150,000+ Reasons to Celebrate: National School Choice Week
It is National School Choice Week, and we in Ohio have reason to celebrate – in fact, more than 150,000 reasons and counting, since that’s how many total students have applied for state scholarships since Ohio’s expansion of school choice to every household this year.
All five scholarship programs are growing, to the benefit of Ohio taxpayers, families, and school systems. While it is cause for celebration, not everyone in Ohio is happy: a group known as “Vouchers Hurt Ohio” attacks this mechanism that permits state dollars to follow pupils. A spokesperson has been cherry picking facts to craft two partisan narratives that are troublingly misleading that I’ll address in this space and show why they are actually cause for celebration.
Program Growth
The first misperception is that there are too many applicants, or the insinuation that the programs' wild popularity as people exercise choice will somehow result in being over budget. That claim was made by an advocate for the organization on the “10th Period” blog, and its lede has been picked up by some media outlets. This is neither true, nor responsible reporting for anyone concerned about the state of education finance in Ohio.
As the Greenbook prepared by the nonpartisan Legislative Service Committee (LSC) explains, “The budget continues to fund all state scholarships directly using foundation aid but does not allocate specific amounts to each scholarship program. Rather, it funds them within an earmark from GRF line item 200550, Foundation Funding – All Students, that also funds foundation aid payments to school districts, community schools, and STEM schools.” (p. 7)
The earmarks are specifically described as estimates, reflecting assumptions and the uncertainty with which public and nonpublic districts and schools are well familiar. You might wonder, what are the bases for these assumptions?
The LSC, the Office of Budget and Management (OBM) and the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) all prepared analyses for the legislature as it budgeted for primary and secondary education totaling “$11.64 billion in FY 23…[and] estimated at $12.97 billion in FY 24.” The most aggressive was for Senator Sanda O’Brien’s SB11 proposal to make full EdChoice scholarships universally available to all Ohioans. Its Fiscal Note estimated 90,476 existing non-public school students would newly join the program, and also “roughly 10,000 public students would take an EdChoice scholarship annually under the expansion proposed by the bill” (p. 5).
Estimates described in the LSC’s budget Greenbook for the final budget, HB 33, are less aggressive, as they correctly predicted not all current nonpublic students would apply. To date there have been just over 70,000 new Expansion applicants from any prior school, public or private.
Furthermore, Vouchers Hurt Ohio’s narrative conveniently omits the savings realized when numbers of students formerly in district public schools take a scholarship, since all are funded from the same line item. As Table 5 illustrates, the Fiscal Note estimated that each such scholarship awarded would reduce $6,640 of foundation formula aid, resulting in net savings for taxpayers.
Participation and Race
Perhaps the most unscrupulous allegation is the implication that scholarship growth is somehow racist or segregationist simply because a disproportionate number of new EdChoice Expansion applicants this year are White. It may be expected, since spurious claims of segregation are also featured in the organization’s lawsuit, despite a lack of rigorous evidence in their filing, but still disappointing and necessary to be addressed.
If we assume that the lion’s share of new applicants this year are those who were not eligible last year, anyone who understands the history of Ohio’s scholarship programs will find this unsurprising. Ohio is among the most segregated states in the country by race and socioeconomic status, and district schools are reflective of this. The policy’s recent history of limitation by income and residence where assigned to low-performing public schools made for eligibility that disproportionately favored Ohio’s students of color until this year.
Interestingly, now that school choice scholarships are, for the first time, available to all households in Ohio, we see that the requests of all 5 scholarship programs almost exactly match the racial and ethnic breakdown of all students reported by ODEW (both chartered non-public and public school students from district, charter, JVSD, STEM schools, etc.)
There is no question that Ohio’s choice programs have provided educational lifelines to the most disadvantaged pupils, including Black and other children of color, who constitute a higher percentage of children in poverty in Ohio. Our own Diocese of Cleveland’s Catholic schools continue to grow in racial, religious, and socio-economic diversity - growth that has accelerated with the expansion of Ohio’s school choice programs.
Beyond our Diocese, this is true across the state, as reported by the NCES Private School Universe survey, which includes non-chartered and chartered nonpublic schools, regardless of whether they are scholarship providers. Ohio’s total private school enrollment fell by 8% from 2012 to 2022, but not evenly across racial and ethnic groups. While White students declined most sharply (-18%), enrollments were buoyed by gains in Black (14%), Multiracial (54%), and Hispanic (88%) enrollment.
In the early years of school choice, when Ohio’s scholarship programs were intended to enable students in poverty and poorly performing settings, who were disproportionately students of color, Catholic schools responded, and the policy worked as intended. Now, when the scholarship programs’ intent is to provide choice to every household in Ohio, our schools have again responded, and the policy is working as intended.
While many readers immediately understood the above claims as the anti-voucher movement’s desperate attempts to shield their monopolies from competition, these attacks are disingenuous and malevolent. School choice is growing because Ohio’s families desire it. It is beneficial for students, their families, their communities, and yes, even district public schools. We have much to celebrate this year in Ohio!
