Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio. He notes that the state’s EdChoice program was sold in part on the claim that more taxpayer dollars to private schools would mean better pay for private school teachers. How’s that working out?
I wanted to see if that actually happened, but it’s impossible using state data because they don’t track it.
However, there are some private schools that are unionized. The largest of these private school teachers’ unions is the one governing Ohio’s largest Diocese — Columbus.
And while the state does NOT track private school teacher salaries, fortunately for transparency, the teachers’ union in Columbus does post its salary schedules — yet another reason to be pro-union, amirite?
Anyway, what I did is look at how their salary schedules changed between 2019-2020 to 2024-2025 (because that’s the last year we have complete EdChoice data). In order to track how Columbus’ private school teachers’ salaries were moving prior to the real huge, infusion of taxpayer funding, I went back as far as the 2015-2016 school year to track raises from then as well.
In addition, I looked at the change in unconstitutional EdChoice taxpayer tuition subsidies from Franklin County school districts between the 2019-2020 and 2024-2025 school years. Here’s that data:
At the end of the day, here’s what I found1:
Columbus’ Catholic School teachers received less than 5% of the $66.7 million annual increase in unconstitutional taxpayer subsidies in the 2024-2025 school year.
Something even more remarkable? Starting teacher salaries in Columbus’ Catholic schools are actually growing slower than they did prior to the unconstitutional EdChoice explosion — likely because the schools have decided to sacrifice their starting teachers’ EdChoice -fueled increases to give bigger boosts to the salaries of mid to later career educators for retention purposes. While the schools now clearly have enough taxpayer money to bump starting salaries higher, they did not do that.
It’s important to point out that this is an estimate only. And it assumes that the Columbus Catholic schools only take kids from Franklin County (which can be inferred by the contracts’ description of the pay scale as “the basic salary paid a full-time teacher in the Franklin County schools in the Diocese of Columbus”). So no kids from surrounding counties are assumed here, even though plenty do attend Diocesan schools.
So that percentage is likely even a little less.