You always have to watch how careful politicians in the General Assembly and Governor's mansion talk about school funding. It's always about one aid line, not all aid lines. It's like if you have two jobs and income from one has gone up 50%, but income from the other has dropped 75%. The overall result is a 25% cut.

All you need to know about how inadequate Ohio's school funding system is is to look at the monkeying they do to it. Playing around with how much school districts are guaranteed to get, or what funding cap needs to be instituted to keep increases down tells you there isn't enough money to pay for the formula.

Oh, and the formula itself? Simply a product of arbitrary increases done to a calculation last completed 10 years ago.

Another budget cycle is about to pass with the state failing to live up to its constitutional obligations to our kids. When will this end?

Nation's Largest For-Profit School In Danger of Closing.

Well, the State School Board has voted 16-1 to recover $60 million from the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- the state's first and largest online K-12 school. That's because ECOT can't prove it actually educated $60 million worth of kids out of its $105 million it got last school year.

If this percentage were spread over ECOT's 17 school years and more than $1 billion paid, the state could have paid nearly $600 million in taxpayer dollars to the school for kids that were never there. The sheer amount of funding at stake here is staggering.

And it would be one thing of ECOT were doing a bang up job educating children. However, its performance is abysmal and fails to graduate more students than any other high school ... IN THE COUNTRY.

As I said on this weekend's State of Ohio broadcast, I think ECOT should close because it has failed to meaningful improve the state's educational landscape and it's fleeced taxpayers of more than a half billion dollars since it opened in 2000-2001.

But before we give credit to state policymakers for doing their jobs (finally), let's remember why ECOT's been allowed to fail: Political contributions. Its founder, Bill Lager, has given more than $1.8 million to politicians over the last 17 years -- more than $1.5 million of that to Republicans, according to FollowtheMoney.org.



Gov. John Kasich's first address to a graduating Ohio high school class was before ECOT in 2011. ECOT has hosted numerous other political heavy hitters during that time.

Only after the shame of being associated with a nationally ridiculed school like Lager's became unbearable, and their public thievery obvious, did Lager's minions gather their spines.

This is something we cannot forget as we move forward from this shameful episode in Ohio's education policy history.

ECOT Circling the Drain

When the usually very charter school friendly Columbus Dispatch editorial page says your charter school is fleecing Ohio taxpayers, you're in trouble.

That's exactly what happened this morning to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- the nation's largest K-12 school that fails to graduate more students than any high school in the country.

Here's a sampling of the Dispatch's language used to describe ECOT's plan: "attempted plundering of the treasury ... for sheer audacity there is no precedent ... raiding the state treasury ..."

Shall I go on?

At issue is whether the online behemoth is, actually, a behemoth after all. See, the state cannot verify that the school has all 15,000 or so students it claims to have. In fact, the school has about 40 percent of that number, as far as the Ohio Department of Education can tell. And a hearing officer agreed last week, ordering ECOT to repay $64 million of the more than $100 million it received from Ohio taxpayers last year because it didn't have as many kids.

ECOT supporters have long said that the way the state calculates attendance at online schools is unfair to ECOT. Yet, somehow, no other online schools (which are not the best performing in the state, by a long shot) are doing this to this degree.

Obviously, ECOT officials will try their bullying tactics to keep, as the Dispatch called it, "raiding the treasury." They held a modest rally at the statehouse last week, which was notable for two things -- competing mascots, and the fact that no major politicians showed up, a stark contrast to several years ago when Gov. John Kasich spoke at ECOT's graduation and spoke effusively of the school.

As ECOT's power wanes, it appears that not even the school's once strong advocates, who were willing to take millions of founder Bill Lager's money to fund their campaigns will stop by to say, "Hi." Quite a turn of events.

And quite a step forward for Ohio's quality-based school choice movement.

The GREAT Scholarship -- A first for Ohio cities

I haven't posted much on here about my second (or, technically THIRD) life as a City Councilman in Green. Typically, my life as an Education Policy guy and City Council don't really cross paths. One job fixes road, bridges and sewers. And the other deals with education.

Bad Catskills jokes aside, there aren't many times when Education Policy meets Municipal Policy, especially in a city like Green that isn't huge and whose mayor doesn't actually run the schools.

Well, I changed that this week when I introduced an ordinance that would create the Green Reaches Educational Attainment Together Scholarship. Yes, its acronym is GREAT.

The idea is to provide $2,500 annual scholarships to first-generation students from Green as long as they maintain a 2.5 GPA in Green High School and in college (either two-year or four-year).

For years, Ohio (and other states) have cut their commitment to its higher education system, forcing families and students to go deeply into debt to pay for the college education more and more of our young people need to thrive in this 21st Century economy.

We've known for a long time that first-generation students tend to be the most at-risk for not attending college, not finishing college and having to pick up the most outside employment to pay for it.

And that doesn't even touch the fantastic economic development tool this would provide to our communities. For example (this is according to the same studies cited previously):

• Lifetime taxes are, conservatively, $273,000 (215 percent) greater in present discounted value. 
• Lifetime government expenditures are about $81,000 (39 percent) lower in present value. 
• The lifetime total fiscal effect is roughly $355,000 in present value. 
• Crime is significantly lower. 
• Volunteering is 2.3 times more likely. 
• The estimated value of volunteer labor is 4.1 times ($1,300 annually) greater. 
• Employment in the nonprofit sector is twice as likely. 
• Annual cash donations to charities are $900 (3.4 times) higher.
• Total philanthropic contributions are $3,600 (4.7 times) higher.
• Voting and political involvement are significantly higher. 
• Participation in school, community, service, civic and religious organizations is substantially (1.9 times) higher. 
• Leadership in these organizations is particularly (3.2 times) greater. 
• Attendance at community meetings is 2.6 times greater. 
• Neighborhood interactions and trust are significantly higher. 

I'm proud that my friends at the Fordham Institute (with whom I have quarreled over the years) have shown support for this, as are my local school folks. If you feel this is something cities should do for economic development and other reasons, please contact my city's mayor and city council members.

I am more than willing to change or tweak areas that need fixed. That's the legislative process.

Here are their email addresses:

James Ahlstrom

jahlstrom@cityofgreen.org

Chris Humphrey

chumphrey@cityofgreen.org

Ken Knodel

kknodel@cityofgreen.org

Justin Speight

jspeight@cityofgreen.org

Skip Summerville

jsummerville@cityofgreen.org

Bob Young

byoung@cityofgreen.org

Mayor Gerard Neugebauer

GNeugebauer@cityofgreen.org

Real Choice Ohio

It's been a couple years now, but nearly 100 Ohio school districts have sent the Ohio Department of Education invoices for all the money the state has diverted from kids in public school districts to charter schools.

Out of that group grew an organization that calls itself Real Choice Ohio -- a grassroots organization that is meant to help districts re-capture their students from Ohio's mostly failing charter schools.

They are holding a conference on Friday from 9-3 at the Ohio School Boards Association. I'll be presenting at 1 about charter performance. Here's the full agenda: https://www.scribd.com/document/347724540/Real-Choice-Ohio-Conference-Agenda-May-12-2017

I would urge any school leaders interested in figuring out how to rescue their students from Ohio's mostly failing charter schools to attend the conference. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a more effective, practical response to Ohio's charter school challenge -- give parents the information they need to make the best possible decision for their kids and their future.

What's a Baseline: Why Most Reporting on School Funding Falls Short

Since the Ohio House of Representatives passed its unbalanced budget about two weeks ago (an issue I'll take up in another post), I've been watching the reporting on its school funding provisions. No surprise. The focus has been on how the House version provides (slightly) more funding than Gov. John Kasich's budget.

Kasich's budget was compared with what districts received in the previous year.

Look, both of those stories tell us something. But they miss the point. And this is no knock on the reporters. They are doing what they've always done -- compare the current budget with the one immediately proceeding it.

This approach, though, misses the mark. Here's how. In 2007-2008, we went through the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. That resulted in huge revenue shortfalls for the state and its communities -- a shortfall that wasn't just an Ohio problem. It was a United States problem. However, the federal government stepped in to shore up those shortfalls, with the thought that once the economy snapped back, states would use the new revenue in place of the federal assistance.

But that's not what happened in Ohio and other states. Instead, they used the lack of federal funding as an excuse to cut funding to education and other services. Oh, and to cut taxes for primarily rich people. And in Ohio, the new Governor also eliminated nearly $1 billion in additional state resources that had been promised to schools after the state eliminated a tax upon which many districts had come to depend. And this doesn't include the explosion in the diversion of school district dollars to privately run charter schools and private school vouchers.

To me, the baseline has always been the Great Recession budget. For if you aren't providing more funding for kids than you did in the toughest economic time in 80 years, then your funding scheme probably doesn't meet the "thorough and efficient" clause of the Ohio Constitution.

What does it matter if this version of the budget provides slightly more funding than the one immediately proceeding it, if that version was demonstrably inadequate?

This is why when I and Innovation Ohio compare school funding numbers, we will always use the Great Recession as a baseline, adjusted for inflation. Because I and we believe that if Ohio can't provide kids more than what the state did during the Great Recession, the system is wholly inadequate.

So even with the "boost" from the House, this budget provides $828.6 million fewer to Ohio school districts over this biennium than during the Great Recession budget. In the last year of this budget, about 400 of 613 school districts will receive fewer dollars than they did during the last year of the Great Recession budget.

This is including all revenue headed to districts, which answers the ultimate question at the end of the day: What do kids in public schools get when everything's included?

So whenever you see my budget data, or Innovation Ohio's, it will generally be compared with what children received during the Great Recession. And it will likely result in children receiving fewer resources than they did during that awful economic period.

Until it doesn't.

Given our state's recent history, you'll be excused if you decide not to hold your breath until that happens. But until it does, we will hold our elected officials to that, I think, minimal standard.