Letters Reportedly Show Ohio Voucher Push Expanded From Needy Students to Wealthy Families

The Center for Christian Virtue organized “Prayer at the Statehouse,” a Christian worship gathering held on a Thursday morning last May in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol. About a hundred people attended, and three state legislators and Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted took part. The center, an advocacy group, has a new headquarters directly across from the capitol. At the event, Husted spoke about the monthly prayer meetings he leads in the governor’s office and said that advancing school choice was one result that could follow from prayer.

The center played a key role in one of the broadest expansions of private school vouchers in the country, which allows all Ohio families, including the wealthiest, to receive public money for private school tuition. Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers in the mid-1990s, when they were available only in Cleveland and were presented as a way for disadvantaged children to leave struggling schools. Today the program reaches more than 150,000 students statewide at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $1 billion. The vast majority of the money goes to Catholic and evangelical institutions, which dominate the private school landscape in the state.

The article describes a broader national trend. In the past few years, vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina, and supporters are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others. Critics have raised concerns that the program was promoted as a civil rights measure to help poor children but is increasingly directing money to families who already could afford private school. The reporting also describes rising tuition at some private schools, pressure on public school budgets, and voucher spending in Arizona that exceeded predictions by hundreds of millions of dollars. It further reports that some funds for homeschooling and education-related expenses have been used for purchases such as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-riding lessons. Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky recently rejected vouchers in ballot referendums.

The reporting draws on private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, among leaders of the Ohio movement. According to the article, the letters show a strategy that began with targeted programs for needy children in parochial schools and later sought to extend benefits to much wealthier families. In the early 1990s, Ohio’s Catholic bishops faced declining enrollment in urban parochial schools and rising costs as they admitted more Black students, often from non-Catholic families who could not pay much tuition. Newly elected Republican Governor George Voinovich, a Catholic, corresponded frequently with the state’s leading bishops. Their letters, collected in his papers at Ohio University, show what the article describes as a close and collaborative relationship, and the bishops and Voinovich discussed increasing state funding for Catholic schools.

The article notes a legal obstacle. The Ohio Constitution states that “no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society,” and Voinovich and his aides reportedly worried about political fallout and possible legal challenges from groups such as the ACLU. In an April 1991 letter to Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland, Voinovich wrote that his team was “quietly lining up ‘heavy hitters’ in the business community” and trying to find a legislator to serve as an advocate. The article also identifies David Brennan, a Cleveland-area businessman who had attended Catholic school in Akron, as a major fundraiser for Voinovich’s campaign and a figure who began cultivating allies for voucher legislation.

In May 1991, Voinovich and Brennan met to discuss creating a commission on school choice, which Brennan would chair. Soon afterward, the bishops provided 18 suggestions for possible members. Six of those suggested were placed on the commission, and the article reports that no mention was made of the fact that the church had selected them. Seating six church-recommended members without disclosing the church’s role is a matter of honest dealing (Proverbs 11:1).

Source: Read the original report