The “Existential Threat” Facing Ohio’s Public School System

William Phillis started teaching in 1958. “I’ve always liked the idea of schooling. I’ve always liked the idea of the public school system,” said Phillis. Only five years before, the people of Ohio passed a constitutional amendment to create a Board of Education, and schooling in the state was changing rapidly. “The state started making progress in terms of curriculum and programs for kids,” he said. “At that point in time, there was no vocation, there were no charter schools, there were no vouchers.”

School vouchers are public funds that help parents pay for education at private schools—ostensibly to give children in low-performing public schools the chance to attend a participating private school. The first major voucher programs were introduced in the 1990s. “There’s only going to be a certain portion of the state general revenue fund going to education,” Phillis said. “And so for every dollar that’s taken out of school districts and given to charters and vouchers, it’s a dollar less that’s provided for public education.”

The Cleveland Scholarship Program was started in 1996, which allowed Cleveland parents to use public money for tuition at private schools as well as allowing students to attend schools in neighboring districts. The Educational Choice Scholarship expanded the program in 2005. Last year, House Bill 33 revised the EdChoice program to include all students— regardless of school district performance or family income. Ohio now spends more than $970 million on private school voucher scholarships.

According to Phillis, who is now the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, the expansion of the voucher program has been to the detriment of public schools.

Vouchers Hurt Ohio, a coalition of over 130 school districts across the state, filed a lawsuit in January 2022 challenging EdChoice as unconstitutional. “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system,” reads the lawsuit. “Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding – the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools – otherwise available to already struggling school districts for the education of their students.”

One of the primary arguments from advocates for voucher programs is that they help low-income families get a better education than they could from public schools. But data shows that the majority of students benefiting from EdChoice and the expansion were from affluent families already enrolled in private school. In Montgomery, Miami, Greene, Warren, Butler and Clark counties, for example, use of EdChoice vouchers increased by 313 percent, according to Dayton Daily News reporter Eileen McClory, but enrollment at schools that accept vouchers grew by only 3.7 percent. “More and more vouchers” are “being awarded to students who were already attending private schools,” reads a2023 report by the Ohio Education Policy Institute. “In FY19, only 7% of new EdChoice voucher recipients had attended private school the year prior, however in FY23 nearly 55% of new voucher recipients were already attending private schools.”

“In my district, over 90 percent of the students who were using vouchers years ago had never set foot in one of our public schools,” said Dan Heintz, a member of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Board of Education and a supporter of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit. “The whole notion that people were using vouchers to escape failing public schools was nonsense, because the kids had never attended,” he said. “The only thing that they were escaping is a tuition bill.”

Data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce shows that of the 1,817 students in Cleveland Heights-University Heights who use EdChoice, 73.69 percent are “not low-income qualified,” meaning their household income doesn’t fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. And reporting from Cleveland.com found that despite an increase in students receiving Edchoice scholarships in the Cleveland area, those districts haven’t seen a substantial loss in student population.

According to Heintz, the state left him and his colleagues no choice but to sue. “We were forced to do it by the Ohio legislature,” he said. “We tried everything else…we went to Columbus and we gave testimony in hearings. We hired lobbyists. And everything that we tried was ignored by our extremely gerrymandered legislature.” At one point, his district was losing $16 million a year to the voucher program. “That was 16 million coming out of what we could put in front of the students in our desks.”

Chad Aldis, vice president of Ohio policy for the Thomas Fordham Institute, a Koch-linked conservative think tank based in Washington, DC, acknowledged that many EdChoice users were already enrolled in private schools, but said there were provisions in the program that explicitly benefitted low-income families. Aldis also argues that because of changes in how Ohio schools are funded, the financial burden on schools is no longer a factor. Voucher funding comes directly from the state of Ohio without passing through district budgets.” Now, when a student leaves a district, it’s much more akin to as if the student moves to Indiana, where the district can no longer claim the kid, but that’s because they’re not educating the student anymore.”