While marijuana legislation and other bills are still pending in the second year of this General Assembly’s term, you can count on education policy always being part of the conversation. 2024 should be no exception.
Ohio’s private school voucher program has been the subject of heated debate among lawmakers and education advocates since the 1990s. The program was initially designed to give low-income students access to private schools, with the goal of improving educational outcomes in struggling public school districts.
But while public school advocates still hope for a fully funded Fair School Funding Plan for districts across the state, they have seen shocking increases in funding for private schools through vouchers that have them almost as concerned as the delays they say have come with public school funding.
“You should fund public schools,” said Stephen Dyer, a former state representative and former chairman of the Ohio House Primary and Secondary Education subcommittee on the House Finance Committee. “If you want to fund private schools, fund private schools, but there’s no reason you can’t do both.”
Private School Voucher Extension in Numbers
This Ohio Department of Education reported 23,272 participants in the voucher program expansion for fiscal year 2023, up from 20,702 reported in 2022 and an even higher number than last year, when 17,155 students participated in the federally subsidized program.
In 2021, 85% of voucher expansion program participants lived below 200% of the federal poverty level, and in 2022, 93% were below 250% of the poverty level.
In 2023, the language in ODE’s data changed from “low-income qualified” to “low-income ineligible,” removing the breakdown of federal poverty percentages. In this year’s report, 67% of participants were “low-income qualified” and 32% were “low-income ineligible.”
The state’s latest budget, passed this summer, a Republican-led effort to expand voucher eligibility to private schools, increased the poverty level allowed under the voucher program to 450 percent of the poverty level, which is a household income of $135,000 or less for a family of four.
Scholarship recipients can transfer to a private school, which receives state funding of $6,165 for students in grades K-8 and $8,407 for high school students.
Families earning more than $135,000 can still apply for a grant worth at least 10% of maximum wages, even if they have higher incomes, Senate President Matt Huffman’s office said after the budget was passed.
Public school advocates questioned the expansion, saying the focus should be on the Fair Schools Funding Plan, which aims to support public school districts according to their individual needs, given that the immense majority of Ohio students attend classic public schools.
“Distortion of the idea behind the voucher”
Since the latest voucher program participation figures were released, Dyer has conducted his own analysis of the voucher program and found that its “purpose is completely different” than when it started.
“Now the money will go to wealthier, white families to fund the decision they have already made to send their children to private schools,” Dyer told OCJ.
In the analysis he published on his blogDyer said ODE data showed that nearly nine out of 10 novel applications to expand the voucher program went to white students, and more of the novel vouchers for high school students went to families earning more than $150,000 a year than to families earning less.
Dyer also cites an argument that opponents of expanding vouchers have made before: that expanding voucher programs to private schools is “resegregating” public schools, with more white students going to private schools with vouchers in hand.
“It’s a perversion of the idea behind the voucher, quite frankly, which was sold as providing access to poor students, students of color, students who traditionally didn’t have access to private schools,” Dyer told OCJ.
The latest data for Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program expansion showed that 66.4% of participants were white and 15% were black, the second-highest number.
In 2022, 65.9% of expansion vouchers went to white students, up from 64.1% in 2021.
The immense majority of vouchers — nine out of 10 — come from just 31 school districts, Dyer said.
“The racial makeup of these districts is, on average, 21 percent white,” he writes in his analysis. “Yet 46 percent of EdChoice voucher recipients are white—more than twice as many white students as attend the 31 public school districts that would otherwise have nine out of ten voucher students.”
At least as Ohio’s voucher program continues, Dyer hopes there will be a plan to audit the program to recover the billions of dollars spent to subsidize it. He pointed to an audit of the defunct Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) that revealed fraudulent enrollment numbers and led to legal battles to recover more than $60 million in state funding from the online charter school.
“These are all our dollars, so we have the right to decide what happens with them, and of course we have the right to control where our dollars go,” Dyer said.
Lawsuit
With Republican supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, support for private education vouchers and “school choice” seems assured, at least for the foreseeable future, so public school advocates are looking for other ways to effect change.
Another legal battle is still ongoing in Franklin County Common Pleas Court that seeks to curtail the voucher program in favor of the legislature’s constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools.
The lawsuit was filed in January 2022, accusing the state of Ohio of improperly and unequally funding private schools and, in particular, attacking the voucher program as a drain on public school resources.
“The Legislature has merely acted to further expand vouchers to private schools in Ohio,” the lead group in the lawsuit, Vouchers Hurt Ohio, wrote in a recent statement about the program. “We have no chance of changing their mind or direction, so we are forced to sue to get a fair trial in a court where the Ohio Constitution is respected and means something.”
Over the nearly two-year course of the case, extensions have been granted, and Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman has asked to be excused from testifying on the grounds of “legislative privilege,” also arguing that the testimony sought from Huffman is “neither legally relevant nor necessary.”
In December, Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page issued a ruling on Huffman’s subpoena, ordering Huffman to answer written questions but not to appear in person.
Page authorized subpoenas for 42 “private independent schools” in Ohio in the case, selected, according to the plaintiffs, “as a representative sample based on their location, demographics, percentage of EdChoice students enrolled, and total funds received through EdChoice.”
The parties filing against public school advocates in this case argued that passage of the state budget, including increased funding for the Fair School Funding Plan and expansion of the voucher system, should allow for dismissal of their public school funding complaints.
“While plaintiffs likely will continue to challenge the new program changes, that does not change the fact that their current complaint challenges regulations that ‘are no longer in effect governing EdChoice,’” lawyers argued in arguing for the lawsuit’s dismissal.
The deadline for submitting documents and evidence in the case was November 30, and the court requested “expert opinions” from both sides by February 23 next year, with a hearing date set for November 4, 2024.
This article has been updated to reflect the court’s ruling on Senate President Matt Huffman’s subpoena.
