With a 3-2 vote last week, the Upper Arlington school board signed onto a lawsuit that aims to strike down Ohio’s EdChoice scholarship program. First enacted in 2005, EdChoice today provides financial assistance to roughly 130,000 students to defray, or fully cover, the cost of private school attendance. Historically, scholarship eligibility has generally been limited to lower-income families, but legislators in recent years have allowed more parents to access the program. Legislation passed just last year made all Ohio families eligible for scholarships, with wealthier families eligible for partial scholarships.
The expansion of EdChoice has riled up the public-school establishment, which perceives the program as a threat to its longstanding hegemony over K–12 education. To protect their interests, choice opponents have (in addition to litigation) embarked on a PR campaign aimed at bashing private schools. The “Vouchers Hurt Ohio” group, which receives support from more than 100 school districts, accuses private schools of “siphoning” money from public schools, a claim that flies in the face of empirical evidence showing EdChoice has no impact on districts’ per-pupil expenditures. The group also attacks the program for creating a “system of state-funded discrimination,” even though private schools must follow non-discrimination policies and have served countless low-income, Black, and Hispanic students through the years.
If all this melodramatic rhetoric weren’t enough, now we get this: One of the state’s wealthiest school districts is trying to strip educational choices from less advantaged families by joining the lawsuit.
Serving a posh enclave just outside of Columbus, Upper Arlington had the fourth highest median resident income and the forty-ninth highest property valuation per pupil of Ohio’s 608 school districts in 2022–23. Its average teacher salary ($91,306) ranked fifth highest statewide and the district spent $17,677 per pupil, 15 percent above the statewide average. This spending figure excludes capital outlay, so it wouldn’t even reflect the district’s recently completed, $235 million school facilities upgrade.
I’ve got no quarrel with residents in affluent communities using their own resources to generously support public schools. Decades ago, I benefitted from attending a well-off school district that provided a good education. What’s unfathomable is when districts like Upper Arlington use their power and prestige to harm families who are less fortunate.
Let us recall that this year alone, some 27,500 Black and Hispanic students received an EdChoice scholarship. If EdChoice goes away, children from poor families and distressed neighborhoods in cities like Columbus will be forced to trek back to an “assigned” public school that may be unsafe or provide a substandard education. Without EdChoice, working-class families from all across the state will need to make much tougher decisions about whether they can afford a private school for their sons and daughters.
Most of the district leaders and residents of Upper Arlington are fortunate not to have to make those types of agonizing decisions for their children. Their well-resourced public schools work for the vast majority of students, and the state’s scholarship program—even an expanded one—has a next-to-nil impact on the district. Why advocate to snatch educational opportunities from the hands of disadvantaged Ohio families? Why heap scorn on the private schools that serve some of the state’s neediest students—something that wealthy districts like Upper Arlington refuse to do by forbidding open enrollment?
Perhaps the Upper Arlington school board didn’t fully understand the ramifications of their actions. Maybe they got caught up in the political theater. Whatever the case may be, the result was a shameful, sickening display of elite power and privilege.
