Voucher demand falls

We have previously reported how the last budget expanded the availability of vouchers from 14,000 a year to 60,000, and how little demand there was for them. This year demand for vouchers has fallen even further.

The Department of Education received nearly 600 fewer applicants to the Educational Choice scholarship this spring compared to last year
[...]
The 16,848 students whose families submitted applications by last Friday's deadline comes in short of the 17,438 who did so a year ago and still far below the 60,000 limit on vouchers. ODE also held a second application window last fall that brought the total applications to 17,516 for use in the present school year.

Let's look at the graph

If parents in school districts that are struggling are rejecting the voucher option, why would the legislature think expansion of vouchers into districts where schools are excellent, prove to be any more popular?

School choice proponents need to begin to understand that the vast majority of parents choose public schools, and that choice deserves the same vigorous support for-profit education receives from the "choice" community and Ohio's current crop of legislators.

What's in your portfolio?

A reader pointed out this exchange and segment on CNBC, a business channel. There can be no doubt that the financiers that brought us the great recession see education as the next area ripe for looting

Anchor: Charter schools have become very popular... But are charter schools a wise addition to your investment portfolio? Well let’s ask David Brain, President and CEO of Entertainment Properties Trust. David, why would I want to add charter schools into my portfolio?

DB: Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a high-demand product. There’s 400,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools, the industry’s growing about 12-14% a year. So it’s a high-growth, very stable, recession-resistant business. It’s a public payer, the state is the payer on this category, and if you do business with states with solid treasuries then it’s a very solid business.

Anchor: Well let me ask you about potential risks, here, to your charter school portfolio, because I understand that three of your nine “Imagine” schools are scheduled to actually lose their charters for the next school year. Does this pose a risk to investors?

DB: Well, occasionally—our Imagine arrangement’s on a master lease, so there’s no loss of rents to the company, although occasionally there are losses of charters...In this case it’s a combination of relationship with the supervisory authorities and educational quality; sometimes the educational quality is very difficult to change in one, two, or three years. It’s a long-term proposition, so there are some of these that occur, but we’ve structured our affairs so this is not going to impact our rent-roll and in fact you see this is maybe even a good experience as the industry thins out some of the less-performing schools...

I don’t—there’s not a lost of risk...the fact is this has bipartisan support. It’s part of the Republican platform and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, has been very high on it throughout their work in public education. So we have both political parties are solidly behind it, you have high demand, high growth, you have performance across the board...it’s our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of the portfolio. It’s the most high in demand, it’s the most recession-resistant. And a great opportunity set with 500 schools starting every year. It’s a two and a half billion dollar opportunity set annually.

Parents choose public education

That's a headline you won't see in the Columbus Dispatch anytime soon, but if recent evidence is any guide, that's exactly what parents have done when it comes to Ohio's voucher expansion boondoggle.

Interest from Ohio parents has been light as the state expands its offer for vouchers that allow children to move from low-performing public schools and into private schools.

The state budget signed by Gov. John Kasich at the end of June more than doubled the number of taxpayer-funded vouchers available for the new school year under what's formally known as the EdChoice Scholarship Program. The state will provide as many as 30,000 scholarships, an increase from the previous cap of 14,000 vouchers, which are worth up to $5,000 each.

1,575. That's how many of the additional 16,000 vouchers have been applied for. Proponents of this expansion argued that there was massive pent up demand from parents to move their children out of public education and into the private sector, but the 14,000 cap was trapping them. In fact, so pent up wa the demand that next year the cap is increased again to 60,000 vouchers!

Now the excuse seems to be that they need more "marketing", that parents aren't aware. If parents aren't aware, how was there ever any pent up demand? As we reported earlier, research has demonstrated that vouchers do not have a strong effect on students academic achievement.

Since 2000, more evidence has accumulated about the impact of vouchers on student test scores, particularly from longer-term studies of the publicly funded voucher programs inMilwaukee, Cleveland, and D.C. [...], these studies have generally found no clear advantage in academic achievement for students attending private schools with vouchers.

The rhetoric used to support voucher programs has shifted, with some proponents giving less emphasis to rationales based on achievement and more emphasis to arguments based on graduation rates, parent satisfaction, and the value of choice in itself.

If Ohio's experiment with expanding vouchers is any guide, parents are choosing public education over privatization, despite what million dollar education privatization advocacy campaigners at School Choice Ohio would have us believe.

Maybe we ought to listen to Ohio's parents and invest in struggling public schools instead of syphoning away scarce resources for an experiment few seem interested in.