BuckeyeBlog

Update:

The House vote on SB 57 has been delayed until probably June 10th, since Representative Widowfield, a bill supporter, resigned from the House yesterday and was unable to vote today.

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The Special Needs voucher, SB 57, may be debated and voted on in the Ohio House today.

Interested citizens can follow the debate here on the Ohio Channel.

Warning: there may be scenes that will anger or disappoint you. For example, the pervasive distain many legislators will have for parents’ abilities to choose what is best for their children, or, their unquestioning embrace of socialistic principle in defending a one-size-fits-all government monopoly of public education.

As we heard in the Senate debate, there will be gross distortions of the facts, particularly the cost of the program. When any number more than $70 million in terms of money spent though the voucher program is mentioned, know that to be a whopper. And the opportunity for the program to save money for taxpayers (because the vouchers are capped in certain instances and because private schools - namely your community’s Catholic, Christian or Jewish schools well-versed at efficient operations - are simply less expensive that public schools) will probably not be aired.

Finally, watch for a poison-pill amendment perhaps coming from OEA-beholden Republican Randy Gardner. Rep. Gardner may propose what will sound like a good idea, to remove the voucher funding from the current flow of state money to local schools for special needs children.

But think of the perverse incentive this creates for public schools: if they are able to get rid of their special needs students into the Voucher program, they still get to keep all of the state funding as if the child were still filling a chair in their building. Also, the competitive effects - of public schools improving their activity because of parental/market accountability — that have been found in Florida would no longer apply. There would be no ‘whip of competition’ to condition the public schools to perform better.

The true purpose of this amendment will be to redesign the voucher as a costly, duplicative program thereby giving Gov. Strickland a more defensible excuse to veto it.

As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, “Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight .”

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors - all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

Parents, kids and the principle of freedom won a victory in the Ohio Senate today, although by a narrow margin. The vote on SB 57, the Special Needs Scholarship was 17 to 15 in favor. All Democrats voted against the bill, along with Republican Senators Stivers, Schuring and Grendell. Now SB 57 moves to the Ohio House.

Kudos to Senate Education Chair Joy Padgett, Senate President Bill Harris and SB 57’s sponsor, Sen. Kevin Coughlin for their leadership in shepherding the measure to passage.

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Up for a vote today in the Ohio Senate Education Committee is a bill giving families of children with disabilities new options for their education. The provisions of Senate Bill 57, also known as a special needs voucher, were passed by the General Assembly last year as part of the budget bill but were vetoed by Governor Strickland.

The Governor gave two reasons for his veto: first, school choice programs lack accountability; and, second, school choice programs harm public schools and the children who remain in them.

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In justifying his veto last year of a voucher program intended to help disabled children achieve better in their educations, Governor Strickland offered up two of the teacher unions’ tried and true critiques of school choice. One was the fallacy that regulatory accountability is both effective and the only tool for conforming public expenditures to public goals. We’ll explode this notion elsewhere on BuckeyeInstitute.org in a couple of days or so.

Strickland then offered the familiar assertion that school choice hurts the children who remain in public schools, through draining resources in a way that would harm “…the vast majority of students, including disabled students, who attend public schools.”

Unfortunately, the facts don’t back the Governor up on this assertion.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have looked at the Florida McKay Scholarship, the program model for Ohio’s special needs voucher, and found that:

Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.

Disabled public school students’ largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.

The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program.

Strickland has threaten to veto SB 57, Sen. Coughlin’s and Rep. Peterson’s latest version of a statewide special needs scholarship.

If he follows through on his threat, we’re wondering exactly how the Governor will explain to the parents of disabled children across Ohio, both those who would have taken advantage of the voucher and those who wouldn’t have, why he chose to ignore the facts about a special needs voucher and favored the prerogatives of teacher unionists and other adults over the needs of their children.

For a fuller briefing on the special needs voucher, visit BuckeyeVoices.org where a podcast with report author Winters has just been posted.