Pro-Voucher Lobbying Group Funds a Questionable Report to Support Its Fight Against Vouchers Hurt Ohio Lawsuit

On Friday, December 16, 2022,  Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page denied the state’s request that she dismiss the Vouchers Hurt Ohio Lawsuit filed nearly a year ago by a coalition that now includes 130 of the state’s 610 public school districts. The Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit declares that Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program violates the state constitution. The case may now proceed to trial.

The plaintiffs in the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit declare: “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools. Because private schools receiving EdChoice funding are not subject to Ohio’s Sunshine Laws or most other regulations applicable to public schools, these private facilities operate with impunity, exempt from public scrutiny despite the public funding that sustains them.”

Not surprisingly, and also in December of 2022, the Thomas Fordham Institute, a pro-voucher lobbying organization, published  a new report by Stephane Lavertu and John Gregg, two professors at the Ohio State University, to dispute the plaintiffs’ arguments.

The Columbus Dispatch‘s Anna Staver summarizes the researchers’ three primary findings:

• “Racial segregation in public schools decreased” when private school voucher programs expanded.
• Public “schools don’t lose money when kids take EdChoice scholarships.”
• “Students who stay in public school don’t do worse. The lawsuit sitting before the Franklin County judge didn’t expressly say that districts are harmed academically by the voucher program, but this was something Lavertu looked into.”

What about racial segregation?   Staver quotes Professor Lavertu defending his finding that school segregation decreased: “Certainly, at the state level, minority students are more likely to have vouchers… Statewide, we know that disproportionately they go to non-white students.”

Steve Dyer a public schools advocate, blogger, and former chair of the Ohio House Education Subcommittee of the Finance Committee, calls Professor Lavertu’s bluff: “The study compares the racial makeup of voucher students with the statewide racial makeup of Ohio students.” Dyer points out instead that racial segregation is a district-by-district condition; the state’s overall racial makeup is quite irrelevant to what may be happening within each of the state’s 610 school districts.  Dyer explains: “There are 95 districts that lose 10 students or more to EdChoice. In 76 of those districts, accounting for 87% of all vouchers given through the program, a higher percentage of white students take vouchers than… (the percentage of white students) in that district. The average difference between (the percentage of) white students taking vouchers and (the percentage of) white students in those 76 districts was 76.2%. That means that in the districts where 87% of voucher students come from, voucher recipients are 76.2 % more likely to be white than their public school counterparts.” Dyer concludes that the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit’s claim that EdChoice vouchers contribute to racial segregation is correct.

What about the effect of EdChoice vouchers on public school funding?     Lavertu and Gregg say their study proves that school districts don’t lose money when kids take EdChoice vouchers. How can this be possible?  After all, the state has not increased taxes to pay the extra cost.  As Staver reminds us, in 2021, the Legislature changed funding mechanism for EdChoice vouchers. Before 2021, the Legislature funded the vouchers directly out of local school district budgets, but in 2021, the state began paying for the ever-increasing number of vouchers right out of the state public school foundation budget. Whether the money was extracted from the local district budgets or is now extracted from the state’s public school budget, how is it possible to contend that the growth of the EdChoice voucher program has not reduced overall public school funding?

I also  wonder about the new report’s focus on the statewide fiscal impact of the vouchers rather than the effects (often disequalizing) from school district to school district. Like all school funding systems, Ohio’s is very complicated and affects each district idiosyncratically due to the amount and makeup of the district’s local property tax base. The funding for EdChoice vouchers in Ohio is also variable from district to district.

Steve Dyer interprets the report as an admission that, “EdChoice forces local school districts to rely more on property taxes to pay for educating the students in public schools.” Dyer quotes the 2002 DeRolph decision in which the Ohio Supreme Court declared overreliance on local property taxes unconstitutional: “The overreliance on local property taxes is the fatal flaw that until rectified will stand in the way of constitutional compliance.”

Finally, what about Lavertu and Gregg’s perplexing finding that the growth of EdChoice vouchers to pay for private school tuition has driven an increase in public school test scores?  Staver quotes Lavertu: “The average student in an EdChoice district experienced an increase in district-wide achievement… Unfortunately, we are unable to determine how much the positive effect is due to students learning gains as opposed to changes in student composition.”

In a December 30, 2022 column for the Columbus Dispatch, the Fordham Institute’s own Research Director Aaron Churchill tries to spin the meaning of the report’s finding—that the increase in voucher use has driven up public school achievement as measured by test scores—by falling back on the old argument for competition: “First, the achievement of district students modestly rises as a result of EdChoice… (T)he finding might reflect the program’s targeting of lower-performing schools within a district, leaving behind somewhat higher-achieving pupils. It also follows other studies showing that, while not a cure-all, choice programs have a positive ‘competitive effect’ on public schools… (D)istrict students benefit academically when the competition intensifies and schools are motivated to bolster their education offerings.”

If and when the new study by Lavertu and Gregg is ever peer-reviewed, I will be interested to read the analysis. Until then I find myself comparing the study to the facts in my own school district, Cleveland Heights-University Heights (CH-UH), one of the lead plaintiffs in the Voucher’s Hurt Ohio lawsuit.

• As someone who has worked for years in various capacities to mount volunteer-led local school property tax levy campaigns, I am certain that that Steve Dyer is correct: Students taking vouchers away from our school district have increased our district’ s overreliance on local property taxes. The Vouchers Hurt Ohio legal complaint itself cites Cleveland Heights-University Heights’ losses of funding to EdChoice vouchers as an example of the fiscal damage to school district budgets: “The Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, for example, is expected to receive from the state of Ohio a total of approximately $5.6 million in foundation funding for Fiscal Year 2022 to educate the 5,000 students who attend its schools. The state of Ohio, however, will pay out over $11 million for private school tuition to the approximately 1,800 EdChoice Voucher recipients residing within the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District in Fiscal Year 2022. In other words, approximately twice as much public funding will be paid in Fiscal Year 2022 for private school tuition for CH-UH residents as the foundation funding allotted to the entire student body of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights District.”
• Certainly vouchers are not reducing racial segregation in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools. Steve Dyer’s data confirm that enrollment in CH-UH is 17.5 percent white, but that 90.3 percent of the 1,873 students taking an EdChoice voucher are white.
• Finally, it is impossible for me to believe that students carrying vouchers from the budget of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools are somehow stimulating an improvement in our district’s overall standardized test scores. The treasurer in our school district reported that in 2020, 94 percent of students taking an EdChoice voucher from CH-UH have never been enrolled in our public schools; these students in almost every case have always been enrolled in religious schools.

***

Josh Cowen is a professor at Michigan State University who has conducted voucher research for two decades and who warns that overall, students do better academically in their neighborhood public schools than by taking a voucher to a private school.  Cowen explains: “Large-scale independent studies in D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show that for kids who left public schools, harmful voucher impacts actually meet or exceed what the pandemic did to test scores…. The newer D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies that took place after 2013 and have showed pandemic… sized harm to student test scores (in) all… at-scale voucher programs.  What do I mean by ‘at scale?’ I mean that despite limited evidence in those (earlier) pilot programs, vouchers have been steadily expanding across the country, and within states.  So those D.C. Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio studies represent our best understanding to date of what happens when you expand vouchers beyond the initial test phase… For the vast majority of kids, they’re better off in public schools. That’s what the latest voucher research shows.”

Cowen warns about trusting voucher reports that are funded by pro-voucher advocacy organizations: “It’s difficult to tell how much money has been spent to advocate for school vouchers over the years. But we know perhaps the biggest single funder… is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation is a little-known group based in Wisconsin and they’ve given tens of millions of dollars to voucher activism over the years.  Bradley not only funds voucher activism, it funds voucher research too…  Generally speaking, you don’t want activism and research funding to mix. Think about it this way: should the Sackler family fund research on the addictive properties of Oxycontin?  Should Exxon fund studies about the existence of climate change?”

When I look at the findings in Lavertu and Gregg’s new report on Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers, I find it unsurprising that the new report was paid for and published by the Thomas Fordham Institute, one of Ohio’s several pro-voucher lobbying organizations.

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Even with a Gerrymandered, Voucher-Supporting Legislature, Ohio Advocates Will Keep on Pushing for a Strong System of Public Education

After the November election, we woke up in Ohio to a troubling political reality. We have only one remaining Democratic official elected statewide—U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, who now begins the final two years of a six year term. Our state is highly gerrymandered, and all the people elected to run our state government, from Governor Mike DeWine on down, are Republicans—most of them increasingly conservative. Republicans now hold a 26-7 supermajority in the Ohio Senate and a 68-31 supermajority in the Ohio House of Representatives.

Although the term-limited, outgoing House Speaker, Bob Cupp lowered himself by joining Senate President Matt Huffman to create illegal (and implemented nonetheless) gerrymandered legislative and Congressional districts for the November, 2022 election, Cupp’s biography summarizes a complex and nuanced political career: “Speaker Bob Cupp is serving his fourth term in the Ohio House of Representatives. He has served as an elected official in all three branches of government and at both the local and state levels: as an Allen County commissioner, a four-term state senator, a court-of-appeals judge, and a justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio.” Extremely knowledgeable about public school finance, Cupp led a several-years-long commission to design a new Fair School Funding Plan and sponsored the legislation as part of the FY22-23 state budget.

Here, however, is the Columbus Dispatch‘s Anna Staver describing Cupp’s replacement, Derek Merrin, who was just elected by his peers to become House Speaker in January: “A 36-year-old realtor and real estate investor who launched his political career before he could legally drink is about to become one of the most powerful lawmakers in Ohio… Merrin told reporters… that he plans to push a ‘bold conservative agenda’ in the next General Assembly… Merrin helped shepherd the 2019 ‘heartbeat bill’ through the House Health Committee where he served as chairman… When the next two-year legislative session gets underway, the leaders of both the Ohio House and Senate will be strong supporters of expanding school choice. Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, is known around the statehouse as the school voucher guy, and Merrin co-sponsored ‘the backpack bill.’ That’s a plan by House Republicans to make every K-12 student in Ohio eligible for a tuition voucher for private school. ‘Speaker-elect Merrin has been a strong supporter of funding students, not systems,’ Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer said. Baer worked closely with lawmakers on House Bill 290, (the Backpack Bill) which was introduced more than a year ago.”

Senate President Matt Huffman has been shamelessly willing to brag about the power his gerrymandered, Republican supermajority grants him. Last spring, he told reporter Anna Staver: “We can kind of do what we want.”

There are many of us here in Ohio who are concerned about the values likely to be trampled not only in the lame-duck legislative session right now but also in the next General Assembly and the biennial budget that will be its first priority.  What are we to do? Working with other partners across the state like Ohio Public Education Partners,  the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education sat down on a recent Saturday morning to develop a clear list of legislative priorities.

Here is a brief review and, in some cases, an update on what’s happening with those priorities. It is already clear that action in the Ohio Legislature’s 2022 lame-duck session will speed forward in some cases; other bills, introduced in this 134th General Assembly, will die if they are not acted upon.  What follows is a brief update about what’s happening and what people-in-the-know believe is the status of the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education’s priorities.

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education SUPPORTS Senate passage of HB 497 to end Ohio’s Third Grade Guarantee.

Last June, the current Ohio House passed HB 497—to end third-grade retention for children who cannot pass the state’s third-grade language arts standardized test—by a margin of 82-10, and last month, the Ohio State Board of Education passed a resolution in favor of HB 497 by a margin of 18-1. The Ohio Senate Education Committee heard sponsor testimony on this bill on November 30. People in-the-know worry that Committee Chair Andy Brenner, a strong supporter of test-and-punish school accountability, will not bring this bill for a committee vote before the end of the 134th General Assembly.

Members of the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education will be pressing our state senators—during the current lame-duck session—to ensure that no more Ohio third-graders are held back as a result of one test score. Teachers report that young children are experiencing extreme anxiety about the third-grade language arts test, and research clearly demonstrates that holding kids back severely undermines children’s self esteem and increases the likelihood they will drop out of school before graduating.

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education OPPOSES SB 178, which would move many of the responsibilities of the Ohio State Board of Education to a cabinet position under the Governor and undermine the role of the State Board of Education.

Immediately after three Ohio Democrats were elected to the Ohio State Board of Education on November 8, 2022, a brand new bill was introduced in the Ohio Senate to strip the State Board of its power. Jo Ingles of the Statehouse News Bureau reported: “Three candidates who had backing from two large teachers’ unions won big in Ohio State Board of Education races last week. Now, as Ohio lawmakers come back into session after the election, they are considering reining in the power of state school board members… This legislation (SB 178) would strip the elected board of most of its current educational responsibilities and put them under a new cabinet position n the governor’s office.”  Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education will be advocating against the hollowing out of the Ohio State Board of Education.

The Ohio Senate Education Committee held rushed hearings on the 2,100 page bill—on November 29 and November 30.  Here is the Legislative Service Commission’s summary of the bill in its current form. People in-the-know believe the Senate will pass this bill during the week of December 5. The key question is whether the Ohio House will take up the bill and pass it before the end of the session. Pointing out that a major restructure of the Ohio State Board of Education and the Ohio Department of Education must be carefully considered before any bill is enacted, many key Ohio advocates are lobbying hard to slow down the process. They say that any restructure of the State Board of Education must be delayed until the next legislative session when it can be more deeply studied.

After the November 29th rushed hearing on SB 178, Honesty for Ohio Education opposed the bill with a strong statement: “We are very concerned at Senator Reineke’s introduction of a massive… bill, with little explanation, that dramatically changes the face of public education by shifting oversight of public education from the voters and the State Board of Education to the governor’s office. Not only does this bill inject partisan politics into public education, it also strips the State Board of significant educational responsibilities.  More concerning is the blatant attempt to fast-track SB178 through the legislature during the Lame Duck session. This follows a midterm election that seated three new State Board of Education members who prioritize the safety and wellbeing of all students, not extremist politics. The energy around the bill smacks of partisanship rather than thoughtful education policy.”

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education OPPOSES HB 290, the proposed Backpack Education Savings Account voucher program.

It is likely that action on the Backpack Bill will become part of the winter’s biennial state budget debate as the new legislative session launches in the new year. The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education will be paying close attention.

Under the Fair School Funding Plan, The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education SUPPORTS the immediate appropriation of the full phase-in of recommended funding for school districts serving children living in concentrated poverty.

The issue of full funding for the Fair School Funding Plan is likely to become part of the biennial budget debate in the upcoming legislative session.

Because current voucher programs were radically expanded in the FY 22-23 biennial Ohio budget two years ago, the legislature was unable to fully fund the Fair School Funding Plan that was also part of that budget.  The legislature phased in only two years’ of funding for the six year plan, and did not fully phase in funding needed for school districts serving children living in concentrated poverty. The state’s responsibility for supporting the many school districts in our area of the state which educate children living in poverty is a high priority for the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education.

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education SUPPORTS the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit.

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education has been a strong supporter of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit. Consider the following facts that are part of the lawsuit filed last January by over 100 public school districts, who argue that the state’s expansion of EdChoice vouchers violates the Ohio Constitution’s requirement that Ohio must provide an adequate and efficient system of public schools:

“The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools.”

The Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education OPPOSES the culture war bills facing the Legislature, bills that prohibit teaching about race and fully serving LGBTQ students.

Myriad culture war bills await action in this 134th Ohio General Assembly lame-duck session. Although the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education has prioritized pending legislation that will control the very existence of our state’s system of public education and the future of all 610 of Ohio’s public school districts, members of the organization are also extremely concerned about the myriad bills that have been introduced to curtail discussion of racism and any mention of sexuality or gender. These bills are designed to silence teachers and make some students and their needs and their heritage invisible. Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education will be collaborating with a partner organization, Honesty for Ohio Education, to keep the public informed about the culture war bills and help them take action.

Even though the voices of the members of the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education are outnumbered right now in Ohio politics, its members will join other Ohio advocates to articulate our deep commitment to Ohio’s children and to name the public’s obligation to fund the strong system of public education our state constitution established generations ago.

The Challenge of Pushing Back Against This Year’s Wave of State Legislation to Expand School Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts

This year there are bills in state legislatures all over the country to start up or expand school vouchers—money awarded out of state education budgets to cover private school tuition. In some cases the bills are for Education Savings Accounts that would give parents something like a credit card for a limited amount of tax money they could spend on any education services in lieu of enrolling their children in public schools.

For NPR’s State Impact Oklahoma, Robby Korth reports that just this week, the Oklahoma Legislature defeated a bill prioritized by Governor Kevin Stitt—the Oklahoma Empowerment Act, which would have started up an Education Savings Account voucher program with money for private school tuition as well as educational supplies for homeschooling. Stitt and Senate leader Greg Treat promise, however, they will be back, maybe by trying to slip the program into the fine print of a future, several-thousand-page state budget.

Last week Erin Einhorn of NBC News consulted EdChoice, formerly the Rose and Milton Friedman Foundation for EdChoice, for an accurate count of current state-by-state legislation: “Seventy-four measures have been introduced in state legislatures this year to create or expand voucher programs, said Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, a national organization that supports vouchers and other alternatives to traditional schools. And supporters of ballot referendums are gathering signatures in at least four states. The new efforts come on top of the 22 states that already added or expanded vouchers last year—a ‘ginormous’ year for the programs, Enlow said.”

One of those ballot initiatives, for an education savings account program in Michigan, is being spearheaded by none other than Betsy DeVos.  Einhorn reports: “A ballot referendum that DeVos is backing in Michigan, with nearly $400,000 from her family and an organization she supports, would give parents up to about $8,000 per child per year for tuition, tutoring or expenses like school supplies.” DeVos calls the campaign for this referendum the Let MI Kids Learn Campaign. Fortunately public school parents and supporters are pushing back with a campaign to oppose DeVos’s efforts: Don’t Sign.

Einhorn emphasizes the dogged determination of wealth-backed school privatizers as one cause for the recent upsurge in proposed legislation and ballot initiatives, but she also interviews a professor of education policy who believes that right now voucher support may have been bolstered by COVID fatigue and ugly far-right political attacks on the public sector: “In the past, the debate over vouchers ‘was more about school quality’ and the free market principle that parents exercising educational choice would force schools to compete and improve, said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. ‘Now’, he said, ‘with studies finding that vouchers have not significantly improved school quality, it’s also about ‘creating a narrative that public schools are teaching our children things that we—whatever ‘we’ means—collectively disagree with or are skeptical about.’ The language supporting vouchers today is infused with ‘deep state hostility,’ Cowen said. ‘The government wants to impose a certain kind of education on you and your children.’ That dynamic is playing out in states including South Carolina, where an education savings account bill dubbed the Put Parents in Charge Act would create the state’s first voucher program, and Idaho where Gov. Brad Little signed off on a $50 million ‘Empowering Parents’ program this month.”

While the bills and referendums for voucher expansion across the states differ, Einhorn quotes the Education Law Center’s Jessica Levin—who leads Public Funds Public Schools a pro-public school/ anti-voucher project of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Levin describes the similarity of much of the legislation from state to state: “Many have language similar to model legislation put out by the American Legislative Exchange Council and other conservative groups… It’s a very aggressive and well-funded push… They are constantly shape-shifting or changing tactics.”

There are several brief accessible resources to support advocacy against the startup or expansion of vouchers. Levin’s project, Public Funds Public Schools, produces easily downloadable fact sheets to assist advocates trying to push back against state bills or referendums to launch or expand school vouchers and education savings accounts. The first, Research Shows Private School Vouchers Don’t Work for Students and Harm Public Schools, summarizes research showing that, “For many years, studies of voucher programs across the country have found no improvement in student achievement… Many of the rights and protections that apply to students in public schools do not apply to students using vouchers to attend private schools. In fact, students may face discrimination when they try to enroll in a private school or after they are admitted.” In fact, vouchers have been shown to exacerbate school segregation.

Another Public Funds Public Schools fact sheet documents The Myth of Cost Savings from Private School Vouchers. In fact, “vouchers are more expensive than public schooling… Vouchers (tend to) subsidize private education for students would not otherwise have attended public schools” and who were never enrolled in the public schools in the first place.  “Voucher programs concentrate students who require increased resources in public schools.”  The costs for special programming—English language learners and disabled students, for example—must then be covered from public school budgets.  Finally, “voucher programs do not change fixed costs in public schools”—costs for services the public school district is required to provide even if some students leave for private schools.

The Network For Public Education provides a pointed fact sheet on the danger of Education Savings Account vouchers (ESAs), Do Education Savings Accounts Lead to Better Results for Families?: “ESAs provide a huge loophole for unaccountable use of public money… Most of these programs release their funds to parents in exchange for the parents agreeing to forego their right to public education… A state auditor’s office in Arizona identified more than $102,000 in misspending on education savings account money in just a five-month period, including… parents who did not submit required quarterly expense reports and parents who purchased prohibited items…  ESAs are not truly savings accounts. They give parents ways to spend someone else’s—the taxpayers’— money…. Worst of all, they place students in unaccountable systems, where many will be under-educated.”

The Public Funds Public Schools website catalogues research reports to help advocates accurately correct myths and misconceptions spread by the promoters of vouchers. And the website has a bill tracker where advocates can research the status of bills which have been introduced in any of the 50 state legislatures to start up or expand vouchers.

It is worth paying close attention to what is happening in your state. Here in Ohio, where I live, over 100 school districts have filed a lawsuit against the state’s huge and growing EdChoice voucher program.  In their lawsuit, these school districts document exactly how, when the legislature quietly expanded EdChoice vouchers in last summer’s state budget, the cost of the voucher expansion subsequently blocked the legislature’s capacity fully to implement a new public school funding plan legislators passed in the same budget bill:

“Because public funds are finite, funding EdChoice Program Vouchers out of the foundation funding designated for public school districts inevitably depletes the resources designated by the legislature for educating Ohio’s public school students. H.B. 110 (the state budget bill) initially incorporated the salient features of the …Fair School Funding Plan  …. However, due to the ballooning effects of the EdChoice program, the enacted version of H.B. 110 funded only up to one-third of the increases required by the proposed Fair School Funding Plan over the next two fiscal years.” “(T)he Fair School Funding Plan was not fully funded due to the ballooning costs of the EdChoice Program. Only 16.67% of the Fair School Funding Plan is being funded through Fiscal Year 2022 and 33% of the Fair School Funding Plan will be funded through Fiscal Year 2023, as specifically delineated in H.B. 110.  This means the General Assembly will meet only a fraction of its constitutional obligation, by the standards it has adopted, to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools for Fiscal Year 2022.”

Public school parents, teachers and school districts are realizing that protecting public schooling has become a long and ongoing fight. Betsy Devos and her friends have demonstrated a decades-long commitment to  destroying public education, and they are not going to quit anytime soon.

On 25th Anniversary of Ohio’s “DeRolph” Decision, Expansion of Vouchers Has Only Exacerbated School Funding Inadequacy and Inequity

Today is the 25th anniversary of the original Ohio Supreme Court decision in DeRolph v. Ohio. A quarter of a century ago, the Court declared Ohio’s method of school funding unconstitutional because state dollars were inadequate and inequitably distributed. The case was brought back to the Ohio Supreme Court and upheld three more times, but in the ensuing 25 years, Ohio’s flawed school funding system has never been legislatively remedied.

Because state funding was deemed inadequate and inequitably distributed, the Court declared that the entire system was overly reliant on local property tax levies which Ohio requires school districts to put on the ballot. The Court also charged the Ohio Legislature to discontinue a long practice of what the justices called “residual budgeting” and instead to base the per-pupil funding level on what school districts must actually spend to fulfill the state’s commitment, as defined in the state constitution, to a “thorough and efficient’ system of common schools. What is residual budgeting? It is the Legislature’s practice of dividing up the state’s revenues in each biennial budget across all the functions of government, and spending what’s available for K-12 education without consideration of the actual costs of teachers and school counselors or special education or school transportation, or the needs of English learners or the importance of enriched curriculum or school libraries or music and art classes.

The problem in March 2022, on the 25th anniversary of the first of four Supreme Court decisions in DeRolph v. Ohio, is that the legislature has neither chosen to fund public schools sufficiently nor to compensate for differences across local school districts in the amount and type of local property that can be taxed. Ohio school funding remains inadequate and inequitably distributed. School funding continues to depend too much on each school district’s capacity to put school millage on the ballot and on parents’ willingness to mount major political campaigns to pass these levies every few years.

Part of the problem has been a long legislative commitment to tax cuts. In an April 2021 report for Policy Matters Ohio, Wendy Patton examined Ohio’s chronic disinvestment in state funding for public education: “On average, local governments paid for the greater part of school funding in each of the last 40 years but three, 1987-1989. At times, the gap narrowed between state and local share, but the 2006-07 budget halted that progress by eliminating major business taxes and phasing in big state income tax cuts. Gov. Ted. Strickland made positive steps using federal stimulus…. But Gov. John Kasich promptly reversed that effort with a $1.8 billion cut to school funding imposed over the two-year budget of 2012-13. School funding has lagged ever since. By 2020, the state share of school funding had fallen to its lowest point since 1985.” In the most recent FY 2022-2023 state budget, passed by the Ohio Legislature in June 2021, the Ohio Legislature again cut income taxes, this time by $1.7 billion over the biennium.

The new FY 2022-2023 state budget raised some hope for school refunding reform. In the budget, the Legislature passed a brand new Fair School Funding Plan designed to meet the mandates of the Ohio Supreme Court’s four DeRolph decisions. The new plan was developed through a study in which experts tried to figure out a base cost per pupil that would reflect the real costs for school districts. Over a six-year phase-in, the Fair School Funding Plan was supposed to guarantee adequate funding, equitably distributed. Legislators promised it would end residual budgeting and end what, 25 years ago, the Court had condemned as overreliance on local property taxes.

But problems became apparent as last summer wore on.  The Ohio Senate refused to pass a law implementing the plan in full, and merely chose to fund the first two years of the plan because state senators said they did not want to tie the hands of future legislatures. It soon became apparent that there was no long-term commitment among many in the Ohio Legislature fully to implement the plan. The Ohio Senate also left out an important provision in the original Fair School Funding Plan—the inclusion of a cost study of the real needs in districts serving concentrations of children living in poverty while at the same time refusing to begin a phase-in of “disadvantage aid” until the second year of the biennium, with a zero percent increase for FY 2022.

The most serious threat to fair school funding in the new Ohio budget for FY 2022 and FY 2023 is that the budget alarmingly expanded school privatization, with the added investment in vouchers and charter schools coming out of the state’s public school foundation budget.  In the budget the Legislature raised the state budget for charter schools from $30 to $54 million per year. Legislators also allowed charter schools to locate in any or all of the state’s 610 school districts, while in the past, charter startups had been limited to a group of eligible districts.

But the biggest threat to fair public school funding cames from the myriad ways the budget expanded the state’s investment in one of its largest school voucher programs—EdChoice.  Each K-8 EdChoice voucher grew from $4,650 to $5,500; each high school voucher grew from $6,000 to $7,500.  The legislature altogether removed any cap on the number of EdChoice vouchers, which had previously been limited to 60,000 total.  Students qualify for EdChoice if they live in the attendance area of a public school that ranks in the lowest 20 percent on the State School Report Card Performance Index, but under the budget, all siblings of students who currently have a voucher qualify, wherever they live.

And there’s more. While there used to be a 75 day window for submitting an application for an EdChoice voucher, there is now “a rolling window with no closing date.” Alarmingly, in the new budget the state has begun phasing out the requirement that students must have attended a public school in the year prior to qualifying for an EdChoice voucher. High school students had previously been able to apply for a voucher without prior public school enrollment, but that requirement will have been phased out for all K-12 students by 2026.

A quarter of a century after the Ohio Supreme Court declared Ohio school funding unconstitutional, over 100 public school districts recently filed a second lawsuit declaring that EdChoice vouchers deprive Ohio’s public school districts of essential revenue. Much of the substance of the new lawsuit traces Ohio’s school funding problems to the same old issues—inadequate and inequitable school funding and the resulting overreliance on local property taxes.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs declare: “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools. Because private schools receiving EdChoice funding are not subject to Ohio’s Sunshine Laws or most other regulations applicable to public schools, these private facilities operate with impunity, exempt from public scrutiny despite the public funding that sustains them.”

The plaintiffs continue:  “Because public funds are finite, funding EdChoice Program Vouchers out of the foundation funding designated for public school districts inevitably depletes the resources designated by the legislature for educating Ohio’s public school students. H.B. 110 (the state budget bill) initially incorporated the salient features of the …Fair School Funding Plan  …. However, due to the ballooning effects of the EdChoice program, the enacted version of H.B. 110 funded only up to one-third of the increases required by the proposed Fair School Funding Plan over the next two fiscal years.” “(T)he Fair School Funding Plan was not fully funded due to the ballooning costs of the EdChoice Program. Only 16.67% of the Fair School Funding Plan is being funded through Fiscal Year 2022 and 33% of the Fair School Funding Plan will be funded through Fiscal Year 2023, as specifically delineated in H.B. 110.  This means the General Assembly will meet only a fraction of its constitutional obligation, by the standards it has adopted, to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools for Fiscal Year 2022.”

On this 25th anniversary of the DeRolph decision, Ohio’s legislators continue to flout their responsibility as defined by Article VI, Section 2 of the 1851 Ohio Constitution: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

If you are interested in further exploring Ohio’s school funding dilemma, sign up to attend an Ohio League of Women Voters webinar tonight, March 24, 2022 at 7:00 PM: Fair School Funding: The Unfinished Agenda and How to Win.  Register here.

Five Reasons Why the Lawsuit Filed by Over 100 School Districts to End Ohio’s EdChoice Vouchers Is So Urgently Important

As I listened to a webinar last week about the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit filed by more than 100 school districts to demand that the court finds our state’s EdChoice Voucher program unconstitutional under the Ohio Constitution, I challenged myself to name five succinct reasons this lawsuit is so urgently important.  Here is my five point argument against Ohio’s EdChoice Vouchers.

First — EdChoice Vouchers were premised on a false assumption—that standardized test scores are a measure of school quality.

In fact aggregate standardized test scores reflect primarily our society’s family economic inequality from school district to school district. In the fall of 2019, the Plain Dealer’s data wonk, Rich Exner, created a series of bar graphs to demonstrate the almost perfect correlation of school districts’ letter grades on the state school district report card with family income.  Standardized test scores are not a good measure of school quality.

By basing voucher eligibility for students on their school’s low standardized test scores as reflected in the state school report cards, legislators who initiated the voucher program premised the idea of vouchers as an escape route for students from public schools instead of developing a strategy to support the public schools that serve our state’s poorest children.

In research summarized in a newsletter last October describing the National Education Policy Center’s new Price of Opportunity Project, NEPCs executive Director Kevin Welner explains that school achievement gaps as measured by standardized tests instead reflect larger opportunity gaps:  “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth. Compared to the Scandinavian countries and other so-called Western democracies like Canada, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, American children are inordinately trapped in intergenerational poverty. Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

Second — Ohio school districts serving masses of poor students lose urgently needed school funding to vouchers. The students who remain in district public schools suffer program losses when other students extract essential school funding to pay private school tuition.

In Ohio, EdChoice Vouchers, funded by school district deduction, have taken money year after year from the budgets of local school districts serving masses of Ohio’s poorest children. Until last summer’s budget bill, the Legislature made the school districts themselves pay for the vouchers out of their local budgets and therefore increase class size, or cut the number of counselors and school nurses, or shutter the school library in the public school.  At last week’s Vouchers Hurt Ohio webinar, Cleveland Heights-University Heights school board member, Dan Heintz, explained that of the 22 Ohio school districts most severely penalized by the EdChoice Voucher program, all 22 are majority poor, and 19 are majority African American. In these school districts which desperately need increased services for their students, the loss of school funding to vouchers has pared down programming for the students who remain in the public schools.

Third — Many school districts lose more money to vouchers than they receive for voucher students in state foundation basic aid.

The state has awarded to the local school districts basic foundation aid for each of the voucher students, but the amount of each voucher in many cases has significantly exceeded the amount of per-pupil state aid coming to the district. In many of these districts which primarily serve students in poverty, the state has been extracting more money for each voucher student to carry out of the school district budget than it spends on each student who remains in the district’s public schools.  Many of the students taking vouchers out of the school district budget have never been enrolled in the district’s public schools and have always attended private schools. Heintz reminded viewers that in his district, 95 percent of students taking vouchers have never been enrolled in the school district.

The lawsuit, as filed, delineates the losses in public school funding for Heintz’s district, one of the plaintiff districts: “The Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District… is expected to receive from the state of Ohio a total of approximately $5.6 million in foundation funding for Fiscal Year 2022 to educate the 5,000 students who attend its schools. The state of Ohio, however, will pay out over $11 million for private school tuition to the approximately 1,800 EdChoice Voucher recipients residing within the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District in Fiscal Year 2022. In other words, approximately twice as much public funding will be paid in Fiscal Year 2022 for private school tuition for CH-UH residents as the foundation funding allotted to the entire student body of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights District.”

Fourth — EdChoice Vouchers have exacerbated white flight.

In a number of school districts, EdChoice vouchers have accelerated racial segregation, as white students have taken the vouchers to attend private schools.  At the press conference where the lawsuit was announced, a member of the Richmond Heights Local Schools Board of Education, Nneka Jackson explained how, in her Cleveland suburban school district, EdChoice Vouchers have increased racial isolation: “If someone tells you this is about helping poor minority children, hook them up to a lie detector test ASAP and stand back because the sparks are going to fly… About 40 percent of Richmond Heights residents are white. Before the EdChoice private school voucher program, about 26 percent of the students in the Richmond Heights School District were white and 74 percent were students of color. Today, after EDChoice, Richmond Heights is three percent white and 97 percent students of color. Private schools are allowed to discriminate, plain and simple, based on disability, disciplinary records, academic standing, religion and financial status. These are often proxies for race and other protected characteristics. Ohio is essentially engaged in state-sponsored discrimination in admissions and retention. You know who can’t do this? Public schools. Common schools.”

Fifth — By expanding the EdChoice Voucher program in the FY2022-2023 state budget, the legislature made it impossible to fully phase in the new Fair School Funding plan it passed in the same state budget.

The state ended school district deduction finding for EdChoice Vouchers in the FY 2022-FY2023 state budget and will fund the vouchers out of the state’s public school foundation budget.  In the very same the FY 2022-FY2023 state budget, the legislature passed a new Fair School Funding Plan. By expanding EdChoice Vouchers, the state has rendered itself unable to fully phase in the Fair School Funding Plan.

The lawsuit declares: “Under House Bill 110, in the state budget bill recently passed by the General Assembly, effective June 30, 2021, the EdChoice Program has been greatly expanded both in terms of eligibility for the EdChoice Program and its scope. Indeed, HB 110 eliminates previous limits on the number of EdChoice Program vouchers the Ohio Department of Education can approve… Because public funds are finite, funding EdChoice Program Vouchers out of the foundation funding designated for public school districts inevitably depletes the resources designated by the legislature for educating Ohio’s public school students… HB 110 initially incorporated the salient features of the… Fair School Funding Plan, a bipartisan effort to fund Ohio’s public schools adequately and equitably as required by the Ohio Supreme Court in DeRolph v. State…. However, due to the ballooning effects of the EdChoice Program, the enacted version of HB 110 funded only up to one-third of the increases required by the proposed Fair School Funding Plan over the next two fiscal years.”

The Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit challenges a state program that has exacerbated systemic racial and economic injustice.