As enrollments drop, city after city is facing pressure to close half-empty schools. Fewer kids means fewer dollars. Consolidating two schools saves money because it means paying for one less principal, librarian, nurse, phys ed teacher, counselor, reading coach, clerk, custodian … you get the idea. Low-enrollment schools end up on the chopping block because they’re the ones that typically cost more per pupil.

But there is another way to cut costs without closing underenrolled schools.

First, it’s worth noting that small schools needn’t cost more per pupil. Our school include examples of small schools all across the country that operate on per-pupil costs comparable to those of their larger peers — some even delivering solid student outcomes.

But here’s the catch: These financially viable small schools are staffed very differently than larger schools.

There’s a 55-student school near Yosemite that spends about $13,000 a student — well under the California state average. How do they make it work? One teacher teaches grades 2, 3 and 4. There’s no designated nurse, counselor or PE teacher, and rather than traditional athletics, students learn to ski and hike.

A quick glance at the many different financially viable small schools across different states reveals that staff often wear multiple hats. The principal is also the Spanish teacher, or the counselor also teaches math.

Also common are multi-level classrooms. When my kids attended a small rural high school, physics was combined with Advanced Placement physics, which meant my 10th and 12th graders were in the same class, but with different homework.

Sometimes schools give kids electives via online options, send them to other schools for sports or forgo some of these services altogether. Some have no subs (merging classes in the case of an absence). Sometimes the schools partner with a community group or lean on parents to help in the library or to coach sports.

Done well, smallness can be an asset, even with the more limited services and staff. Whereas a counselor might be critical in a larger school to ensure that a student has someone to talk to, with fewer students in a small school, relationships come easier. Teachers may have more bandwidth to assist a struggling student.

What isn’t financially viable? A school with the full complement of typical school staff but fewer kids. These aren’t purposely designed small schools; rather, they’re underenrolled large schools (sometimes called ). The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, has a slew of tiny schools spending over $30,000 per pupil. Such schools vary in performance, but all sustain their higher per-pupil price tag by drawing down funds meant for students in the rest of the district. In the end, no one wins.

With so much aversion from parents to closing schools (witness, for example, , Chicago, San Francisco, , Pittsburgh or Denver), we might expect more districts to adopt these nontraditional staffing models as a way to save costs and keep families happy.

In some cities, it’s the that are offering just that: smaller, nontraditional programs that make it work without extra subsidies.

Some will argue that nontraditional schools (including charters) won’t work for every student. Districts must take all comers, including English learners, families needing extra supports, those wanting a full athletics program, specialty autism services and so on. That said, the idea here is that larger districts needn’t offer those services in every school, provided they’re available elsewhere in the district.

But it’s these larger districts that are the most wedded to the uniform staffing structure. It’s so deeply embedded in job titles and union rules, as well as program specifications and more.

Tolerating small, nontraditional schools would mean letting go of some of that rigidity and accepting the idea that schools can be successful without all those fixed inputs. And it might mean reducing some staff who believe their roles are protected when enshrined in a staffing formula. On the flip side, if the school in question has higher outcomes, and the choice is to close it or redesign its staffing structure to transform it into a more intentionally small school, parents and students may accept that trade if it means preserving the school community.

It would also mean changing budgeting practices so that what gets allocated is a fair share of the dollars per pupil — in contrast with allocations based on standardized staffing prescriptions.

The last decade saw a big push for inputs-based models, including “every school needs a counselor” or “every school needs a nurse.” As enrollments continue to fall, these inflexible one-size-fits-all allocations stand in the way of keeping small schools open.

None of this is to say that every school should remain open. Many will inevitably close. But for some of those that deliver solid outcomes for their students, perhaps now is the right time to rethink the typical schooling model. 

American education, both K-12 and postsecondary, has long needed to reboot and reemphasize instruction in civics and citizenship. But that need has never been greater than today, as disunion, disruption and disbelief come to characterize so many elements of American life. Schools alone cannot cure society’s ills, but they could do far more to rectify people’s ignorance about the principles, practices and origins of our democratic republic and the responsibilities and rights of its citizens. 

A number of worthy efforts to address this challenge are underway, including the development of new academic standards and curricula for the public schools. Among the most prominent of these are , a curricular roadmap created by a bipartisan team of scholars and educators under the aegis of , and the “” K-12 social studies standards created by the under the aegis of the .

While the roadmap concentrates on inquiry and understanding, posing myriad questions about civics and history that students should grapple with, “American Birthright” is chockablock with content — names, dates, events and concepts that students should know. Each offers a framework on which to hang a complete K-12 curriculum, and I believe an amalgamation of their divergent approaches would tap into a nascent consensus among American parents about .

But instead of seeking common ground and striving for a unified approach to revitalizing this essential subject, some seem to prefer conflict. Call them culture warriors or not, they work at finding fault. From the right, for instance, the Civics Alliance the College Board’s excellent Advanced Placement course in civics and American government — developed with the National Constitution Center and anchored to Supreme Court decisions — because it includes an “action” component. The lead author of “American Birthright” gave Educating for American Democracy’s roadmap an with the accusation that it harbors “a very large amount of radical action civics.” He similarly denounces all forms of “bipartisan cooperation” in this realm because “the radicals conceive of ‘civics’ as a means to eliminate their political opponents from the public square.”

The roadmap has been also faulted by progressive academics, for leaving curriculum (and test) development to state and local sources, rather than propagating a national plan, and being too soft on social justice issues. And EAD is trying to initiatives from the left that it sees as incompatible with the more-or-less centrist path it is trying to follow. For example, Biden administration’s priorities for a grant program meant to foster civics education, seek more attention to “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives” than the consensus-minded supplies. 

Educators, too, sometimes add to the discord and suspicion, because many teachers don’t view these subjects the same way many parents and voters do. As Frederick Hess and Michael McShane note in their new book, , drawing on a RAND survey of social studies teachers, “Barely half deemed it essential that students understand concepts like the separation of powers or checks and balances.” A broader RAND survey of K-12 instructors found “that more … think civics education is about promoting environmental activism than ‘knowledge of social, political and civic institutions.’ ” 

Is the potential juice — a consensus-based reboot of civics education — worth so many squeezes? Why keep struggling to fend off culture warriors and redirect instructors? at have had meager impacts, petered out or been reversed, and the quest for concord is slower and a lot less fun than hurling brickbats.

So why persist? The country has muddled through for decades despite the fact that Americans know next to nothing about civics or history — what editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant once called a “forest fire of ignorance.” Never mind that just scored as proficient in civics on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress and of college-age Americans know that the vice president breaks ties in the Senate. (More think that’s the responsibility of the speaker of the House!) How much does it really matter in the real world that they understand so little about government?

Yet, having muddled through yesterday is no guarantee of successful muddling tomorrow. The nation’s citizenship woes grow more consequential as people’s faith in democracy itself falters. YouGov late last year that almost a third of young Americans agree — many of them strongly — that “democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government.”  

Why believe in something you barely understand or were never taught and feel you have no role in? 

Civic ignorance is a silent killer, akin to high blood pressure, easy to ignore or take for granted even as it accompanies and hastens the onset of more serious maladies. Deteriorating norms of behavior, vulnerability to fake news and conspiracy theories, inability to compromise, isolation from civil society — all are associated with not knowing or caring much about the functions of government, the principles that underlie it or the historical saga that explains why we have the kind we do, where it has succeeded, where it has faltered, how it has changed.

Over time, like persistent hypertension, accumulated ignorance makes a difference. As Americans huddle in separate ideological (and socioeconomic and ethnographic) silos and accustom ourselves to cruder language and worse conduct, especially in the public square — “defining deviancy down,” as famously phrased by my mentor, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — civic and citizenship challenges mount. It’s no surprise that people, especially the young, grow more cynical and pessimistic, more open to alternatives such as strong leaders who don’t have to bother with messy elections of the ”free and fair” variety.

Because people’s attitudes and actions in the civics-and-citizenship realm are shaped by a hundred forces, schools bear limited responsibility. But when it comes to old-fashioned ignorance, formal education has a big role — and was playing it poorly before anyone heard of culture wars. For decades, civics has loomed small in the curriculum, standards have been low, requirements few (and declining), instructors often ill-prepared. In few places are schools, teachers or students held to account for whether anything gets learned. Rare is the college that requires its students to study civics, and almost as rare are colleges that even offer such courses.

Yes, most high schoolers must take a course in civics or government — though a dozen states have no such graduation requirement, and most of those that do mandate just a single semester. Some administer a statewide end-of-course exam, but almost nowhere do students actually have to pass it. In Maryland, where I live, the test score counts for 20% of a student’s course grade, while teachers determine 80%. (Until recently, passing the exam itself was a prerequisite for a diploma, but that was seen as too onerous and punitive, particularly for poor and minority students.)

When the Thomas B. Fordham Institute state academic standards for civics (and U.S. history) in 2021 — an effort the “American Birthright” author criticized for its alleged advocacy of “action civics” — reviewers gave A ratings to just five jurisdictions while judging 21 to deserve a D or F. Common failings, said the reviewers, included “overbroad, vague or otherwise insufficient guidance for curriculum and instruction” and neglect of “topics that are essential to informed citizenship and historical comprehension.”

Weak standards, low expectations, few requirements, practically no accountability, poorly prepared (and oft-misguided) teachers and too little time spent on the curriculum. A mess, to be sure. Yet it’s hard to muddle through with a population that’s gradually untethering from democracy, that knows not how a Senate tie gets broken and that’s more engaged with video games than understanding elections or attending to issues before the town council. Nor should we look forward to a day when schools, to the extent that they teach the subject at all, are confined either to progressive “action civics” or MAGA-style “patriotism civics.” It’s one thing for the country to evolve politically toward blue and red but quite another for young Americans not to know enough to see what they have in common.

Whether the renaissance that K-12 civics urgently needs is likelier to emerge from a curriculum based on the government’s , an arranged marriage between EAD and “American Birthright” or something entirely different, it’s important to persist. Instead of getting depressed by the challenges ahead, let’s recall once more that in this realm there’s far greater agreement than argument across the land on fundamentals. It’s a ceasefire most Americans would cheer.

How about a ceasefire in the civics wars? Possibly even a peace treaty? This could turn out to be easier to achieve than pausing the conflict in Gaza (or Kashmir or Sudan).

The world’s big fights generally arise from opposed interests and disputes over fundamentals, and looking from afar at American civics education, one might think the same: hopeless divisions over what should happen in classrooms, textbooks and assessments. Should it focus on “how government works” or “what can I do to change things?” Is this subject about knowledge or action, information or attitudes, facts or dispositions? Rights or obligations?

Yet, unlike disputes that pit country against country and terrorist against nation state, much of the civics conflict is unnecessary, driven more by cultural combatants and politicians than by vast divides among parents and citizens regarding what schools should teach and children should learn. If those who inflame these debates would hold their fire, cool curricular heads — there are plenty around — could successfully build on the latent accord among parents and taxpayers who are the consumers of civics education. 

The evidence has been rolling in for years.

The University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center, for example, 1,500 K-12 parents in 2021 and reported that respondents, “across political parties feel it is important or very important for students to learn about how the U.S. system of government works (85%), requirements for voting (79%), the U.S.’s leadership role in the world (73%), the federal government’s influence over state and local affairs (72%), how students can get involved in local government or politics (71%), benefits and challenges of social programs like Medicare and Social Security (64%) and contributions of historical figures who are women (74%) and racial/ethnic minorities (71%).”

A year later, the Jack Miller Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that focuses on civics and history, parents of elementary and secondary school students and found that “89% agree that a civic education about our nation’s founding principles is ‘very important.’ ” This semi-consensus also extends to history class: “Over 92% of parents believe that the achievements of key historical figures should be taught even if their views do not align with modern values — cutting against the narrative that America is firmly divided on how to teach students about the founders and the country’s history.”

As is clear from Dornsife’s percentages, there isn’t total consensus, just widespread agreement on fundamentals. Get into hot topics like gender, abortion and racism, and plenty of Americans want their kids’ schools to convey a one-sided view or avoid the issue altogether. Yet nearly everyone wants students to learn how to analyze issues, to understand why people argue about them and how a democratic republic attempts to navigate them. Nearly everyone wants kids to understand those mechanisms — why the United States has the kind of government it does, where it came from, how it works and the principles that drive it. And everyone, I’m pretty sure, wants their children to grow up to be good citizens.

The hard part — even after professional warriors drop their weapons — is turning that latent consensus into concrete standards, curricula and pedagogy. As Frederick Hess and Matthew Rice in 2020, after leading a series of bipartisan discussions at the American Enterprise Institute, there is “widespread agreement on many … of the goals of civics education” but “little agreement on how to get there.”

To that end, several recent initiatives have revisited what should be taught. Probably the two best known are the , launched — with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities — by with a broad-based group of academics and K-12 practitioners, and “,” a set of “model K-12 social studies standards” produced by the convened by the . 

The roadmap claims to offer “a vision for the integration of history and civic education throughout grades K-12.” This 40-page document abounds with questions that students should grapple with, not things they should know. (“What can we learn from historical leaders even when we disagree with their actions and values?” “What fundamental sources and texts in American constitutionalism and history do you invoke to help you understand current events? What gives those sources credibility and authority?”) It’s squarely on the inquiry side of the curriculum — not a list of people, events and structures — which is why it’s thought by many to represent the progressive side of the civics debate. Yet the questions it poses can’t be answered very well unless one also knows stuff, so it furnishes a framework on which to hang a thorough and ambitious curriculum. That is, provided someone adds the content that teachers and their students will need.

Content is what “American Birthright” is all about. Its 115 pages also offer a framework — up to a point. They abound in names, events and dates, which is why these model standards are widely viewed as coming from the traditional side. The document also poses explanatory and discussion challenges but tends to frame them as simplified admonitions about big, complicated topics: “Explain why free people form governments to defend their liberty.” “Describe how citizens demonstrate civility, cooperation, self-reliance, volunteerism and other civic virtues.” Those are obviously important things to do, but really hard unless one has already acquired roadmap-style analytic skills as well as factual knowledge.

In my view, an amalgam of the best of the roadmap and “American Birthright” would make for an awesome social studies plan, albeit one that would occupy far more school time than is typically allotted to these subjects. Such a blend would also take advantage of the latent consensus about what kids should learn.

Another approach is to build, as has done, on the test that immigrants must pass in order to become U.S. citizens. Administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it consists of 100 knowledge-centered questions about history and civics. (“What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?” “Why do some states have more representatives than other states?” “Before he was president, Eisenhower was a general. What war was he in?”) Those taking it face only 10 questions — but since nobody knows which 10 they’ll get, preparing for the test means learning the answers to all 100. 

Knowing those things is just a start on real citizenship, but not a bad threshold to ask people to cross. And the university team has amplified it into the beginnings of actual curriculum by adding original sources, study guides, teacher materials and other supplements meant to “exceed the USCIS test in helping students learn not just the facts tested but [also] the underlying concepts, ideas and events.”

Nobody expects civics classes in Dallas to be identical to civics in Seattle. There’s no reason to expect matched curricula or teaching styles across a vast nation with a decentralized K-12 system governed almost entirely by states and communities. Yet the country needs some shared understanding of what it means to be an American and what’s changed — and hasn’t — over these several centuries. That’s why a ceasefire is necessary as well as feasible.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. 

Yes, the politics around public charter schools have become more challenging, especially in the blue-hued cities where most of the media lives and works. But across vast expanses of urban and semi-urban America, and especially in Black and brown communities where charter schools have proven most popular and effective, there’s still plenty of room to grow, and few policy barriers standing in the way.

That’s one key takeaway from a new analysis by my colleagues David Griffith and Jeanette Luna at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, . The median large district in the U.S. still serves upward of 80% of its resident students, with the other kids attending charter schools, private schools or home schools. That means that most large districts, including highly urban ones, are far from being saturated with options — especially for families of color, who generally are poorly served by traditional public schools. This makes them promising locales for further charter expansion.

I say “charter expansion” for several reasons. First, of the many alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools have by far the strongest track record when it comes to boosting student achievement, especially for low-income children and students of color. A growing body of research, including a recent study from , shows charter school students outpacing their traditional public school peers both on test scores and on long-term outcomes such as college completion, especially in urban areas. In contrast, private school choice programs have been markedly less effective in boosting student outcomes, at least as judged by test scores. Recent studies of large-scale voucher programs in , and all show recipients trailing their public school peers on test score growth, sometimes significantly.

Second, compared with private-school choice initiatives, the charter movement has proven much more capable of growing its market share. Whereas only about currently receive publicly funded scholarships or savings accounts — many of which cover just part of the price of schooling — more than 3.6 million pupils attend charter schools. And as the study found, during the 2010s, the rising tide of competition that most large school districts faced was almost entirely attributable to charters.

Another recent , this one from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, supplies further evidence of charters’ staying power and potential for growth. Whereas enrollment in traditional public schools shrank by 3.5% during the pandemic era, charter school enrollment grew by 9%. The increase was particularly explosive among Latinos.

So where do charters have the most growth potential in the years ahead? Our analysis shows that most likely hotspots are in urbanized or rapidly urbanizing areas that are home to many students of color, who tend to be best served by these high-impact schools. More specifically, we believe that moving forward, philanthropists, national charter networks and advocates should consider three key factors:

• Policy. It’s hard to open charter schools in hostile environments, such as those with paltry funding or strict charter caps. Conversely, new investments in equitable per-pupil funding or facilities are akin to placing at state (or municipal) borders.
  
• Room to grow. In the handful of places where more than half of students already exercise school choice, the market for educational alternatives is arguably saturated. But these are exceptions.
  
• Momentum. While past results are no guarantee of future performance (as mutual funds are required to say), states where charters are growing are likely to see further growth in the coming years — provided the movement can avoid legislative setbacks.

Put those variables together, and the following states emerge as especially promising places where investments in continued charter growth might do the most good:

• Texas. The Lone Star State has enjoyed strong charter growth, with enrollment up 7% from a year ago and 20% since before the pandemic. Yet there’s still plenty of room to run. While Houston, Dallas and Austin have long hosted lots of great charter schools, it’s still the case that 70% to 75% of children living in those cities attend district schools. And there’s even less school choice in smaller districts like Fort Worth, El Paso and Northside, in San Antonio, all of which have significant and growing Hispanic populations.
  
• North Carolina. The Tarheel State boasts a 19% charter growth rate since 2019 and shows no signs of slowing down, thanks to a new statewide charter authorizer. Yet 85% to 90% of students in the counties that are home to Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Greensboro attend district schools.
  
• Nevada. The Silver State’s two large districts, Clark County (Las Vegas) and Washoe (Reno), are among the biggest prizes on the map. Together, they serve almost 400,000 kids, yet just 16% (in Vegas) and 12% (in Reno) attend non-district schools. The legislature just created a new independent charter authorizer, which should supercharge Nevada’s charter growth, which is already up 19% since before the pandemic.

Those are just the standouts. Plenty of other states and local communities are good bets, too. Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin all recently enacted major funding increases for charter schools, and have hospitable environments. The suburbs around Denver and Atlanta serve a growing number of students of color and yet offer limited educational options. Population booms and strong charter policies in Florida and Tennessee make them welcoming jurisdictions.

So, to potential supporters who think the charter opportunity has passed them by, I say: Think again. There are lots of students, families and communities that are still in dire need of great educational options. Let’s make sure they get them.

Now, as courts and politicians decide the future of the state’s school voucher program, a study released in December indicates that private school choice hasn’t had the damaging impact that many of its detractors claim. In fact, its author argues, racial segregation of students tended to decline in school districts where more students were eligible to receive vouchers from the state. 

The was commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a reform-friendly think tank with a special focus on research and advocacy in Ohio. Its arrival could help shape the debate over the effects of school vouchers and the course that the state’s ambitious choice agenda will take in 2023, though voucher critics may contest its findings on school funding.

Alleging that the public funding of private schools is unconstitutional, and that the current system “discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools,” a coalition of school districts last year. A Columbus judge by the government to dismiss the case just a few weeks after the Fordham report was issued. At the same time, Republican lawmakers to massively expand the voucher program, known locally as EdChoice, to all of Ohio’s K–12 students after stalled in December. 

Roughly 60,000 kids statewide receive EdChoice scholarships ($7,500 for high schoolers, $5,500 for younger children) to defray tuition costs at private schools, including religious institutions. That number over the last decade, leading supporters of public schools to complain that their enrollment, finances, and academic offerings have been harmed by the rapid movement of families and funding from districts.

But study author Stéphane Lavertu, a political scientist at Ohio State University, argued that his research didn’t support those claims. The report shows that vouchers’ effects on student achievement and per-pupil funding in public schools are ambiguous, but not obviously negative — and far from increasing racial segregation in affected schools, he argued, EdChoice seems to actively decrease it.

“What we can say with some level of certainty is that segregation did not go up in district schools,” Lavertu said. “In fact, we can say with some confidence that it went down. That’s the only finding where I would say that there’s a clear direction, and it’s down.”

Lavertu examined school- and district-level figures for 47 Ohio districts where students in at least one school were entitled to scholarships between the 2006–07 and 2018–19 academic years. While eligibility was eventually expanded to students from comparatively low-income families, the study focuses almost exclusively on the original eligibility threshold, which hinged on students attending a school designated by the state as underperforming. 

The availability of vouchers clearly impacted student headcounts: On average, a district with at least one EdChoice-eligible school experienced a decline of between 10 and 15 percent of its students over a little more than a decade. 

But those exits were disproportionately driven by non-white students, Lavertu found. Data from the Ohio Department of Education revealed that 56 percent of participants in EdChoice during the period under study were African American, Hispanic, American Indian, or Alaskan Native. Consequently, the average district that was exposed to EdChoice saw a 13 percent decline in its percentage of minority students; those departing students left for private schools with higher concentrations of white and Asian students, while the district schools they left became less racially isolated (falling from roughly 57 percent minority-enrolled to roughly 50 percent). 

Happily, academic outcomes also improved somewhat. Using Ohio’s “district performance index,” a composite measure that includes the proficiency levels of students in all tested subjects and grades, Lavertu found that achievement climbed in the typical district with EdChoice-eligible schools. Those gains were reached from a startlingly low baseline, with average academic performance rising from the second percentile statewide (roughly the twelfth-lowest-performing district in Ohio) to the sixth percentile (roughly the 37th-lowest-performing district). 

Those findings were far less definitive than those for segregation, the study notes, because it can’t be known why the index ticked upward. The impetus might be improved teaching in public schools as a product of private school competition, but it could also stem from relatively lower-performing students being more likely to receive vouchers, changing the composition of the existing school system.

While the academic results were “very noisy,” Lavertu said, the results make it hard to claim that the remaining public school students are worse-off academically than they would have been if vouchers didn’t exist.

Funding questions

The study’s most disputed assertions relate to the financial consequences of EdChoice, which are central to the arguments of its opponents. 

Because voucher funding originates with the state, school districts only lose that portion of K–12 revenue when their students leave for private schools (according to , 42 percent of Ohio’s total K–12 spending came from the state in Fiscal Year 2020, though the percentage allocated from Columbus to each district is determined through a complex formula). Local dollars, which are principally collected through property taxes, are not affected.

Once some families use their vouchers, that money is also spread over fewer public school students. In fact, per-pupil expenditures rose by 1.39 percent in districts exposed to EdChoice; operating expenditures (i.e., those unrelated to capital spending on things like land, buildings, and equipment) rose by 4.55 percent per-pupil. While those results aren’t big enough to be considered statistically significant, Lavertu argues in the study, they can effectively rule out the notion that tax-funded scholarships lead to declining spending on public school students.

Even if those calculations are accurate, however, voucher critics say that they ignore a disquieting reality: Some localities find themselves needing to raise their own property taxes in order to cover costs when students and state funding are gone. Their efforts to do so often fall short — the people of Parma, the state’s seventh-largest city, that were brought to the ballot — and even when they succeed, cash-strapped towns and cities are left reaching deeper into their own pockets to fund essential services.

Thomas Sutton, a professor of political science at the private Baldwin Wallace University, pointed to that has occurred since 2019, when the Ohio legislature lifted income thresholds for families to become eligible. Some districts have been left asking their residents to pay more for the same schools, often while attempting to cut costs by closing or consolidating buildings that cost the same to maintain no matter how many students are enrolled. 

“The amount of money those districts are using per-pupil hasn’t declined precipitously,” Sutton said. “But the reason it hasn’t declined is because they’ve had to make it up through local taxation, not because there’s been no impact on the local district.” Meanwhile, state spending on private schools .

Lavertu acknowledged that the immediate effects of losing students to programs like EdChoice could be “difficult to deal with.” But he added that the influence of school choice could still be neutral, or even beneficial, over time — particularly when combined with necessary reforms to adjust for shrinking enrollment.

“When you’re losing students and losing revenue, but those fixed costs are there, you’ve got to make some really hard choices going forward. In the short term, that can be really, really painful,” he observed. “What I’d say with the funding is that, in the long run, it doesn’t appear to have a negative financial impact.”

The fiscal challenges facing Ohio’s schools could grow even more tangled with of HB 126, legislation that limits public challenges of property tax valuations. In recent decades, school districts have clawed back significant amounts of annual revenue by appealing to county boards when they believed that nearby properties — the — were undervalued. Under the new law, the avenues to such challenges are sharply curtailed. Local authorities have also struggled to that allow millions of dollars of tax revenue to go uncollected.

Matthew Chingos, vice president for education data and policy for the Urban Institute, has conducted several reviews of the effects of private school choice on phenomena . Much of the existing research, he noted, looked at small-bore programs that were intended only for poor children or those with disabilities. But with more and more states attempting to rapidly scale their voucher initiatives — Ohio could be next if Republican lawmakers are successful — there could be a need for “a new generation of evidence” to shed light on how a more muscular approach to choice helps or hurts traditional public school systems.

“[Scaling up] increases the potential for these programs to make a difference for the better, but it also raises the risk that, if they have negative effects, they’ll be more widely felt,” Chingos said.