As Ohio has expanded school vouchers to cover nearly every student in the state with at least a partial scholarship, state spending on private school scholarships has ballooned to nearly $1 billion a year.
But public and private schools use different tests, and performance data are posted online at different times. Comparisons are especially tricky in high school because private school students can be tested on different subjects than public school students.
At least two Republican legislators want to require the same tests and same dates for releasing the test results, for more apples-to-apples comparisons.
A cleveland.com/Plain Dealer analysis compared each Cuyahoga County school district –as well as a handful of large-enrollment districts across the state – with private school students on vouchers for the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data available. Private schools only are required to test students who receive a public voucher, so data for those schools is not comprehensive.
The results varied.
In some instances, such as Cleveland Metropolitan School District and Columbus and Akron city school districts, the private schools performed better. On the other hand, public school test results were stronger than private results in Lakewood and Westlake.
Most of the districts had mixed results. In Euclid City School District, private schools bested public schools in grades 3-8 and most of high school, but the district edged out private schools in English Language Arts II and American government.
Public school students in Berea City School District performed better on tests in grades 3-8 and most of high school, but private high school students performed better in science.
Complicating the Comparison
Complicating the comparison at the high school level is that students often take different tests. Public high schoolers’ scores are based on end-of-course exams. Private schools can administer end-of-course exams or one of over three dozen alternative assessments, which may not exclusively test students on Algebra I, biology, English Language Arts II, American history or American government.
For instance, while public high school students are tested on Algebra I and biology, for instance, private schools provide scores for more general math and science tests.
State data doesn’t reveal which assessments the private school students have taken.
In short, the data doesn’t reveal enough information to prove that private schools are hands-down academically superior – even as the state is expected to spend nearly $1 billion on private school vouchers for last school year, once the final payments are calculated.
Voucher costs have skyrocketed since state lawmakers expanded eligibility in one of the state’s five scholarship programs to include people of all incomes, starting in the 2023-2024 school year.
To make it easier to compare, two Republicans are sponsoring an Ohio House bill that would tackle the timeline and data discrepancies between public and private students.
“I feel very strongly that there’s a lot of parents out there that might, as they’re going forward, want to make a decision about what schools kids are in,” said state Rep. Gayle Manning of North Ridgeville, who is sponsoring House Bill 407 with fellow Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz of Cincinnati. “They can’t at this point. They don’t know how many kids at what age or what grade” were proficient in a subject area.
Report Cards
Private school report cards are tricky to find on the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s website. Results for the previous school year aren’t posted online until Feb. 1, as opposed to public school report cards, which are released Sept. 15.
And which tests private school students take is mostly a mystery, although the Diocese of Cleveland administers an assessment known as the Northwest Evaluation Association MAP. If private schools don’t want to administer the same tests taken at public schools, there is is a state list of 45 alternatives they can use.
The data is presented differently, too.
In public schools, test scores for each subject and individual grade levels are published online for grades 3-8. So, the family of a fifth grader in Euclid could see how those schools perform within that grade level. In private schools, data are aggregated for grades 3-8 and high school.
To compare scores, cleveland.com/ The Plain Dealer calculated averages for each district’s tests in grades 3-8, by subject area.
Catholic Schools
The 110,000 students at Ohio’s 370 Catholic schools account for about two-thirds of all private school students in the state, said Tom Rhatican, an associate director with the Catholic Conference of Ohio, in submitted remarks against HB 407. Not all of those 111,000 students are on vouchers.
Since the legislature expanded to universal vouchers, new Catholic schools are opening, including one enrolling would-be, first-generation college students and another that only enrolls students with special needs or learning differences, he said.
Most of the scholarship students in Catholic schools in 2022-2023 year qualified by coming from low-income households, by living in the boundaries of a low-performing public school or by having a disability.
“Students who are qualified by only these characteristics are, in general, going to perform less well than the average student in any given population, be it a building, district, county or state,” said Frank O’Linn, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Cleveland.
Several times a year, all students in Cleveland Catholic schools take an assessment known as the Northwest Evaluation Association MAP. To compare diocesan students’ proficiency to public schools’ proficiency in grades 3-8, the diocese uses a state report that compares those MAP scores with proficiency scores on Ohio’s State Tests. Cleveland diocesan proficiency averages in these grades are higher than the average of all Ohio public schools proficiency averages, he said.
In Defense of School Choice
State Rep. Andrew Brenner, a Columbus-area Republican, is chair of the Senate Education Committee and said he co-sponsored or helped write almost every piece of school choice legislation in the past 10 years. He believes there should be free-market principles applied to the education system because right now public schools have a monopoly.
(Not everyone believes in the free-market approach to education. A coalition of about 140 school districts is suing the state over private schools vouchers, arguing that the legislature’s expenditures on scholarships is hurting the system of public schools the Ohio Constitution requires the General Assembly to support.)
But Brenner says the point of school choice is “you have to have the money follow the student for competition, otherwise you’ll have mediocrity.”
“Look,” he continued, “if I’m spending $35,000 a student in East Cleveland city schools, which is what the state is roughly paying for those kids in that school district to fail miserably, and that school district can use those dollars to hire whomever they want, do whatever they want. They’ve got autonomy, essentially, on how they can spend those dollars. You give them an EdChoice scholarship for $8,500 to go to a high school, that is significantly cheaper than it would be to send them to the traditional public schools. And you’ve already determined the improvement in there.”
In East Cleveland, 54.2 percent of students were proficient in high school American government, compared to 48 percent of private school students on vouchers being proficient in social studies.
When going head-to-head with high-performing suburban public school districts, private schools tended to perform the same or worse. Some of that is because Ohio doesn’t have a free-market education system, despite the vouchers, Brenner said. Private schools operate on small budgets and cannot afford to pay educators well, he said, describing some teachers at a special education private school with master’s degrees only earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year.
“The government shouldn’t be monopolizing what people’s decisions are,” he said. “I think it’s up to what’s in the best interest of the family. And if that means we spend some money on an EdChoice scholarship for them to go to a private school, so be it.”
Lawmakers budgeted about $9.6 billion in state funds to spend on traditional K-12, charter schools and vocational schools in 2023-2024. Spending nearly $1 billion on private school scholarships is significant.
But Brenner doesn’t use the $9.6 billion number to compare public-to-private funding. The number Brenner uses is over $20 billion, when considering federal funds and local property tax revenues that flow to public schools, he said.
“The money is trivial,” he said of voucher spending compared to public school support.
Just over 1.6 million students attended Ohio public schools in the 2022-2023 school year, compared to 82,991 students attending private schools on vouchers that year. The voucher number is expected to rise to over 155,000 for the 2023-2024 school year because the state increased eligibility.
Private schools are prized by some families for other reasons besides academics. For instance, if a child is being bullied and is not safe at a public school, Brenner said a new environment could be better.
“I don’t blame traditional public schools for 100 percent of the bad performance,” he said. “I do have massive concerns when only 5, 10, 20, 30 percent of your kids are passing a state standardized test.”
In Defense of Public Schools
Christina Collins, executive director for Honesty for Ohio Education, which fights right-wing policies in Ohio schools, noted that average proficiency scores at public schools are sometimes low because the schools have a large percentage of low-income children, which require more resources to educate, and because they educate and test special education students.
Private school students on vouchers used to have to take the same assessment as public school students – the Ohio’s State Tests for grades 3-8 and end-of-course exams for high school – until 2019, when the two-year state budget bill was amended in the Senate to allow the alternative assessments.
“When I was on the state board, we would constantly get these rules. Initially it would say, ‘all schools’ and then they’d walk it back. ‘This doesn’t apply to non-public schools,’” Collins said. “I mean it’s this constant walking back.”
Collins is heartened by HB 407, and the fact that two Republicans saw that discrepancies were a problem and decided to introduce it.
“The nuances and caveats of it are so many that their argument that private schools are better, there’s just no evidence for that,” she said. “There’s nothing to prove it.”
HB 407
HB 407 would apply to three of the five Ohio voucher programs: the Cleveland Scholarship; EdChoice, which is available to families who live in the boundaries of low-performing school districts; and EdChoice-Expansion, which now gives families of all income levels at least a partial scholarship. Schools with at least 20 percent of their students on a voucher would have to follow HB 407.
“The goal of HB 407 is to give parents student performance, demographic and disciplinary information and ensure state tax dollars are being spent properly,” Manning said in bill testimony in a committee hearing. “In this way, parents will be provided with the best possible information when planning their child’s education.”
In addition to requiring the same tests and same dates for releasing the test results, Manning’s bill would require a disaggregation of private school students on vouchers by the same subgroups that are tracked in the public school, such as by low-income, race, English language learners and other groups.
Manning looked into the possibility of, instead of eliminating the alternative assessments, allowing public schools to also choose to take them. But that is not allowed. The U.S. Department of Education, which gives Ohio millions for education, wants to look at proficiency levels that are more specific than what the alternative assessments show, she said.
HB 407 would additionally require scholarship money sent to private schools to be accounted for separately from other funds. The private schools would have to submit an annual report to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce – which would then post the information online – about how it spent the state funds.
“I think it’s very important that we know how they’re spending the money,” Manning said. “They say, ‘Well, we spent it on tuition’. A lot of them have increased tuition now. So where’s the money going? To me, if you’re giving $200,000 to the superintendent of the schools or principal or whatever they call them, you know that’s fine. That’s a decision that they can make. But that’s a decision parents should know.”
Support and opposition to the bill has split along the usual lines of public education organizations versus school choice advocates.
Private schools oppose the bill.
“Despite the progress made for education freedom, we’re disappointed to see a slew of bills, including HB 407, take significant steps backward by proposing onerous regulations on private entities, which defeats the purpose of education freedom and choice,” said Donovan O’Neil of the Americans for Prosperity of Ohio, a libertarian public policy organization. “The proposed regulations in HB 407 are not dissimilar to regulations we see placed on public schools, which, again, defeats the purpose of education freedom and choice.”
Transparency for private schools is needed, said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association.
“To be clear, OEA remains opposed to the expansion of voucher programs in Ohio. The universal eligibility for EdChoice that occurred in the state budget was a grievous error that will have lasting implications for education in our state,” he said. “…That being said, House Bill 407 will help to bring greater accountability and transparency to this arena.”
Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network, which is part of the Center for Christian Virtue, called the bill a corrosive intrusion on a private entity to operate without government interference.
“All of the new regulatory metrics in HB407 ignore the most common reason families are choosing to take an EdChoice scholarship, which is that they have fundamental disagreements with their public school on education philosophies or ideologies that the school is teaching their children,” he said.
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