February 3, 2022

Dan Heintz: Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program has failed

Published by Peter Greene

In an op-ed for Cleveland.com, teacher Dan Heintz underlines the failure of Ohio’s voucher program.

Back in the 1950s, economist Milton Friedman departed from his area of expertise to dabble in the area of public education policy. Seventy years later, we now know that what resulted was far from the Nobel performance of his earlier career. In this case, it was closer to a Darwin Award.

Inspired by Friedman’s work, Ohio’s General Assembly brought forth the EdChoice voucher program. By introducing competition into the public education “marketplace,” Ohioans were promised EdChoice vouchers would improve our educational outcomes. Now, with just shy of a billion dollars spent, and our kindergarten-through-12th-grade achievement rank much diminished, the EdChoice program has proven to be an economic as well as an educational failure.

Nearly 95% of the students using vouchers in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District have never been enrolled in one of our schools. So, the narrative that voucher students are fleeing failing schools just doesn’t hold up. These families are fleeing a tuition bill, not a failing school.

Unfortunately, Ohio’s taxpayers are now paying those private-school tuition bills. EdChoice is about compensation, not competition.

In 2014, EdWeek ranked Ohio 16th in the United States for “K-12 Achievement.” That year, the General Assembly allotted $70.5 million to EdChoice vouchers. By 2021, despite voucher spending of $163 million that year, our ranking had fallen to 27th in the country.

In total, Ohio taxpayers have now spent nearly $900 million on private-school vouchers, while our kindergarten-through-12th-grade achievement has plummeted.

The private schools receiving this windfall from taxpayers are often worse, not better, than the public schools where these children would otherwise attend. In 2011, The Plain Dealer studied the performance of voucher students at private schools compared to students at the public schools where they would have otherwise attended, reporting that, “Cleveland public school students often outperformed voucher students on 2009-10 state proficiency tests, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education.” The story noted that students who remained at public schools outscored those who used vouchers to attend private schools on nine of the 14 tests.

There’s even more failure from EdChoice. Read the full op-ed here.

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