Northeast Ohio Advocates for Catholic Schools

Yesterday, January 31, Governor DeWine held his State of the State address, where he previewed his priorities for the next biennial budget. In the biggest news for nonpublic schools, the governor proposed   expanding the income limits for EdChoice scholarships   to 400% of the federal poverty level, presumably around $120,000 of household income for a family of four, up from the current 250% ( $75K for the coming school year ). He also promised to continue the work of school safety and provide funding support for all public & private schools that want a school resource officer. Details on both are forthcoming as official budget documents will released in the days ahead. Owing to the large number of Ohioans who would become eligible, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman was  quoted  as stating, “Although it’s not a universal voucher, it practically speaking is in many regards.” Meanwhile, Senator Sandra O’Brien (R-Ashtabula) has introduced a proposal to provide EdCh...

  It is   National School Choice Week , and parents nationwide are celebrating a movement that’s gained incredible momentum in recent years. However, the cause for state support of parental school choice is nearly as old as tax-funded schools themselves, including a pioneering history here in Ohio where policy and advocacy raged 170 years ago, with Catholic schools at the fore.   This fascinating history is full of lessons still applicable today. The year was 1853, and with the Diocese of Cleveland having been carved out of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati just six years prior, the Arch still held jurisdiction over most of Ohio's population and land. The Most Reverend John B. Purcell, Archbishop of Cincinnati, became a strong champion and articulate advocate for a plan that would allow Catholic schools to receive a share of state funds for education. Catholics were still very much a minority, and anti-Catholic sentiment was strong in Ohio and throughout our young nation. As ...

The nation’s Catholic schools provided a rare highlight among this week’s sobering news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation’s Report Card, a congressionally mandated assessment conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Last month, NCES released a report on the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments for age 9 students through 2022 to examine student achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. It summarized  alarming declines  over the last two years that saw the largest score drops in decades for reading and the first ever for math. In the Diocese of Cleveland, however, Catholic schools did not experience such a decline. Every Catholic elementary student takes the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) MAP® Growth™ assessment, which saw achievement in those similar grade levels remain level or slightly increase over pre-pandemic levels. This local patt...

June 26, 2022 The Supreme Court has been in the news, and while the Dobbs decision is undeniably the biggest, there is another with relevance to school choice nationwide and in Ohio. On Tuesday, June 21, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in  Carson v. Makin  that Maine's town tuitioning programs violated the Constitution by excluding schools that provide religious instruction from being eligible for selection by students in the publicly funded programs. Chief Justice  John Roberts delivered the majority opinion , stating broadly that when state and local governments choose to subsidize private schools, they must allow participating families to use those funds to pay for religious schools. The exclusion of religious schools from participating in Maine's state tuition assistance program was a violation of the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause rights of students who might want to choose such schools. A short and clear summary from the Cato Institute, which filed an amicus br...

On January 4, five public school districts, two families, and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding   filed a complaint   in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court that argues the Traditional EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion programs offend the Ohio Constitution. This lawsuit has been discussed by anti-school choice groups for months, including a group called "Vouchers Hurt Ohio" and it is not a surprise that the coalition filed the complaint. To summarize the argument, the parties allege that the State of Ohio does not adequately fund public education to secure a “thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state” (Article IV, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution) and therefore the State should not allow for the EdChoice programs to continue. The complaint, interestingly, does not address the Jon Peterson, Autism, or Cleveland Scholarship programs. Some experts have already weighed in that the district's arguments may not be particu...