Yes. Unconstitutional EdChoice Vouchers STILL have a Race Problem

While Judge Jaiza Page couldn't find evidence of legislators deliberately injecting race into EdChoice, the data are clear that segregation is happening everywhere in the program.

I know that one of the downsides of Tuesday’s historic decision holding that EdChoice vouchers were unconstitutional was that Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page didn’t rule it was unconstitutional based on the racial segregation the program creates.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. After all, while Judge Page didn’t find there was outright racial discrimination, she also didn’t say there wasn’t racial discrimination either.

So I went back to find some additional data points to demonstrate just how crazy the racial segregation is in EdChoice.

I looked at the racial makeup of voucher students who take tests. Tests aren’t reported for every Voucher student, but it’s important to understand that every public school student is tested and it is these test scores that determine everything from funding to performance bonuses to whether the state will take over the district or let Charter Schools open up in those districts.

Here’s what I found:

• Of the 427 school districts who had enough Voucher students taking tests to report them to the state, only 8. That’s right. Eight districts had a higher percentage of White students in the district than the percentage of White voucher students taking the tests.

  Some districts were amazingly different. Like Winton Woods. While only 6.9% of Winton Woods students are White, more than 62% of the tests Voucher students from Winton Woods took were taken by White Winton Woods students. All 686 tests Voucher students from Beachwood took were taken by White students, despite only 47% of Beachwood students being White.

• There were 232,713 tests taken by Ohio Voucher students. Only 4009 of them were taken in districts that had more tests taken by minority Voucher students than the District had.

• The percentage of White Voucher students taking tests in Ohio’s urban districts was nearly double that of urban district White student percentages.

As you can see, even in less diverse school districts, Voucher test takers are considerably less diverse than even those districts’ demographic makeup.

So while Voucher proponents may feel like they are fine on the racial disparity issue, I ask you, Dear Reader, do these data indicate that EdChoice Vouchers help or hurt racial equity in our K-12 schools?

Because this sure doesn’t look like EdChoice is giving more educational opportunities for minority students.

It seems like it’s giving taxpayer funded subsidies to private, mostly religious schools, which are considerably less diverse than the public schools from whom they are taking those dollars.

Which helps explain why the EdChoice program is, in fact, unconstitutional.