Who’s Killing Ohio’s Public Education? Follow the Vouchers

[0:01] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. In this episode, we look at what is going on in the Ohio legislature this session, and then we take a deep dive into the school voucher Ponzi scheme being used to decimate public education in the state. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:36] Music.

[0:49] Okay, what I wanted to do with this segment is kind of give you an update, a legislative update for people here in Ohio, in our local area, in the greater Toledo area. Just to kind of keep you up to date on what legislative actions or things that are going on in the Ohio State House should be important to not only members of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, but free thinkers in general, atheists, humanists. The first thing is that the state legislature, this session that started in January, is far more extreme than it was last session. And last session was pretty extreme when we got a law that was passed to force school districts to allow LifeWise to come in and indoctrinate students.

[1:49] We thought that that was extreme. Well, now it’s gotten more extreme. And how it’s gotten more extreme? Well, they passed a bill called SB1, Senate Bill 1, that is affectionately called the Higher Education Destruction Act by opponents, including myself. I oppose it as well. And what it would do is it would censor a lot of the things that happen in colleges in Ohio. It would prevent faculty from striking.

[2:26] It would dictate what is to be taught, how it’s to be taught. It’s just an anti-cognitive. Anti-education bill in the whole thing. There is a group, a faculty group at Youngstown State that organized and got a petition drive going. And so currently there is a petition out to.

[2:54] Repeal, to take back Senate Bill 1 at the ballot, or to put it on the ballot in November for people in Ohio to vote on. And if this repeal passes, then everything that the Senate Bill 1 did would be changed back. It would be like it never existed. And so there are some like signing events and different groups such as Toledo Troublemakers that we work with and Toledo Persist, they’ve gotten together and had signing parties or signing events where you could go and sign the petitions. Now, I want to point out some things about signing these petitions. The first thing is you can only sign a petition once for the issue. So I know people have a lot of friends who probably think like they do on this issue, and you probably know a lot of friends that They’re going to have petitions and you want to help all your friends. Only sign one, please.

[4:02] If you sign more than one petition, the extra ones that you sign will get thrown out. Your signature will be disallowed and it could actually hurt the process. So that’s the main thing. The other thing is pay attention to how the signature box is laid out because they’ve done some funny things to it. Now normally when you print your name, your full legal name, on most forms it goes first name, middle name, or middle initial, last name.

[4:37] That is the general way that it’s done. Well, on this petition, and I fell victim to it, so I can tell you this is something to watch out for. It goes first name, last name, middle initial at the end. And so you have to do it correctly. You have to fill it out correctly. If it says first name, last name, middle initial, you have to put first name, last name, middle initial. Or they’ll disallow the signature. So don’t give the conservatives in the statehouse any evidence or any way to disregard your signature. So make sure you do that. And again, the other thing, too, is also make sure you fill out the correct petition for your county.

[5:28] And they have to raise like 250,000 signatures by the end of June, I think June 20th. And then they have to have signatures from 44 of the 88 counties in Ohio. And it has to be that way. So make sure you sign the appropriate petition for your county that you live in. Oh, and the other big thing about the petition, too, is you have to be registered to vote. You should be registered to vote anyway, especially in these times. But this is especially correct for signing petitions to put stuff on the ballot. You have to be a registered voter. So this might be a good time if you’re not registered to go ahead and register to vote. If you do it now, you should still have time to sign the petition. By the time you verify the signatures, your registration should be on file.

[6:40] So that’s going on. And I really encourage people to sign the petitions to get this on the ballot, because at least then we’d have a chance to see if people agree with it or not. And I think most people, most most rational people won’t approve this, but we’ll see. We’ll see.

[7:00] The next thing, too, is that there is a current bill being considered in the legislature that would ban ranked choice voting in Ohio. Now, and it would not only prevent local municipalities and other government entities from having ranked choice of voting as an option, but if a municipality chooses to have ranked choice of voting, then they would be penalized by losing tax dollars. The state share of their tax dollars would be withheld. And this particular bill was sponsored bipartisanly, ironically enough, in the Senate by Teresa Gavirone, who covers her district, covers Bowling Green and Wood County. And Bill, I think his name is Bill DeMora.

[7:58] Yeah, Bill DeMora from Columbus. He’s a Democrat and he is also sponsoring it. And so some of the arguments, it was the basic arguments that Gaviron and DeMora used have been debunked in the past. They say that ranked choice voting flies in the face of what common sense worked by causing greater uncertainty and delayed election results. It can take days or even weeks to settle. Gaviron said the process reduces turnout and creates confusion among voters and administrators, apparently referencing a forthcoming article. She argued one in 20 voters mismark their ballot in some way.

[8:41] She added that in 2024, several states with ballot measures enacting a ranked choice system rejected those proposals. DeMora defended their bid to deprive ranked choice municipalities of state funding. It doesn’t outlaw them. It doesn’t say they can’t do it. It just lets it hold state funds for those that do it. May sound harsh, but it’s necessary. Ranked choice voting is expensive, confusing and time consuming. And it’s not. It says, the majority, and this is from Rank to Vote Ohio, Denise Riley, who’s the executive director, says, these senators have ignored the pleas from their constituents to stop spreading electoral disinformation. A majority of RCV jurisdictions released preliminary results the night or day after the election. Noted that delays often have to do with allowing time for absentee ballots to arrive, not the time it takes to tabulate ballots. Riley rejected claims that procedure reduces participation, pointing to Maine’s nation-leading turnout in 2022, and a report published by the American Bar Association. She dismissed arguments about voter confusion, noting several states in which exit polling showed voters understood what they were doing. And for what it’s worth, the sponsor’s testimony was at times misleading.

[10:03] Although several states did reject ranked choice voting last year, two of those cited by Gaviron, Montana and Arizona, weren’t voting on ranked choice. They were considering different versions of open or so-called jungle primaries. That approach puts candidates from all parties on a single ballot, with some number of top vote-getters advancing to the general election. And DeMora’s complaints about voters not casting a ballot in a given race, known as an undervote, is at best disingenuous. He misspoke when it comes to Portland’s mayoral race. The analysis from Oregon Live, he relied on put the mayor’s race undervote at 11%, not 15%. Based on a comprehensive report from county election officials, it appears that count includes undervotes and overvotes, where a voter marks two candidates in the same rank. The actual undervote was less than 7%.

[11:02] Regardless, it’s not uncommon at all in local races for voters to leave a race blank. Consider the 2023 mayor and city council races in Columbus. Roughly 15% of voters left the mayor’s race blank. The same amount, DeMoore mistakenly cited in Portland. In Columbus’ city council races, the undervote was staggering. While Portland saw roughly 20% of voters leave council races blank, in Columbus, the undervote ranged from 44% to 77%. And that I can attest to. I had a family member say that they didn’t vote for certain offices. And usually they gave, if they didn’t know who this person was or didn’t like this person, they just didn’t vote because we had a lot of uncontested races. And so they just didn’t vote.

[11:55] They just didn’t vote for that office. So it happens. So this is another thing where the two-party system is trying to keep its power by forcing people to vote archaically and not allowing them to modernize the voting. Ranked choice voting is a good way of choosing people, because instead of having somebody winning with 30% of the vote where 70% of the people didn’t vote for them, you’ll have somebody get over 50% of the vote. So they’re going to represent their constituents better than somebody who wins because they split the vote. I also find it highly ironic that some of these people, some of the people opposed to ranked choice voting in the Ohio legislature, claim that there’s a lack of competition, that the person that wins doesn’t get 50% of the vote, which that’s not how ranked choice vote works. But I find that that argument ironic, especially coming from somebody like Representative Brian Stewart down in central Ohio, who got to pick his voters when he when he supported gerrymandering his district in the last time that the maps were redrawn.

[13:24] So, you know, talk about competition. He doesn’t allow it in his district, but he wants to prevent other people from having competition in their municipalities. You know that’s not fair.

[13:38] And then finally, what I wanted to bring up, too, as a legislative update, is the Republicans in the U.S. Congress are working on their budget. And one of the things that was buried in the budget bill that’s still being considered is something that had appeared last year and died, but now has come back like the zombie apocalypse. And what it is, is it’s a bit that’s added into the bill where it would authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to arbitrarily take away tax-exempt status from nonprofit groups that they’ve arbitrarily decided support terrorism. And that supporting terrorism is not defined.

[14:37] What is considered support isn’t defined or anything. And it would prohibit due process for these groups. So once you were accused of supporting terrorism and they revoked your tax-exempt status, you could not take it to court. Now, I don’t know about you, but that is just very undemocratic.

[15:03] Just that somebody in the government could arbitrarily decide that your nonprofit supports terrorism. You can just see its use, its abuse, especially in the current administration. And it would be used to stifle dissent, essentially. They’re already doing it with using the FCC to go after the broadcast news networks like CBS. President Trump sued CBS for billions of dollars or millions of dollars for a Kamala Harris interview that he claimed was misrepresented, even though she lost. And at the same time, the FCC is investigating CBS for distorting the news. And so the whole reason they’re doing that is to stifle dissent. So basically, you leverage the government against somebody to get them to kowtow to what you want them to do. So CBS is planning on settling, I think they’ve already settled, the lawsuit.

[16:17] And they told 60 Minutes, the news magazine that had that interview, that they were going to have to review all their future scripts. And one of the senior producers who’s been with the show for 20 years or 30 years quit because of it. And that’s how that works. That’s how that type of government censorship works. That’s how it works in authoritarian regimes, is they just don’t ban you. What they do is they use the legal process that already exists to force you to change your ways in ways that are detrimental to democracy and the people’s right to know. So that’s in the budget. And it is very, very chilling. That part where the Secretary of the Treasury could just revoke it. Now, just to give you a comparison, I believe this was during President Obama’s administration. There was a push to identify extremist groups, domestic extremist groups, that might have had some violent tendencies.

[17:39] That had non-profit status, and the IRS was going to identify these groups and revoke their tax-exempt status. The right-wingers just had a fit that the government was going to take away the tax exemption from these conservative groups who they claimed did nothing wrong. And I agreed with them that they probably shouldn’t do that. They should actually have some evidence, but that eventually went away. They changed their mind, and they stopped doing that because of the backlash. But here they are. The conservatives are now doing this, and the intention is clear that they want to stifle dissent, and especially dissent coming from the liberal side, as it were, the left side of the aisle. And so these are some dangerous things. So I just wanted to point some of this stuff out. I have some links to some of this information and some of these other things on the show notes. And we really need to keep informed about this stuff because we have a very important, all these elections coming up are important, but we have an election coming up in November and we need to make sure that we support our issues and our humanist values.

[19:00] Music.

[19:09] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[19:19] Music. The ohio legislature is considering a budget net the next two-year budget currently it’s uh i believe it’s called house bill 96 right now so they address some uh conservative fever dreams like cutting libraries, funding for libraries, cutting money for food banks, cutting funding for public schools, giving more money to private schools. And they even added an anti-trans bill. Text to the budget. They copied and pasted President Trump’s executive order.

[19:20] We’ll be right back.

[20:13] Claiming that the state would only recognize two genders, male and female,

[20:19] and they are not changeable. So that’s how it’s going. But what I wanted to talk about today in particular is about giving money to private schools, and they do that through school vouchers. Here in Ohio, they call them scholarships to try to hide what they actually are, but they are school vouchers. And Ohio has a pretty big program. It’s called EdChoice. And they expanded it. I believe it was last year. In last year’s budget, they expanded EdChoice. And what they did was they removed the income caps for eligibility, and they pumped more money into it. In fact, they’ve spent, to this point, they’ve spent nearly $900 million on private school vouchers. I know there are some people out there saying, hey, it’s school choice. The parents should choose if they want to go private school. Well, it’s not that simple, and it’s not that fair.

[21:24] I’ll tell you some stats here, and this is in Ohio, and I think it’s probably fair to say that this compares favorably to other areas that have vouchers. Here in Ohio, 90% of kids go to public school in the state of Ohio.

[21:44] 90%. That means 10% of the kids go to private school. And they can be any kind of different private schools, most of them are sectarian religious schools, either Catholic or evangelical, that sort of thing. And last school year, the 23-24 school year, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce said that 65,000 vouchers were paid out to private schools. But the attendance, the new registrations in private schools only went up to 3,700. So that means that over 60,000 vouchers went to families that already send their kids to private school.

[22:50] And this money that’s going to the private schools, what the state does is that constitutional prohibition in the Ohio Constitution, that doesn’t allow direct payment of taxpayer dollars to religious schools. And so what they do to get around that is they give the money to the parents, and then the parents pay the tuition. And so we have 10% of the kids in the state go to private school, and they are getting almost a billion dollars paid out. Meanwhile, the Ohio legislature wants to cut public school funding to maybe $500 million for the year. And they also want to add some more anti-public school rules to that budgeting. One of them being that a public school is only allowed to have a certain percentage in reserve. And if they have more reserves than the state allows, then they have to return that money to the local taxpayers.

[24:07] And a lot of times these reserves are like a rainy day fund. So if something happens, like they have a boiler and a class in a school go bad and they need to get it fixed immediately, they have to dip into these reserves. It’s only fiscally prudent for a school to have reserves because they can’t close and they need the money to run.

[24:34] But like I said, 10% of students go to a private school. The other thing, too, also to consider that there are not private schools in all 88 counties in the state of Ohio. A majority of the private schools in the state are clustered around the major urban centers and suburbs of those urban centers. So most of the private schools are located in the Cleveland area, Columbus. There’s a scattering around Toledo, Cincinnati, and those are the main place. There are actually, I think, 12 counties in the state that have no private schools.

[25:18] So this claim that these vouchers are going to help students get better schooling doesn’t help those kids that are in the rural, isolated communities that don’t have private schools. And when I say they don’t have private schools, they don’t have private schools at all. They don’t have Catholic schools. They don’t have evangelical schools. Nothing. Nothing is available. Then you have some of these private schools that are jacking up their tuition because mom and dad are already paying the tuition, but they’re getting some of that money from the state. And so what some of these private schools are doing are then charging tuition more than the state subsidy so that they make more money.

[26:10] And it’s just ridiculous. It just really is ridiculous. And then we have a couple of states like Arkansas, I think, was one. Oklahoma was one. And I think in Arizona, where they’ve had to go back and redo their voucher program, their law for their voucher programs, because some of these people were getting these vouchers and they weren’t spending them on school. They were going on vacation. They were buying a car or putting a down payment on a car or renovating their house or buying clothes. They weren’t paying it to a private school. And so some of these states that thought that they were doing this big thing had to go back and change it and put some restrictions on it. The other problem with the school vouchers, especially in Ohio, and I’m sure that this is the same in other places, is the lack of accountability.

[27:12] Now, you have tax money that goes to a local public school. What kind of accountability do you have? You vote for the Board of Education, and they, through their fiduciary duty, operate the schools in the best interest of the community and the voters that voted for them. So you have a direct line to people who run your school district. They decide the curriculum. They decide who to hire, who to fire, you know, and they are charged with doing it in a way that makes fiscal sense, and that includes putting levies on ballots, et cetera.

[27:57] So you have, as a taxpayer, you have accountability, and then you also have the state laws that govern the operation of public schools. It’s in the Ohio Constitution that the state of Ohio has to provide common schools for the children in the state. They are required to provide it. Now, it doesn’t go into any detail about that. And the Republicans in the legislature have been splitting hairs constantly on this.

[28:31] And so what kind of accountability do you have in a private school? None. You do not have any. The parents do not have any. Private schools don’t have to take all the kids that apply. They don’t have to take disabled kids if they don’t want to. They can discriminate for other reasons, like maybe Mohammed and his wife wants to send their kids to a Catholic private school and the Catholic school doesn’t want a Muslim student. It could be for that. There is no board of education in many of these private schools. They have a committee. Sometimes it’s made up of parents, but it’s not always. And if they decide to do something, they do it. They’re not accountable to any voters. They don’t have to run for election. They get appointed or they appoint themselves, if it works out that way. For these evangelical schools, it’s the church, the church elders that run the school. It’s not the parents. The parents have no choice in what is taught and how it’s taught and how the money is spent, unlike a public school.

[29:59] And so, again, let me stress again, in Ohio, 90% of school-aged children attend public school. But the state of Ohio, the legislature, does not want to fund those public schools fairly. And they want to give all this money to the wealthy so that they can send their kids to these suburban private schools. And I don’t understand how people can think that that’s fair. I really don’t. You know, you could say, well, it’s a parent’s rights. Well, the thing is, I can’t make that same kind of choice. I don’t get that same treatment for, let’s say, road services. You know, hey, I don’t want to use that street. I should get a percentage off my taxes because I don’t want to pay for that street. Or I don’t like that street sign, so I’m not paying for it. I don’t get to do that. A public school is a common good.

[31:08] And people say, well, I like my community. It’s got good private schools. Well, your community might be good because of the public school, not because of the private school. When people go and locate in an area, not everybody goes and looks for private schools. Not everybody can afford a private school. And so not only are they not inclusive they don’t have much diversity they really don’t and then we were sold a bill of goods when this whole voucher scheme Ponzi scheme started up in that they were going to help low-income students in struggling urban schools to go to a private school, and that’s not happening.

[31:52] 90% of the vouchers that get distributed get distributed to, again, families that are already paying for private school. They can already afford the private school. The low-income students are only less than 10% of that number. So basically what it was is this scheme, this Ponzi scheme called school vouchers, was a way of redistributing money, tax dollars, from public schools to private schools in an effort to kill the public schools.

[32:30] To damage them so much that it forces more kids to go to private school. But like I said, in some of these rural areas, there are no private schools.

[32:42] And so I think that the school vouchers are a bad deal for the state of Ohio and for any state, really.

[32:53] And if you are a parent and you don’t want to send your kid to public school, that is your right. I don’t have a problem with you making that choice. But why do I have to pay for your kid to be schooled in a private school? How is that fair? Really?

[33:15] Music. For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[33:15] Thank you for listening.

[33:30] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[33:36] SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle.org,

[33:54] Music.