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Ohio Voucher Program

Ohio’s first voucher program—The Cleveland Opportunity and Tutoring Program --permitted children in the Cleveland schools only to attend religious or private schools with state assistance of $2250 per year. The amount paid has now been increased to a maximum of $3450 depending on family income or the school tuition if it is lower.

A five-year study of the program conducted by Kim Metcalf at Indiana University found that voucher students did no better than their public school counterparts. Voucher advocates tout this result while voucher opponents point out that the purpose of the program was to improve academic performance among the underprivileged, a goal voucher advocates positioned as easy to accomplish before the program was enacted. Metcalf also found that the program is serving a high percentage of white students from higher-income families who had already been enrolled in private schools, which is not in keeping with the original intention of the program to serve the low-income minority population.

Despite these factors, in 2006 the Ohio legislature expanded the voucher program beyond Cleveland. The EdChoice Scholarship Program opens vouchers to 14,000 Ohio students from schools all over the state deemed to be in academic emergency or academic watch and offers a voucher of $4250 for elementary students and $5000 for high school students. The National School Boards Association estimates that the program could divert as much as $70 million from Ohio public schools. However, initial enrollment has lagged well below anticipated numbers—only 2450 enrolled--because many students from qualifying schools are not able to meet private school entrance requirements and because many private schools refuse to accept the state-offered tuition amount if the applying family has a low income, a requirement to participate in the program.