BuckeyeBlog

Last week Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson reported that the Cincinnati Public School (CPS) district has found a loophole for denying students eligibility for the EdChoice voucher program. In short, any student in a school that has been rated as being in Academic Emergency or Academic Watch (the equivalent of an F or D grade respectively) for at least two of the previous three years is eligible to receive a voucher. However, apparently if two or more failing schools are consolidated into a new building the clock on eligibility starts over again. The students moved into the new building must endure two more years in a sub-par school performance before being eligible again.

Recently, CPS has consolidated four failing schools (all EdChoice eligible): Heberle and George W. Hays into the new Hays-Porter elementary school and Central Fairmount and Whittier into the new Rees E. Price Elementary.

As Bronson reports:

Let’s underline something else: Kids who wanted to learn, whose parents wanted something better than a new building with the same old mismanagement, fear and chaos, could have switched to safer private schools with Ohio EdChoice vouchers.

But they were blocked by CPS, voucher advocates say.

Thanks to a state loophole, a failing school with the same students and staff suddenly becomes a successful school when it gets a new building with a new state identification number. That restarts the clock for at least two more years of failing report cards before students are eligible for vouchers again.

Some Hays-Porter students came from Heberle Elementary – which was on the bubble, with declining scores. The rest, from failing George W. Hays Elementary, were eligible for tuition vouchers of $4,375 each.

But their failing school report cards were magically erased by a new building that turned out to be worse than the old schools.

To be fair, this may all just be a coincidence and we are in no way implying malevolent intent on the part of CPS administrators. But it would be much easier to believe such a benign explanation if CPS didn’t have a history of trying to skirt the EdChoice rules. As the paper notes in a sidebar: “Cincinnati Public Schools has bent the rules before to sabotage vouchers. Last year, it was the only district in Ohio that refused to provide a public list of about 1,500 students who were eligible for EdChoice vouchers.” In the end, the district provided a list of eligible students but neglected to include their last names.

Rather than responding to competition by improving the quality of their schools, districts may have decided to respond by capitalizing on loopholes and other games. Unfortunately, the only people they’re really cheating are their own students.

Tags: School Choice

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:35 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.