Ohio’s private school voucher program started small. Students at underperforming schools in the city of Cleveland could use the vouchers, funded by taxpayer dollars, to pay for tuition at private schools in hopes of receiving a higher quality education.
Three decades later, the state’s private school voucher program is universal.
“Any family, even millionaires, now get public money in Ohio to pay for their kids’ private school tuition,” said Alec MacGillis, a journalist with ProPublica who spent months investigating the nationwide rise of private school vouchers. His article also appeared in The New Yorker.
MacGillis joined the Ohio Newsroom to discuss the role Ohio played in the voucher movement.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
On the start of Ohio’s voucher program
“It started way back in the early 1990s [with former Ohio] governor George Voinovich, a Republican who had previously been the mayor of Cleveland, was a very devout Catholic and product of the parochial schools. He really wanted to help the urban parochial schools in Ohio, which were struggling at the time. They'd seen a lot of a decline in enrollment because of suburban flight.
“There are various ways in which the state government was already funding Catholic schools at that time. But Voinovich and the state's Catholic bishops embarked on an effort to start up a voucher program in which state money would flow to Catholic schools in the form of vouchers. Students would be able to take and use [vouchers] to help pay their tuition in private parochial schools. And that’s how it all got started.
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“At the time, there was no such voucher program in the entire country. One was just about to get started in Milwaukee. But the one [Ohio] settled on — a pilot program in Cleveland — was one of the first two [private school voucher programs] in the entire country. From that small program, 30 years later, we've now arrived at the point where we have universal school vouchers in Ohio, where anyone of any family income level can get a voucher to send their kid to a private school.”
On how private school vouchers expanded
“It was just this real relentless, very persistent push by voucher supporters year after year. It started with this one small pilot in Cleveland, really meant to be just for disadvantaged students in this one city where they could leave their struggling public school and get into a Catholic school in Cleveland.
“Then from there, a very crucial moment was in 2002 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this program, saying that it was not a violation of the separation of church and state, basically because it was such a narrow program. Just a few years after that, the voucher proponents managed to expand it to other struggling school districts around the state, basically in the other big cities, so Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron. A bunch of schools in these cities were deemed to be so struggling that students there could also qualify for vouchers.
“Then, around 2012 and 2013, [there’s] another crucial expansion where the vouchers start becoming available to working class kids who are even in districts that are not deemed to be struggling. So, it becomes income based. If you're lower on the income scale, you can get a voucher regardless of where you live.
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“And then, the final big step was just a couple of years ago in Ohio, where [vouchers] become truly universal: any family income, any district, any kid in the state now gets vouchers, which range in size from about $8,000 for high school students for families up to a pretty solid income level, and then some much smaller vouchers for kids for families that are further up the income ladder. But basically, any family, even millionaires now get public money in Ohio to pay for their kids’ private school tuition. It's been a remarkable expansion over these last few decades, the product of a very steady long game approach by voucher proponents.”
On the impact of vouchers on public schools
“Public schools are now faced with a real problem, which is that there's simply less money for them. This happens in one of two ways, basically. One is that every time a public school student moves to a private school, the [public] school loses money. Public schools get a certain amount of funding based on how many students they enroll, so if they have fewer students enrolled, they get less funding. That's the most basic way [public schools] are losing money.
“However, most of the voucher money is going to families who already had their kids enrolled in private school. Families that were already affording private school are now getting these quite large subsidies from the state to pay for that tuition. You're not seeing much switching going on yet from public to private schools with this voucher expansion. But even despite that, you still have a loss of funding for public schools in a bigger sense. There's only so much money to go around. The state budget is only so large. And now that the cost of vouchers is approaching $1 billion in Ohio, that quite simply leaves less money for state funding for public schools.
“We're seeing that now. Just a couple of weeks ago, the new speaker of the House, Matt Huffman, declared there is not going to be enough money in the budget to pay for planned increases in public school funding. There had been a plan in place to increase public school funding somewhat in the years ahead to meet the state's obligations for adequate funding for public schools. [Huffman] is now saying, ‘Sorry, there's not enough money to do that. We're going to have to pull back on public school funding. There's simply not enough money to go around.’ But one big reason why there's not enough money to go around is that the state is now paying almost $1 billion per year for these private school vouchers.”
On Ohio’s influence on other states
“From the start, Ohio, along with Wisconsin, was one of the two pioneers in this realm. [The state] basically showed how you can take a very targeted program, that is sold as being a program just for, quote, poor kids in poor schools, and then very steadily expand beyond that to the point where it does become universal. There are now a dozen states in the country where families of any income can qualify for private school vouchers.
“One big reason for this sudden expansion was definitely the school closures during the pandemic. That gave voucher proponents the opportunity to say, ‘Look, you left all these families high and dry. They need other options for their kids. We need to make vouchers available to everyone because of this terrible experience during the pandemic.’ And so Ohio is now one of a dozen states where they're universal. And there are several large states, including Texas, where they're basically on the verge of also getting them. So it's just been a remarkable expansion across the country just in the last few years.”
On the separation of church and state
“We now have a situation where billions of public dollars, taxpayer dollars are flowing to private schools. In many cases, [these schools are] religious, mostly either Catholic or evangelical Christian. Back in 2002, when the Supreme Court ruled in a narrow 5-4 ruling that the Cleveland program was indeed constitutional, it was really based on that program having been so narrow. It was a pilot program in one city, only serving a couple thousand students, so in that sense, the court ruled it was not a constitutional threat. It’s quite striking that we now have a situation where [private school vouchers] are much more vast, and billions of dollars in all these states are now flowing to religious schools.
“There is now a court challenge underway in Ohio. [Over a hundred school districts and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School funding] have filed a lawsuit arguing that this universal [voucher] program is a violation of the Ohio State constitution on various grounds, including the separation of church and state, that it has gotten to be so large that the church state question must once again be examined.”
