Ohio's Successful Experiment with Universal School Choice
After Governor DeWine introduced an executive budget calling for increasing eligibility for the income-based EdChoice scholarships to 400% of the federal poverty level (up from 250% currently), the Ohio House recently passed a budget raising it further to 450%. The Senate is poised to unveil its budget soon, and the chamber that originated S.B.11 is potentially considering making school choice universally available. Throughout the budget process, school choice opponents have raised alarming rhetoric about the devastating effect providing all families an option could have on Ohio's public school systems (as opposed to its students or families).
While legitimate questions abound as to what impact universal school choice might have on existing patterns, policymakers need not be totally in the dark. One part of the state has long experience from which we can learn. The Cleveland Scholarship began in 1996, first with numerous restrictions to scholarship access and growth. Over the years, those restrictions have fallen away, making the scholarship universally available to any resident of Cleveland since 2015.
Meanwhile, the public schools’ Cleveland Plan, launched in 2012 via H.B. 525, called “to ensure that every child in Cleveland attends a high-quality school and that every neighborhood has a multitude of great schools from which families can choose.” Primarily focused on district and charter schools, the City of Cleveland has made parental choice a cornerstone of its improvement strategy, which has since demonstrated growth in public school graduation rates, K-3 literacy rates, and high-quality preschool seats, all of which are positive directions for the students and all of the city. This is consistent with substantial research finding the operation of state scholarship programs to be correlated with improved academic performance of students who remain in public schools. This progress has been simultaneous with a robust charter sector and our nonpublic schools, including Catholic schools, which historically and continually perform well by comparison to their nearest public counterparts.
As the charts below illustrate, in the years since state scholarships became universally available in 2015, the sky is not falling in Cleveland. There has been steady enrollment in all sectors, before and after universality, in this urban district that has experienced overall population decline for decades.
Furthermore, robust funding has been delivered by the state's foundation formula, both before and since the new funding model’s implementation, to provide increasing resources per public school pupil that dipped only during the initial pandemic cuts.
Our Catholic elementary schools are primarily neighborhood schools that reflect the diversity of their surrounding communities. Catholic high schools, which draw from wider geographic areas, tend to be less racially isolated and produce higher graduation rates and college acceptance rates for those who attend on the Cleveland scholarship including being 5 times more likely to meet the “prepared for success” benchmarks. These are valuable options for the region's students, who need not be Catholic to participate in these quality options.
The funding is extraordinarily efficient for taxpayers, in that students are educated in quality school settings at a fraction of the cost to taxpayers in charter or traditional public schools. In this way, Catholic schools can be thought of as a public-private partnership for parents with scholarships. For example, the 106 schools in the Diocese of Cleveland expend well over $300 Million to educate the 38,476 students in grades P-12. Tuition, whether paid by state scholarships or by parents, guardians, and families, accounts for only roughly 70% of revenues in the system. The rest - at least $100 Million in our diocese alone - is made up of local and diocesan philanthropy, endowments, parish subsidy from churches, and other annual giving. State scholarships enable more students to participate in these strong educational options.
Finally, the notion of choice, empowering parents and guardians to choose the best placement for their children, is what parents desire. Recent listening sessions across the city, as Cleveland searched for its new public school CEO, revealed that “Championing school choice for families and students” emerged as the top positive trend from stakeholders. This is evidence of a healthy choice ecosystem at work.
Ohio’s Catholic schools are all chartered non-public schools, which are accountable to Ohio’s Operating standards, report test scores of all scholarship students, and are directly accountable to parents. They provide a valuable good to the state as well as to families and society, and they have available capacity. The Cleveland Scholarship, the nation's second ever "voucher" program, began as a "pilot" intended to experiment and demonstrate what could be possible with school choice. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed its legality, and it's track record demonstrates a helpful example for Ohio's statewide policies which should promote healthy ecosystems of educational options that benefit all Ohio students and parents.