It’s no secret that the public-school establishment pulls out all the stops to prevent families from exercising educational choice, including private school options. More than one hundred school districts, for instance, have lined up in support of a lawsuit that aims to kill in one fell swoop EdChoice, a program that provides state-funded scholarships for about 125,000 Ohio students to attend private schools.
Their latest strategy: tying up private schools in red tape in an effort to weaken them via a thousand regulatory cuts. Introduced earlier this spring, the vehicle for this broadside is House Bill 407. The legislation would heap a number of new and intrusive reporting requirements on private schools regarding their building capacities, admissions standards, expenditures, the income brackets that students’ parents are in, and the schools that students attended in the prior year. It would also reinstate a former requirement that private schools administer state assessments to scholarship students instead of permitting the use of alternative exams, and calls for some type of private school report card. While there is more merit to those outcome-driven proposals, they would discourage school participation in EdChoice and are being pushed, ironically, by education groups that have long resisted these types of accountability measures for their own schools.
Who exactly is advocating hardest for the bill? In committee testimony, the district school boards, superintendents, treasurers associations, and both teachers unions—the entire public-school establishment—voiced full support for the legislation. These longstanding opponents of private-school choice all plugged some variation of the argument that more regulation is needed to “level the playing field” and to help parents access more information about private schools.
Let’s be clear from the start: This effort isn’t about fair competition or parental empowerment. Rather, it’s blatant, anti-competitive behavior cloaked in “accountability.” What the public-school groups are doing is no different than corporations lobbying for policies and regulations that prevent the competition from gaining a foothold. None of these groups have ever argued to increase private school funding to bring their amounts in line with public schools (that would bring some “fairness” to the table). It’s also hard to say that parental rights is their focus when they file lawsuits aimed at robbing families of school choice and constantly ridicule programs that provide more options. It’s also tough to take the testing requirement seriously when pushed by groups that regularly attack state tests. And report cards? Just a few years ago, these very groups (unsuccessfully) lobbied the legislature for an opaque public school report card that would have been useless to parents.
But since private school accountability is at issue—and because they are often criticized by their opponents as being “unaccountable”—it’s worth reviewing yet again the ways in which private schools are accountable.
First and foremost, private schools are directly accountable to the families they serve. When parents are dissatisfied, they can head for the exits. One might say the same is true for public schools. The difference is that private schools no longer receive funding when a student leaves—they lose the state scholarship amount, if applicable, plus any tuition along with the student. If they suffer significant enrollment and financial losses, they have no choice but to close their doors. This form of accountability—financial consequences directly tied to enrollment losses—is a key incentive for private schools to provide a quality education.
Traditional districts, on the other hand, are shielded from the financial pain of enrollment declines through the state’s longstanding use of funding guarantees and local property tax revenues that are not tied to enrollment. Moreover, because a school district must cover every corner of the state, districts have built-in protections from permanent closure. The weaker “market discipline” in the district sector is one reason why school reformers have typically pursued results-driven accountability measures that incentivize districts to pay attention to the needs of students.
Remember also that Ohio’s private schools are already held to many of the same standards as traditional public schools. They must be formally “chartered”—a form of accreditation—by the state,[1] and through that process, they must adhere to the state operating standards that apply to public schools, as well. Moreover, a school’s charter can be revoked for noncompliance with state laws and regulations, and they must follow racial nondiscrimination policies. This regulatory structure makes sense, balancing school autonomy with necessary guardrails, and has served Ohio well for decades.
As for academic outcomes, Ohio has long required scholarship students in particular grades to take a standardized exam. As noted earlier, students were formerly required to take the state test, and their proficiency rates were reported in the aggregate for each school. In 2019, the General Assembly changed the law to allow private schools to administer a state-approved alternative exam that might align more closely with a school’s curriculum. Proficiency rates on these tests are still reported and, last year, state lawmakers added an important new requirement: Scholarship students’ growth results will now be calculated and reported, as well. This additional data point (which entails no new testing burdens) will soon provide a clearer picture of the yearly academic progress of students attending private schools. Lawmakers would be smart to see how the state’s new growth measure helps inform the public before turning back the clock on assessment or instituting a report card system.
It’s important to recognize that adding further regulations on top of the existing framework would only discourage private schools from participating in EdChoice—indeed, very conceivably what the public-school groups hope will happen. In Louisiana—a state with onerous regulations—only one-third of private schools decided to participate in its scholarship program, thus limiting the choices of families and likely to schools of lessor quality. Fortunately, as the table below indicates, Ohio has done better, as two in three private schools participated in EdChoice as of 2018–19. With expanded eligibility and testing flexibility, four in five accepted EdChoice scholarships this past year. Increasing state regulations, as HB 407 proposes, could wipe out this progress in private-school participation.
Table 1: Private school participation rates in EdChoice (income-based or low-performing schools)
Back in 2016, along with my colleague Chad Aldis, I wrote: “Policymakers should tread lightly when adding to schools’ regulatory burdens. After all, freedom from regulation is precisely what makes private schools different and—for many—worth attending in the first place.” I stand by that statement. Rather than pursuing ill-advised attempts to conform private schools into the image of public schools, the state should allow for distinctive schools that meet the varying needs of Ohio families.
[1] Private schools eligible to participate in EdChoice are technically known as “chartered, nonpublic schools.” These schools are not the same as public charter schools.
