Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs

There is sadly no mystery about the damage befalling public schools when private school tuition vouchers are expanded: Vouchers suck millions of essential dollars out of state and local public school budgets. Usually state legislatures start with a small program and then, several years later, explode the number of students eligible and the size of each voucher. Even though we know that aggregate standardized test scores reflect primarily a school district’s economic level and are a flawed measure of school quality, voucher proponents regularly market their new product as an escape for the poorest children from so-called “failing” schools.

Vouchers originally started in two of the nation’s school districts that serve concentrations of poor children: Milwaukee and Cleveland. But in 2021, we are watching a new phase of nationwide growth and expansion of vouchers.

In 2017, economist Gordon Lafer explained: “From 2011 to 2015, eighteen states established some form of voucher program. Vouchers are typically introduced as a limited, targeted intervention aimed at helping the neediest families but then expanded gradually to cover the general population. The country’s oldest voucher program was established in Milwaukee in 1990 and was restricted to poor children in failing schools and capped at a limited number of participants. In 2011, Governor Walker removed the cap, raised the income eligibility threshold, and expanded the program to include students in suburban counties. In 2013 the program was expanded yet again, this time to cover the entire state. Indiana and Ohio were CONTINUE READING: Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland com

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland.com

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one

By Other Voices

As a student at a reputedly failing school, I will say emphatically that our public schools deserve support. As we look to determine the future of education, we must take a step back and decide what we want out of the system. There is more to education than an ill-conceived system of state testing. Public education exists to instill republican virtues in our people. We need this now more than ever.

Public schools have been branded as failing and stripped of funding by bizarre school-choice schemes. If a man has a broken leg, you don’t get him walking again by breaking the other leg. EdChoice, under the pretense of rescuing students from failing schools, has instead defunded those same schools rather than supporting vouchers directly. Our lawmakers must consider: If we focused instead on making meaningful improvements to the public education system which has served our state so well, would there be a need for EdChoice?

Visit Cleveland Heights High School. It is not failing. Nor is it perfect, for the vouchers have made sure of that. It is time that America rediscovers its republican virtues, the source of our strength, and the schools which gave them to us.

Kenji Sakaie,

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland.com

Ohio Legislature Heats Up Controversy by Making New Public School Funding Plan and Method of Funding School Vouchers All Part of the Budget | janresseger

Ohio Legislature Heats Up Controversy by Making New Public School Funding Plan and Method of Funding School Vouchers All Part of the Budget | janresseger

Ohio Legislature Heats Up Controversy by Making New Public School Funding Plan and Method of Funding School Vouchers All Part of the Budget

This week in my school district in Cleveland Heights-University Heights, Ohio, parents and public school supporters are going through a quiet ritual. People have been scrambling to write and submit legislative testimony. Some people are submitting written testimony; others are driving two and a half hours to Columbus, sitting in the hearing room and driving home in the dark. The Ohio Senate Primary and Secondary Education Committee is holding hearings on the state’s next biennial budget and considering a new—desperately needed—school funding plan that has now been folded into the budget bill, which must be passed by June 30.

What is happening is a big deal.  Last fall, a new $2 billion school funding plan was passed by the Ohio House by a vote of 87-9, but the Ohio Senate let the bill die at the end of the session. Now that plan has been folded into the state budget. The House has already passed the budget—including the Fair School Funding Plan—but the Senate is just now holding hearings. If you read some of the testimony being submitted, you might imagine what’s going on in Ohio would get coverage in the state’s big newspapers, but most of them have been bought out by Gannett-Gatehouse Media or Advance Media, companies that have reduced the number of reporters.  Right now not enough people are paying attention to a debate about whether the Legislature will repair the services our state is currently failing to provide for 1.6 million students in Ohio’s 610 public school districts at the same time the state continues to expand school vouchers at public schools’ expense.

I am going to share some of my own testimony and the testimony from others who are members of the Heights Coalition for Public Education. You can find copies of each of these documents in the Ohio Senate Education Committee’s document archive for May 4, 5, and 6.  I will date each reference.

My own testimony (May 6) summarizes the issues at stake in this particular Ohio budget CONTINUE READING: Ohio Legislature Heats Up Controversy by Making New Public School Funding Plan and Method of Funding School Vouchers All Part of the Budget | janresseger

10th Period: Let's Talk Charter Schools | National Education Policy Center

10th Period: Let's Talk Charter Schools | National Education Policy Center

10th Period: Let's Talk Charter Schools

Let's discuss charter schools -- a topic you've seen a lot of on this blog over the years, but has kind of gone away recently for obvious (COVID) and non-obvious (Vouchers/School Funding) reasons.

Despite House Bill 2, which was supposed to slim down our notoriously poor-performing charter school sector and the closure of the nation's largest online school -- ECOT -- which closed because the school literally stole hundreds of millions of tax dollars to educate kids they never educated, we are currently spending more on charter schools than any other year on record. 

By a mile.

According to the latest Charter School funding report from the Ohio Department of Education, we are set to spend $999.7 million. The previous record was $955 million from the 2015-2016 school year -- the high-point of the ECOT years.

Despite this massive recent increase (an extraordinary $111 million jump ... over two years), it's not because we've had more students attending charters than ever. 

No. That record remains the 2013-2014 school year when 122,130 students attended charters. 

It's because Ohio politicians have continued bumping up the per pupil amounts flowing to charters. So now kids in Ohio charters, on average, get nearly $8,500 per pupil in state aid -- about double what that same kid would receive in a local public school.

As I've recounted for more than a decade, because of the way we fund charters, that means that local property taxes have to subsidize charter school kids.

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Rocket Science to understand that if you're removing $8,500 in state aid from a district for a kid the district was only getting about half of that from the state to educate that the difference has to come from somewhere.

This year, that subsidy is slated to be $148 million. And in some districts, it's really high. Like in CONTINUE READING: 10th Period: Let's Talk Charter Schools | National Education Policy Center

Beware: Here Is How to Wreck Your State’s Public Schools | janresseger

Beware: Here Is How to Wreck Your State’s Public Schools | janresseger

Beware: Here Is How to Wreck Your State’s Public Schools

Many state legislatures are currently considering new private school tuition vouchers or planning to expand long running voucher programs, tuition tax credit vouchers, and education savings account vouchers. Ohio provides a stark warning about the potential damage of rapidly growing school privatization at public expense.

In a column in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer, Peter Robertson examines how the growth of publicly funded private school tuition vouchers is increasingly sucking up the state funding Ohio supposedly provides for its public schools:

“According to the Ohio Department of Education’s first February Foundation Funding Report (Robertson’s article contains a link to the Excel spreadsheet from the Ohio Department of Education.), districts will spend $162 million this school year on these private school vouchers… An analysis last year by News5 Cleveland found that nearly two-thirds of voucher recipients had not previously been students in the public district schools—they were private school students who had not received state funding for their tuitions, and now do.”

Robertson was previously an administrator in the Cleveland Public Schools and later a school board member in Shaker Heights. “He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the role of online learning in educational change.”

Ohio’s EdChoice Vouchers are funded by a legislative scheme called “the school district CONTINUE READING: Beware: Here Is How to Wreck Your State’s Public Schools | janresseger

What Is at Stake when ALEC, the State Policy Network, The Buckeye Institute and EdChoice Lobby for Vouchers? | janresseger

What Is at Stake when ALEC, the State Policy Network, The Buckeye Institute and EdChoice Lobby for Vouchers? | janresseger

What Is at Stake when ALEC, the State Policy Network, The Buckeye Institute and EdChoice Lobby for Vouchers?

As we begin 2021, there has been troubling coverage about new voucher programs popping up in state legislatures. This is despite that Betsy DeVos is gone and that President Joseph Biden is a strong supporter of the institution of public schools. And in states like Indiana, and Ohio, where privatized school vouchers have been in place for decades, we can also watch pressure for their expansion.

Earlier this week, Bill Phillis, Ohio’s longest and best informed proponent of public schools and the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, sent around a troubling article from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette describing a bill being considered by the Indiana House Education Committee for the radical expansion of an already enormous publicly funded private school tuition voucher program in Indiana, Ohio’s neighbor:

“The proposed bill expands the $172 million a year voucher program to allow a family of four earning as much as $145,000 a year to qualify for vouchers. Median household income in Indiana is about $60,000 a year. The bill also eliminates income limits on the size of the voucher awards. Currently, a family of four earning up to $48,000 a year is limited to a voucher worth 90% of per-student state funding for the school corporation in which the family resides. At $60,000 a year in household income, the voucher drops to 70%. Four-person families earning up to $96,000 a year qualify for 50% of per-student funding. But HB 1005 CONTINUE READING: What Is at Stake when ALEC, the State Policy Network, The Buckeye Institute and EdChoice Lobby for Vouchers? | janresseger

Ohio Legislative Leader Rams Through Voucher Changes that Hurt Students in Poor, Title I Schools | janresseger

Ohio Legislative Leader Rams Through Voucher Changes that Hurt Students in Poor, Title I Schools | janresseger

Ohio Legislative Leader Rams Through Voucher Changes that Hurt Students in Poor, Title I Schools

This post has been updated. The Ohio House has now passed SB 89.

The Ohio Senate is up to its old tricks.

Five years ago right at the end of a spring session of the Ohio Legislature, a group of state senators added a long amendment to House Bill 70, which was about expanding the number of full service, wraparound community learning centers—schools with medical and social services located right in the school. The amendment had nothing to do with the subject of the original bill. The amendment’s purpose was to establish the state takeover of the school district in Youngstown and set up a procedure for state takeovers of other so-called “failing” school districts. A deal had been cut. No opponent testimony was permitted. The Ohio Senate passed the amended HB 70 and sent it back for quick approval by the Ohio House. Within hours, Governor John Kasich had signed it, and without public input, an appointed Academic Distress Commission supplanted the elected school board in Youngstown.

This time the subject is vouchers.

Last spring, just as everything shut down due to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, both houses of the Ohio Legislature debated changes in the EdChoice voucher program and came up with two separate bills. EdChoice eligibility is currently described by legislators as “performance-based.” The state designates EdChoice schools by these schools’ low ratings on the state’s school district report card, which everybody agrees is flawed. Last spring the program was expected to double in size. At angry hearings, school districts complained because EdChoice vouchers are funded through something called “the school district deduction.” The House plan would have funded the vouchers out of the state budget; the Senate plan kept the school district deduction.

When COVID-19 shut everything down and House and Senate were unable to agree on a plan, a conference committee began quietly meeting. It’s been a complicated year, so everybody was surprised last week when the Columbus Dispatch‘s Anna Staver reported that Matt Huffman, a powerful legislator already elected to be senate president in the new legislative CONTINUE READING: Ohio Legislative Leader Rams Through Voucher Changes that Hurt Students in Poor, Title I Schools | janresseger

Ohio: The Cost of “School Choice” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: The Cost of “School Choice” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: The Cost of “School Choice”

What is the state of Ohio paying for charters and vouchers? From state data and evaluations, we know that neither sector performs as well as the state’s public schools. The legislature likes to fund failure.

Bill Phillis, who retired as deputy state superintendent and is expert about school finance, has the answer:

Current Cost of School Choice

The cost of school choice borne by the state and school districts is enormous. Public school leaders and advocates should be alarmed.
Ohio has been private school-friendly beginning a half century ago. In HB 166, the state provides private schools with $139,995,470 for administrative cost reimbursement and $309,878,268 for auxiliary services, for a total of $449,873,738. One half billion!

Additional direct state subsidies for charter schools and vouchers in HB 166 for FY 21 and FY 22 include:   
Charter facilities                                                $40,000,000 
 Quality charter schools                                  $60,000,000               
Public charter schools                                     $14,000,000               
EdChoice expansion                                      $178,240,758              
Choice programs                                                $9,780,309                               Total                                                $302,021,067

Hence, the direct state appropriations for private schools, charters and vouchers in FY 21 and FY 22 total $751,894,805.
If the deductions from school districts in FY 22 are equal to the deductions in FY 21 for vouchers and charters, the total will be $2,352,881,306. Therefore, the grand total of tax dollars going to private schools and charters in FY 21 and FY 22 is $3,104,776,111.
Charter school deductions from school districts started with $10,784,924 in FY 99 and escalated each year to $929,884,915 in FY 15. Since FY 15, the total charter deduction has reduced slowly to $827,136,047 in the current school CONTINUE READING: Ohio: The Cost of “School Choice” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: Who Pays for Vouchers? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: Who Pays for Vouchers? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: Who Pays for Vouchers?

Bill Phillis, founder of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding explains here where the funding comes from for vouchers: public schools pay from their budgets. The cost this year is nearly $350 million, deducted from the public schools that enroll nearly 90% of the state’s children. A study funded by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute showed that vouchers are ineffective and that children who use them fall behind their peers in public schools. Yet the Legislature wants to increase the funding for vouchers. Why invest in failure?

Deductions from school districts to voucher schools increased from $42,355,792 in FY 2008 to $349,304,605 in FY 2021

In 13 years, voucher deductions have increased each year except for FY 2011 to FY 2012 wherein there was a decrease of 9%. The percentage increase during the period from FY 2008 to FY 2020 has fluctuated between 7.2% and 86%. See the table below: CONTINUE READING: Ohio: Who Pays for Vouchers? | Diane Ravitch's blog