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
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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.

Voucher opposition is expanding

HB59 as introduced by the Governor and passed out of the House finance committee on a party line vote, would create a statewide voucher program, based solely on household income. Eligibility would only be limited to those with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line ($46,100 for a family of 4). Initially only covering kindergarten, it expands to first grade the following year.

This expansion would occur even in the highest performing school districts at a time when so many are still reeling from massive budget cuts the legislature is not keen to restore. Furthermore, once a student qualifies for a voucher they will forever qualify regardless of family income.

Previous attempts to expend vouchers statewide (via HB136) met with huge community resistance across at least 400 of Ohio's 60+ school districts (see the list below). Similar opposition is now growing to this provision in the budget. The following districts have all passed a resolution opposing the voucher expansion in HB59

Adena local	Millecreek West Unity
Allen East Local	Monroeville Local
Anthony Wayne Local	Morgan Local
Athens City	Muskingum Valley ESC
Austintown Local	Oak Hill Union Local
Barnesville EX Vill	Oakwood City
Bath Local	Old Fort Local
Bellbrook-Sugarcreek	National Trail Local
Berea City	New Lexington City
Big Walnut Local	New Richmond
Bluffton EX Vill	Noble Local
Brown Local	Northern Local
Chillicothe City	Northwood Local
Columbiana Ex Vill	Ripley Union Lewis Huntington
Coshocton City	Ross Local
Crestview Local	Ross-Pike ESC
Cuyahoga Falls	St. Clairsville-Richland City
Fairbanks	Sheffield-Sheffield Lake
Fairfield Union	South Central Ohio ESC
Felicity-Franklin Local	Southern Local
Firelands Local	Southington Local
Galion City	Springfield City
Gallipolis City	Tuscarawas Vlley Local
Goshen Local	Tuslaw Local
Graham	Urbana City
Grand Valley Local	Vanlue Local
Granville EX Vill	Vantage Career Center
Green Local (Franklin Furnace)	Van Wert City
Indian Valley Local	Washington-Nile
Keystone Local	Waverly
Lancaster City	Wayne County Career Center
Licking County ESC	Wellston City
Lincolnview Local	West Muskingum
Louisville City	Wheelersburg
Lynchburg-Clay Local	Williamsburg Local
Madeira City	Yellow Springs EV
Mathews Local	Zane Trace Local

A copy of the resolution can be found here, and reads as follows:

WHEREAS, Governor Kasich’s biennial budget (HB 59) proposes to expand the EdChoice Scholarship Program through two new options that will significantly increase the number of publicly-funded vouchers for students to attend private or parochial schools; and

WHEREAS, one of the programs provides private or parochial school tuition vouchers to any entering kindergarten student of a family with a household income less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, to be used at the parent’s choice of participating private or parochial school; and

WHEREAS, the following year, such vouchers would be expanded to include students in both kindergarten and first grade, totaling $25 million over the biennium; and

WHEREAS, such vouchers would be granted without regard to the academic performance or quality of the public school that the student is assigned to attend; and

WHEREAS, the second voucher expansion proposed by the Governor in HB 59 expands eligibility for the EdChoice voucher program to Kindergarten through 3rd grade students enrolled in buildings that received a “D” or “F” in the new K-3 Literacy component of the New Report Card in 2 of the 3 most recent report cards; and

WHEREAS, the operation of the proposed programs would effectively reduce funds from the already financially beleaguered local public school districts, resulting in fewer resources for the education of remaining students;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT, AND IT IS HEREBY RESOLVED, that the ____________ Board of Education does hereby express its opposition to these provisions in HB 59; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the _________ Board of Education expresses its opposition to any legislation that seeks to transfer public dollars to support private education; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Treasurer be directed to spread this resolution upon the minutes of the Board of Education and that copies of the resolution be forwarded to the Governor and members of the Ohio General Assembly.

Below is a list of the districts that opposed HB136

HB136 Voucher Expansion Opposition

Are you prey to a "choice" stealth campaign

Think public-school teachers are bad and vouchers are good? You may be prey to a well-funded stealth campaign.

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. “Vouchers,” he wrote, “are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.” The article was republished by “free market” think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, with the title “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”

While Friedman has promoted vouchers for decades, most famously in his masterwork Free to Choose, the story of how public funds are actually being transferred to private, often religious, schools is a study in the ability of a few wealthy families, along with a network of right-wing think tanks, to create one of the most successful “astroturf” campaigns money could buy. Rather than openly championing dismantling the public school system, they promote bringing market incentives and competition into education as a way to fix failing schools, particularly in low-income Black and Latino communities.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling deregulated campaign finance and unleashed millions in political donations, concentrated wealth has played a role in politics. Now in the limelight for its attacks on unions and the exposure of 800 model bills and documents, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has produced model bills favorable to its corporate and right-wing funders behind closed doors for decades (as In These Times uncovered in 2011)– including school vouchers and tax credit bills.

This concentrated wealth is reaching into America's classrooms state by state, promoting the transfer of public funds to private education through vouchers that allow parents to pay for tuition at private schools with public money. Promoting “school choice” through privately run charter schools doesn’t go far enough for these billionaires. Today, “private school choice” programs, as vouchers are called in the annual report of the Alliance for School Choice, are in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In 2011, a year when states across the nation slashed their education budgets, 41 states introduced 145 pieces of private school choice legislation.

[readon2 url="http://inthesetimes.com/article/13849/the_right_wing_machine_behind_school_choice"]Continue reading...[/readon2]

Accountability for vouchers

On the idea of vouchers in the new world of accountability

The rise of testing-based accountability measures immeasurably complicates this argument for vouchers. Under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, public schools have to demonstrate their performance on certain standardized measures in order to receive funding. Race to the Top further centralizes educational affairs by encouraging states to adopt a nationwide core curriculum and by emphasizing a testing-driven component for teacher evaluations. The argument on behalf of such measures is that public dollars demand proof that they will be spent in a valuable way, and standardized testing is, apparently, the best way to establish this value. (Yes, this argument may be flawed in many, many ways, but let us leave that to the side for the moment as well.) If one wants to establish a centralized, federally-run public school system, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top provide a sturdy foundation for that enterprise.

If, however, one wants to support a pluralist, voucher-driven kind education reform, this movement toward standards-based accountability could prove much more problematic. If the premise of this accountability is that public dollars require proof of effectiveness, what is the reason for demanding that a school run as a public institution (that is, a public school) should be held to any different standard than a school run as a private institution? Both would receive tax dollars from state and potentially local and federal governments: why should they be held to two different standards?
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Once you've bought into the idea that standardized testing establishes a school's quality, it becomes harder to resist the idea that public money ought to go only to those private entities that have demonstrated their effectiveness in teaching. Moreover, these standards for accountability will, as both Louisiana and federal reforms demonstrate, tend to come from bureaucrats working in central government offices.

Under a universalized voucher program and homogenous standards system, the federal government, which would be the engine that de facto drives education policy under this "reformist" vision, would have increasing control over private schools. Why? Over a period of years, private schools would become increasingly dependent upon government tax dollars, and he who pays the piper picks the tune. Maybe not now, maybe not a few years from now, but eventually legislators and regulators could start placing further demands upon these newly dependent private schools. After all, if education is truly in a state of crisis, shouldn't government be demanding the best from schools in exchange for the taxpayer's hard-earned dollars?

In Ohio, much of this discussion has already begun to happen.

• A 2009 newspaper report titled "Ohio voucher students must do better on tests "

But that doesn't mean these schools [voucher eecipients] — and their students — shouldn't be held accountable.

That's needed more than ever after the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that voucher students performed poorly on state achievement tests.

An analysis of about 2,900 students revealed that six in 10 did not pass math, science or social studies, four in 10 failed reading and three in 10 failed writing.

• A 2010 article titled "Voucher students' test scores lag"

Several thousand Ohio students who used Education Choice scholarships to attend private schools are doing no better than students at the public schools they left behind, state test data show.

• A 2011 report titled "Ohio Vouchers Fail to Raise Student Achievement"

The latest data from the Ohio Department of Education showed that students in the state’s voucher programs did not perform better academically than their peers in public schools. In fact, public school students outscored those in voucher schools in many cases.

• And when voucher students were compared to the much maligned Cleveland Schools, this headline was produced "Cleveland students hold their own with voucher students on state tests"

The push is on to expand school voucher programs in Ohio, but new state data suggests that students who attend private schools with the help of taxpayer-funded vouchers don't necessarily fare better academically than the children they leave behind.

Cleveland public school students often outperformed voucher students on 2009-10 state proficiency tests, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.

As the article we opened with discusses, tax payers are unlikely to want to see their precious dollars fund private schools, in light of the overwhelming evidence that these private schools are producing results no better, and in many cases, a lot worse than their public school alternatives.

It would be reasonable to suggest that we ought to have accountability for private schools that receive tax dollars. If they cannot produce results as good as, or better, than their public school counterparts, they ought not to be able to continue to receive tax payer assistance.

If we are to continue to pursue a policy of choice, we have a duty to ensure those choices are of the highest possible quality available, and that goes for private schools too.

Parents *STILL* choose public schools

HB153, the budget bill, increased the availability of school vouchers for private schools from 14,000 to 30,000 last year and to 60,000 this year. Clearly the legislators was expecting a private school voucher gold rush.

When that didn't happen last year, excuses were made. This year, according to reports in the Dispatch, application levels are almost as miserable.

An additional 1,544 requests for a new special-needs voucher program were made by Sunday’s deadline.

Among the 17,438 applications for an Educational Choice Scholarship were 3,814 new applicants. That deadline was Friday. About 17,000 applications were filed last year to use vouchers this school year.

There are 60,000 vouchers available next school year for students in low-performing schools. They’re worth $4,250 for younger students and $5,000 for high-school students.

The Dispatch headline catagorizes this as "School-voucher programs prove popular". the reality and the truth is obviously quite different. Approximately 3,438 additional students have appliedfor vouchers above the original cap of 14,000. That amounts to just 5.7% of the new 60,000 cap.

The voucher expansion in Ohio is clearly a massive failure. Lawmakers obvously expected demand for these vouchers to be over 30,000, hence the increase to 60,000 this year. For those that continue to believe that parents in Ohio want "choice", for the second year in a row, they have been proven to be wrong. Parents in Ohio continue to overwhelmingly support public schools - it's time politicians listened and began to support it fully too.

Education News for 04-18-2012

Statewide Education News

• Ohio takes aim at reducing achievement gap (EdWeek)

Estimates in Ohio suggest that at the current rate of progress, black fifth-graders will be reading on par with white fifth-graders in the year 2315. Third-graders they will start to pass reading exams at the same rate in 2102. Read More…

• Schools, teachers seek delay in grading (Columbus Dispatch)

Leaders of teachers unions and education groups urged lawmakers yesterday to delay rolling out a tougher school grading system proposed by Gov. John Kasich, but the administration is not backing down. “We want them (the new rankings) in yesterday,” Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said. “No one is backing away and saying we need additional time. We are not seeking a delay. We want to see this go into effect this year.” The new system for grading schools and school districts will begin with report cards issued by the Ohio Department of Education this summer. Simulations show that most schools will drop a full letter grade, maybe two.Read More…

• CPS to lose fewer students to private schools (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Cincinnati Public schools will lose fewer students than expected next year to private schools and state-funded vouchers, a school official said Tuesday. Only 899 new students applied for new Educational Choice scholarships for the upcoming school year, said Janet Walsh, a Cincinnati Public spokeswoman. That’s down from 1,078 EdChoice applicants from CPS last year and it’s far below the 1,377 students district officials had projected to lose this spring, she said. Read More…

• School-voucher programs prove popular (Columbus Dispatch)

More than 17,400 applications for students to attend private schools using taxpayer-funded vouchers were filed for next school year, a slight increase over last year. An additional 1,544 requests for a new special-needs voucher program were made by Sunday’s deadline. Among the 17,438 applications for an Educational Choice Scholarship were 3,814 new applicants. That deadline was Friday. About 17,000 applications were filed last year to use vouchers this school year. Read More…

• Fewer Lima families seeking vouchers (Lima News)

LIMA — For the first time since the state began its voucher program, the Lima City School District is seeing fewer families wanting to leave the district. Twenty-eighty fewer pupils have applied for EdChoice scholarships. The last day to apply for a scholarship for next school year was Friday. Not all of those applying will necessarily get a scholarship. Read More…

• Bill would hold school, government fiscal officers accountable (Columbus Dispatch)

School and government treasurers could be suspended or removed if they don’t keep proper records and spend taxpayer money appropriately, a bill introduced yesterday in the General Assembly says.

The bill was prompted by several high-profile cases of misspending and theft, state Auditor Dave Yost said in introducing the Fiscal Integrity Act. Read More…

• Your guide to how Ohio writes inoffensive test questions (State Impact Ohio)

Tenth graders across the state spent much of their time last month taking tests — the Ohio Graduation Tests to be specific. The OGT’s are given in five subject areas, and some students found one question on the Social Studies portion of the exam objectionable. The question asked: “After the Holocaust, many Jews felt that they needed a state of their own in order to provide security for the Jewish people. In 1948, the state of Israel was formed. Many Arabs disagreed with this action. Identify two perspectives of many Arabs that explain their objection to the establishment of Israel.”

The Ohio Jewish Communities, a registered lobbying group, petitioned the Ohio Department of Education to remove that question, alleging bias that offended some Jewish students. After review, state officials concluded the phrasing was inappropriate and won’t be used again. Read More…

• One big difference between Ohio and Florida Standardized Tests (State Impact Florida)

Our friends at StateImpact Ohio have an interesting look at how Ohio comes up with the wording on its standardized tests. By committee, of course. A controversy over a question about the Arab perception of the creation of Israel prompted concerns that the questions might not be without bias. Read More…

Local Issues

• Teen who cared for mom wins bid to take part in graduation (Canton Repository)

CARROLLTON —Teri Fisher had a goal in mind as she battled Stage IV cancer last fall. She wanted to survive long enough to see her son, Austin, graduate from Carrollton High School. Her cancer went into remission in early March, and her goal will be realized thanks to the power of the Internet and a loyal community. Austin, 17, had been told by school principals that he would not be participating in the commencement ceremony in May because he had 16 unexcused absences in the first semester — two more than the amount allowed by the district.Read More…

• Silent support for “Fish” at Carrollton BOE meeting (New Philadelphia Times- Reporter)

CARROLLTON — Many supporters of Austin Fisher came to the meeting of the Carrollton Board of Education on Tuesday night. But they only spoke with their signs. Supporters had been organizing all day Tuesday with hopes that school administrators would change their mind and that Austin Fisher would be able to attend not only his graduation, but also the senior prom, and go on the senior class trip to Cedar Point. Read More…

• Cleveland board votes to trim teaching staff next year (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland school board voted Tuesday to trim an eighth of its teaching staff in the upcoming school year because of budget troubles and a falling number of students. The district will also shorten its school day through eighth grade by 50 minutes next school year and cut the number of music, art, library and gym classes for those students as part of the shuffling of staff to handle the layoffs. The elimination of more than 500 teachers -- all in kindergarten through eighth grade -- through layoffs and a retirement incentive is a major part of district Chief Executive Officer Eric Gordon's plan to resolve a $65 million budget deficit for next school year. The layoffs are expected to cover about $40 million of the $65 million. Read More…

Editorial & Opinion

• Apply common sense with the rules (Lima News)

It's likely no one was upset when the Carrollton, Ohio, school district said students who miss more than a certain number of days wouldn't walk in the graduation ceremony. But such rules should come with flexibility for extremely unusual circumstances. A student missing school to care for his dying mother would strike most people as an extremely usual circumstance.Read More…