NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.
If recent headlines are to be believed, the educational sky is falling in the state of Ohio. It appears that the Educational Choice (EdChoice) Scholarship Program is fomenting total budgetary and administrative chaos.
Vouchers are “gutting” Ohio’s Schools, according to my Forbes colleague Peter Greene. They are “exploding” according to one blogger. “It’s huge,” a representative of the Ohio Association of School Business Officials is quoted as saying.
This all seems a bit over-the-top for a program that just 22,608 of the state’s 1.7 million students used last year, according to the ABCs of School Choice. (That’s 1.3% for those of you keeping score at home.)
It’s time we all cool off. Let’s have some perspective.
First things first, kids move all the time
Schools are funded based on enrollment. If students leave, funding drops. This is the “bite” that voucher detractors say that the program takes out of school budgets.
Now, students leave schools for lots of reasons. Toledo provides a great case in point.
We’ll begin during the six years before 2005, when the EdChoice program was established. (Note: The EdChoice program is not run by or affiliated with EdChoice, which is the national nonprofit that employs me.) Here are the enrollment figures from the state of Ohio:
1999-2000 School Year: 38,023 students
2000-2001 School Year: 37,426 students
2001-2002 School Year: 36,839 students
2002-2003 School Year: 35,742 students
2003-2004 School Year: 34,483 students
2004-2005 School Year: 32,976 students
The change from 1999 to 2005 represents a 13.3% decrease in student enrollment. Clearly, none of these enrollment changes could have been caused by the voucher program, because it didn’t exist yet. So what happened?
Students were simply moving from the district to neighboring districts, or to private schools, or moving out of the area all together. This is normal behavior for school districts. Kids move around.
Was there outrage then about the “bite” that other districts were taking out of Toledo? Were folks talking about those districts “gutting” the Toledo schools? No, they recognized that this is simply the way that the world works, and that the district would have to adjust for its decreasing enrollment.
Fast forward to today. Enrollment in the district has shrunk to 23,160 students. Was this because of vouchers? No. Only 2,019 students in Toledo take advantage of the EdChoice program and less than 1,000 take advantage of the state’s other private school choice programs. Students leaving with vouchers are a tiny sliver of those leaving Toledo’s schools, why so much focus on them?
Fixed and Variable Costs
Traditional public schools have a point when they say that they get lumbered with fixed costs when students leave. A school still needs to have a principal, it has to be heated and cooled, and the rest. Losing a handful of students doesn’t change that.
Be that as it may, public school supporters dramatically overstate their case. Not all costs are fixed. My colleague Marty Lueken estimated that in Ohio, $8,129 of the $13,452 dollars spent per student were spent on variable costs, costs that could fluctuate with changes in enrollment. So, as long as the voucher awarded is less than the variable costs, districts will not be harmed.
Want to guess the average voucher amount in the program everyone is so up in arms about? That would be $4,762, just over half of those variable costs. In order for districts to truly lose out, a whopping 68% of their costs would have to be fixed. They are not. While districts are seeing less revenue, they are seeing even less cost, so they are coming out ahead on a per-pupil basis.
It should also be noted that these fixed/variable cost arguments are only ever used to call for more spending. Have you ever heard a school district say when enrollment is growing, “Well, we already have a principal, and we’re already heating and cooling the building, so we’ll only need half the funding for those new students.” I didn’t think so. Maybe we should take those pleas with a bit of skepticism.
Playing fast and loose with data
Given these realities, how do we get to claims about the “staggering” impact of the voucher program? Well, as we just saw, detractors can only present raw numbers and not per-pupil figures. If that doesn’t work, they can quote numbers out of context to make them seem bigger than they are.
Here is a quote from Peter Greene’s article I link to above: “Toledo’s voucher costs increased by $5.7 million. In smaller districts, the dollar amount might not seem impressive, but Scioto Valley’s increase amounts to a 965% jump in voucher costs.”
Now, why might one use a nominal figure in the first sentence and a percentage in the last? Well that’s because $5.7 million is only 1.2% of the Toledo’s $454 million in total revenue. Doesn’t sound so staggering now, does it? And that 965% change for Scioto Valley is just over $100,000 for a district with $17.6 million in revenue. That is one half of one percent.
Here is another data point for context. Around 93,000 students take advantage of Ohio’s open enrollment law, allowing them to move between public school districts. This is substantially more students than the voucher program enrolls and presents the same costs to districts, and yet, the criticism is much more muted. Curious, that.
The real issue
All of this obfuscation and pettifogging is done to avoid the real conversation. No one wants to answer the question: Why are these students leaving? No child in Ohio is required to use a voucher. They only use them when they are not satisfied with their current school and want to go somewhere else. Want to keep kids, and the funding that comes along with them? Do better and they won’t leave.
Mike McShane is director of national research at EdChoice. He is also the author, editor, co-author or co-editor of ten books on education policy, and is a former teacher.
This blog originally appeared on the website of Forbes magazine.
