School Choice Can Help Revitalize Ohio's Inner-Cities

posted March 6, 2003

(COLUMBUS) - The Buckeye Institute today released Education Empowerment Zones: Revitalizing Ohio's Cities through School Choice, a proposal to use school choice to help bring middle income families back into Ohio’s inner-cities. 

The proposal would establish "education empowerment zones" (EEZs) in Ohio’s six largest urban areas.  EEZs are a combination of continued Community School growth and an expanded education voucher available to the middle-class.  EEZs encourage urban living, helping to reverse the exodus of residents to the suburbs.

Parents want to live where they have access to good schools.  The declining quality of the public schools in Ohio’s major cities, among other factors, has led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of residents in recent decades. The poor quality of traditional public schools in these cities hinders any attempts at revitalization.

"Working and middle class families with children are vital to neighborhood and city building because they have higher incomes and are more economically and socially stable," said Joshua Hall, director of research at The Buckeye Institute and the study's main author. 

"All too often, attempts to encourage urban renewal and get families to move back into cities fail to address one of the largest stumbling blocks: a lack of access to good schools," said Hall. "Education Empowerment Zones would provide all city residents access to quality schools."

In addition to giving city residents access to quality schools, EEZs are estimated to have a number of positive effects on the city as a whole.  Higher school quality will boost housing values.  By raising the quality of schools available to city residents through EEZs, housing prices will rise and in turn raise the average incomes of city residents.

The study examined the effects of EEZs on Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo. 

Implementing EEZs in Ohio's six largest urban areas will see significant long-term savings, however, there is a short-term cost.  In order to meet the financial needs of this proposal, The Buckeye Institute examined 92 programs in the current Ohio Department of Education budget that might be affected by EEZs and identified nearly two dozen programs that could be removed or downsized without changing student outcomes.

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The Buckeye Institute is a Columbus based, nonprofit, nonpartisan, research and education organization of Ohio professors and scholars. For more information about The Buckeye Institute, or to download a copy of the report visit www.buckeyeinstitute.org.