David Pepper and I Talk Vouchers

Toughest part? Picking only 10 bad datapoints on Vouchers

There’s been a lot of chatter around the web the last couple days about my appearance on David Pepper’s Substack and podcast. First of all, I want to thank David (with whom I shared the ill-fated 2010 ballot) for putting me on his streams. He’s been doing hero’s work to bring to light the policy, legislative and political nightmare that has been the last decade of Ohio corruption and failure.

I also want to kind of sum up what the 10 datapoints all point to, and I think it’s why the EdChoice Voucher program is in serious legal jeopardy.

The original Cleveland voucher program was held to be constitutional in large part because of what Chief Justice William Rhenquist wrote in 2002:

"Any 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."

In none of these ways does the current EdChoice program fit.

Let’s take each of Rhenquist’s decision in turn.

Assist Poor Children

As I reported last year, more new EdChoice Expansion Voucher high school recipients come from families making more than $150,000 a year than families making less than $120,000 a year. In addition, the original EdChoice program $242 million of the $272 million sent out to subsidize private school tuition went to families in the highest income brackets.

You’re seeing adults in uber-wealthy communities getting vouchers now. This is not in any way a program now that is an aspect of a broader undertaking to assist poor children.

Failed Schools

We now know that test scores for voucher kids drop 12% for each year they take a voucher. And we also know that 88% of the time, the parent getting the public tuition subsidy is sending their kid to a private school that scores worse on state testing than kids in the district where that parent resides. I’m the first to admit to test score limitations, but certainly you cannot argue that overall private school student performance is better than public school student performance.

Financial Disincentives

Now that the high school voucher is a greater per pupil state aid amount than what more than 8 in 10 of the 1.5 million Ohio public students receive, can anyone make this argument with a straight face? There are now 1,112 private schools taking vouchers. Ten years ago, there were 588. So the number of providers more than doubling in 10 years seems to undercut the whole financial disincentive thing Rhenquist mentioned in 2002.

Ohio’s current EdChoice voucher system is simply put a publicly financed tuition subsidy for mostly wealthier parents to get discounts on the private school tuition they’ve always been paying for their kids.

There aren’t flocks of public school students leaving to take vouchers.

This is all about the adults. And our tax dollars subsidizing their decisions to send their kids to private, mostly religious schools.

And since the state hasn’t audited a single penny of the voucher programs since 1997, private schools can’t prove that a single penny of this more than $5 billion public subsidy we’ve provided them since 1997 has educated a single kid.

Period.