Vouchers' Race Problem Persists

Once again, current year data confirms voucher recipients much more likely to be White than in the districts that account for 90% of vouchers

I’ve written many, many times about how Ohio’s EdChoice vouchers lead to de facto, state-sponsored racial segregation. So I thought I’d look at this year’s voucher data, and I’m sorry to say that the problem continues unabated, even as more and more Ohio districts take vouchers.

As you can see in the chart below, your likelihood is much greater of being white and getting a voucher than you are of being white in the district.

In the 238 districts¹ that account for 90% of all EdChoice Expansion vouchers, where about 7 in 10 kids are white, voucher recipients are 12% more likely than even that high percentage to be white.

Regular EdChoice recipients in the 39 districts that account for 90% of those vouchers are 56% more likely to be white.

Cleveland voucher recipients (EdChoice’s predecessor) are nearly 3 times as likely to be white than kids in the Cleveland Municipal Schools.

The difference is even more astonishing in Ohio’s Major Urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown).

EdChoice expansion recipients (more than 5,000 of them) are more than twice as likely to be white than the district. EdChoice recipients are 40% more likely to be white.

The pattern plays out across Ohio, with students taking vouchers being significantly more white than their district’s demographic makeup.

What does this mean? It means the state is providing hundreds of millions of dollars — none of which is publicly audited — to a significantly whiter, wealthier student population than the district the students would otherwise attend.

It’s state sanctioned White Flight. Pure and simple.

And they’re using our tax dollars to do it.

1. I use the 90% threshold because there are many districts that only lose a handful of students to vouchers and the state does not release numbers below 10. So if a district loses 12 students, for example, it may notate that the number of white students being lost to the voucher out of those 12 is “<10”, which could be anywhere from 1-9. So I cut off at 90% because that typically includes all districts that lose a significant enough number of students to be able to account for their demographic makeup.