Lessons for Improving Ohio’s EdChoice Voucher Program
In order to draw lessons on how to improve Ohio’s new EdChoice voucher program, this report looks at the processes for participating in the Milwaukee and Cleveland voucher programs. It finds that the designers of the EdChoice program have clearly learned from Milwaukee’s simple and easy voucher participation process. EdChoice makes vast improvements over the Cleveland program, which is burdened by a number of unnecessary obstacles.However, there are still important ways in which the EdChoice program can be made easier to use. Unlike the Milwaukee program, EdChoice requires parents to apply during a relatively short period of the year. This burden is compounded by the fact that families’ eligibility for vouchers is based on the changing academic performance of individual public school buildings, so parents will not necessarily know right away whether they are eligible. EdChoice would provide much more access to educational freedom if it were made a city-wide program with rolling admission throughout the year, as is the case in Milwaukee.
You can find the full report here: http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/docs/Policy_Brief_Improving_EdChoice.pdf
Greg Forster, PhD is a Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Friedman Foundation and Matthew Carr is the Education Policy Director at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions
