Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Friday, January 6, 2006
Ohio now the place to watch
Ohio may have just been thrust to school choice center stage, all alone under a white-hot spotlight.
If Florida really shuts down it’s voucher program, as its state supreme court ordered yesterday, Ohio will be the only full-blown statewide voucher program in the country. And Ohio’s importance in the school choice movement is likely to grow, not diminish.
If Ohio’s program, which gets off the ground in the fall, has any success I suspect the legislature will move to expand it. I am certain voucher-loving Gov. Jeb Bush would have moved to expand Florida’s program, had the state prevailed in court.
All told, I still think Milwaukee is the nation’s voucher capital. With 15,000 voucher students (about 15 percent of the public school system), It is the nation’s oldest and biggest voucher program. By comparison, Cleveland’s program is less than a third the size in a much larger city. But the Milwaukee program is contained to city only with no indication the state wants to expand it elsewhere.
So for the wide-scale program, we’re it. And if nothing else, Ohio’s voucher experiment will be interesting to watch. There’s already a prickly debate here over school choice, complete with lawsuits and political battles. If Florida falls by the wayside, it could turn up the heat here.
As Ohio ventures
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