David Pepper has some serious doubts about Ohio’s voucher system.
I continue to predict that the private school “voucher” system of Ohio will at some point turn into the biggest scandal in Ohio history.
For three reasons:
- The system’s costs have now exploded into the billions of dollars (per budget cycle)
- There is absolutely zero transparency as to how those billions are being spent — we have no idea whatsoever how the institutions receiving these dollars are spending them, or even if they are being spent on education
- Ohio is the most corrupt state in the nation, with major scandals exploding every few years (and those are just the ones we know about)—and some of the biggest scandals have included the siphoning off of public education dollars, which have been viewed as a piggy bank for those seeking to make a buck
Add those three factors together, and you have a recipe for disaster. And it’s especially bad when the added costs of vouchers are one of the reasons property taxes are going up everywhere, and why public schools remain underfunded.
So given that backdrop, let me introduce some data I just reviewed from a treasure trove provided by Andrew Wilson—a former member of the Fairborn School Board and a member of the steering committee of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. Using data from the Ohio’s Department of Education and Workforce (DEW), he compiled a list of all the private schools receiving funding from the state through the two major “voucher” programs—called “EdChoice” and “EdChoice Expansion” (note: I use quotation marks because while the money is framed as vouchers for families, it goes directly from the state to the school).
I dug into this data in a few different ways, and discovered some eye-popping facts:
First, what this data shows is how the “EdChoice” and “Ed Choice Expansion” programs have created, essentially, a wholly separate system of schools—funded by the public, but with zero accountability to the public.