Legislators scramble to try to make EdChoice Constitutional. They can't.
Simply capping income is not enough and the Constitution is pretty clear that the problem is giving private religious schools any money. Period.
After returning from vacation, I’ve noticed a flurry of legislative activity to try to sand the edges off the unconstitutional, taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy program for billionaires.
But the problem is that the program simply cannot exist in this state under the current Ohio Constitution. And capping income at $500,000 to keep Jeffrey Epstein buddy Les Wexner from getting the unconstitutional subsidy is not even close to what needs done (though I admit, it may help give cover to the robed politicians on Ohio’s Supreme Court).
As I’ve pointed out previously:
The only way to really address Judge Page’s decision is to do the following: kill EdChoice, transfer that money instead to fully fund the Fair School Funding Plan, require any voucher recipient to have spent at least 180 days attending a public school prior to receiving a voucher, give the same amount of state aid to the student as they would have received in their public school, require any voucher recipient school to accept anyone who applies, require the schools to not charge any tuition above the voucher amount (which was the case in the beginning), require the voucher money to be publicly audited and limit the vouchers to non-religious schools.
And there is still the one-system constitutional question that I don’t think even this solution would address. As I’ve mentioned before, more private schools get taxpayer funded tuition subsidies than there are public school districts — an insane, but true fact.
So while I am enjoying watching legislators recognize EdChoice is in real danger of being killed — as well as encouraged to see their panic, their nibbling around the edges ain’t cutting it.
Frankly the only way to meet constitutional muster is to kill the current program.
Ultimately, the chart above is the unconstitutional tuition subsidy proponents’ biggest issue. The overvaluation of these unconstitutional subsidies and funding them out of the same state budget line item that funds public school students has meant that Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students don’t receive what the state’s own funding formula says they need.
One more thing I wanted to mention today is Honesty for Ohio Education put out a really interesting website and spreadsheet that does a couple things: breaks down the cost of and investment in unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies in every school district and then, importantly, further breaks it down by state House and Senate seats.
The site reminds me of the Know Your Charter site I developed a decade ago while at Innovation Ohio. Same idea, only with charter schools. Put out the information so the public can see how these so-called educational options are funded compared with your kids’ public school educations and pressure the politicians to fix the issue.
Here’s an example of what the Honesty site provides:
Very clean, clear and useful information for anyone who wants to use it1.
On their master spreadsheet, they also include lots of additional demographic and other information, which will help those who want to find out, for example, whether the funding disparities are greater in districts with higher rates of economically disadvantaged students.
Again. Another useful tool in the fight for Ohio’s public education students.
So use it!
I understand why they chose the $8,408 number because that’s the maximum a private school gets for a high school student. And it’s greater than what public school kids get in 85 percent of Ohio’s public school districts. However, wealthier and K-8 students don’t receive that much, so I would have created a district-level per pupil amount.
But while I nerdishly quibble with that data, using the $8,408 amount is absolutely defensible (as you can see in the chart below) and the overall net effect would show the same thing regardless — on a per pupil basis, more state taxpayer revenue subsidizes private school tuitions for mostly religious schools than goes to kids in public schools
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