8/21/08

Jennifer Smith Richards

Columbus Dispatch

School vouchers

Up to 14,000 vouchers are available through the state’s Educational Choice Scholarship Program, which allows students to attend a private school using public money for tuition.

• Eligibility: Students assigned to public schools that have been in academic emergency or academic watch for two of the past three years are eligible. Statewide, 6,760 students used vouchers last school year, up from 3,141 in 2005-06.
• Value: High-school students can get as much as $5,150. Younger students can use as much as $4,375.

Source: Ohio Department of Education

Ohio’s private-school voucher program isn’t just great for the students who use it, a new study asserts, but it’s actually made public schools better.

It was the first sizable study of the statewide voucher program, now in its third year. A state group that includes leaders of Ohio’s primary, secondary and college systems was required by law to study it, but it has not been done.

“One of the bases of (voucher) opponents’ claims was that they would harm public schools,” said Chad Aldis, executive director of School Choice Ohio, a nonprofit advocacy group that helped with the study. “There’s been no harmful consequence. The sky is not falling.”

Greg Forster, the study’s author, said the data show that voucher programs “are neither creaming nor dredging” students from the public schools. Schools are getting better as a result of increased competition, his study says — they don’t want to lose more students to other schools.

Forster, a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, compared the year-to-year performance of students on state tests to judge how voucher-eligible schools were doing. He used a statistical model that he said controls for other factors that might influence a school’s improvement.

“We have a very high statistical certainty that that is a real relationship and not just a fluke,” Forster said.

Public schools with voucher-eligible students say they’re not sure he’s right. Last school year, three central Ohio districts had voucher-eligible students: Columbus, Groveport Madison and South-Western.

“Vouchers didn’t make us do things differently,” said Chris Bowser, spokeswoman for Groveport Madison schools. “We really applied ourselves by looking at the (state academic) indicators and making sure we provide education for all students.”

Officials at the Ohio Department of Education said they hadn’t read the study and could not comment.

Michael Chaney, spokesman for the Partnership for Continued Learning, the group that legally is supposed to conduct a study, said it is planning to resume efforts to do so.

Anticipating that people would dismiss the study because it was conducted by a group that supports choice, Forster included a pre-emptive argument.

“It’s foolish to dismiss all the studies showing that school choice works on grounds that they were conducted by researchers who think that school choice works. If we take that approach, we would have to dismiss all the studies showing that smoking causes cancer, because all of them were conducted by researchers who think that smoking causes cancer,” he wrote.

Aldis said he wants more research to be conducted. It’s unclear whether the state plans to try again to find someone to conduct a voucher study.

Dispatch reporter Charlie Boss contributed to this story.