See, this is why we need more transparency in Ohio’s unconstitutional EdChoice taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy program. Because we kind of have to do our best to estimate how this money gets spent. And private schools do NOT want to tell you that. Even though it’s your money. And even though it’s enough money now to fund 80% or more of the educational cost at private schools.
One of the big things EdChoice providers pitched their parents at the time of EdChoice Expansion was how this program would allow them to grant their teachers a more competitive salary. Here’s how Immaculate Heart of Mary put it in their presentation:
I wanted to see if that actually happened, but it’s impossible using state data because they don’t track it.
However, there are some private schools that are unionized. The largest of these private school teachers’ unions is the one governing Ohio’s largest Diocese — Columbus.
And while the state does NOT track private school teacher salaries, fortunately for transparency, the teachers’ union in Columbus does post its salary schedules — yet another reason to be pro-union, amirite?
Anyway, what I did is look at how their salary schedules changed between 2019-2020 to 2024-2025 (because that’s the last year we have complete EdChoice data). In order to track how Columbus’ private school teachers’ salaries were moving prior to the real huge, infusion of taxpayer funding, I went back as far as the 2015-2016 school year to track raises from then as well.
In addition, I looked at the change in unconstitutional EdChoice taxpayer tuition subsidies from Franklin County school districts between the 2019-2020 and 2024-2025 school years. Here’s that data:
At the end of the day, here’s what I found1:
Columbus’ Catholic School teachers received less than 5% of the $66.7 million annual increase in unconstitutional taxpayer subsidies in the 2024-2025 school year.
Something even more remarkable? Starting teacher salaries in Columbus’ Catholic schools are actually growing slower than they did prior to the unconstitutional EdChoice explosion — likely because the schools have decided to sacrifice their starting teachers’ EdChoice -fueled increases to give bigger boosts to the salaries of mid to later career educators for retention purposes. While the schools now clearly have enough taxpayer money to bump starting salaries higher, they did not do that.
It’s important to point out that this is an estimate only. And it assumes that the Columbus Catholic schools only take kids from Franklin County (which can be inferred by the contracts’ description of the pay scale as “the basic salary paid a full-time teacher in the Franklin County schools in the Diocese of Columbus”). So no kids from surrounding counties are assumed here, even though plenty do attend Diocesan schools.
So that percentage is likely even a little less.
In addition, these salary increases are likely among the highest private school teacher increases in the state because most private school teachers are not in a union. So the chances of non-union teachers garnering larger increases than union ones aren’t great.
For example, Ohio’s Charter School teachers (nearly all of whom are not unionized) make about 37% less, on average, than Ohio’s traditional public school teachers. This, despite the state providing nearly double the per pupil aid to Charters that Traditional districts receive.
I digress.
Back to the private school side, the Cleveland Diocese said in its video explaining the boon EdChoice would be for teachers that 95 percent of the Cleveland Diocese teachers make less than the average public school district teacher ($69,081 at the time) and more than half in 2023 made between $25,000 to $40,000 a year.
“But universal EdChoice will change all that!” their announcer proclaims.
It made a relatively minor, 3-5% difference in the largest, unionized group of Catholic School educators in the state.
What do you think it’s going to to for the Cleveland Diocese where only its high school teachers are unionized?
Once again, this is only an estimate. I wish we actually knew how private school teacher salaries have changed post-unconstitutional EdChoice explosion.
However, despite trying to convince parents that their unconstitutional, taxpayer funding tuition subsidies were going to boost teacher salaries, it looks like about 95 percent of your money has gone elsewhere.
Where? The state says you have no right to know.
Yeah. Maybe we should.
This calculation was done by measuring the annual pre-2020 percentage increase in salary from the previous salary schedules (about 2.15% on average) and comparing it with the post-2020 changes (about 3.5% or so for more experienced and educated teachers). Then applying that additional increase to the 700 teachers the union says it represents based on the average salary in the scale. However, this is not based on actual payroll. It’s based on the scale listed in the Agreements.