The fundamental issue pertaining to vouchers as it relates to African Americans was the issue of providing access to “better” educational opportunities for poor families living in communities with failing and poor achieving schools. The CSTP boasted that it would provide these poor
families such opportunities as they would be able to utilize these vouchers to remove their children from those failing and poor achieving schools in the CMSD and be able to enroll them in participating voucher schools that will improve their achievement and provide them with better quality schools. However, evidence suggests that the poorest African American children in Cleveland are not the beneficiaries of the CSTP as originally predicated.
6.2.1. Users
As mentioned in the preceding chapters, the program was intended to serve the purpose of removing students from poor performing failing public schools in the CMSD and provide them with vouchers to attend participating voucher schools. However, research shows that 33 percent of the students receiving aid through the Cleveland voucher program previously had been
attending private schools, while only 21 percent had attended public schools in Cleveland. These numbers would seem to suggest that the CSTP serves more as a subsidy for students already attending private schools. Data retrieved from the CSTP show that of the 3,741 students who participated in the program in the 2000-2001 school year 1,234 had previously attended private school while 801 had gone to Cleveland public schools. Also, SchoolChoiceInfo.org a voucher supporting organization states “scholarships and tutoring grants are awarded by lottery, with priority for low-income families below 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($37, 700 for a family of four in 2004).” However, according to the Federal Register, the poverty index for a family of four in 2004 was $18,850. So those earning $37,700 are not considered to be living below the poverty index. This evidence is an indication that the program was not aiding the truly desperate, it was however, providing families already in private schools with additional funding to supplement tuition costs to those private schools.
An examination conducted by Catalyst: For Cleveland Schools, an education indicated that the ten schools in Cleveland that have each lost more than 17 students to voucher schools were more likely to have test scores above the district average and sometimes above the state average, and were likely to be magnet schools with specialized programming, and to rated as one of the districts empowered schools based on high academic achievement. Of the Ten schools that lost the greatest number of students to vouchers schools none were among the low-
performing city schools. This suggests that what many opponents feared was coming to fruition; vouchers were being used to fleece the cream of the crop from the city’s public schools thus leaving the public schools with the poorest and most underachieving students, who were the initial target population of the program. It could be concluded that lower income students are still not receiving what school vouchers promised for several reasons, one of them being they are not rich enough to use vouchers. The parents of the voucher students it can be argued, are either better informed about school vouchers or are already in better positions to take advantage of and utilize vouchers due to the fact that their children were already in private schools, or were already seeking better educational opportunities for their children by enrolling them in magnet schools or in schools with a focused specialization.
6.2.2. Demographics
Although the program was introduced as one geared towards specifically poor black families, Metcalf, in is fifth year evaluation of the program found that students who have chosen to use a scholarship for private school enrollment from kindergarten through fifth grade differ from public school students. An important demographic characteristic according to Metcalf is that scholarship students are more likely to be Caucasian, Hispanic, or Multiracial and are less likely to be eligible for free lunch than are public school students. It is also noteworthy that families
who are of the lowest income and African American are less likely to apply for a scholarship, and they are less likely to use a scholarship if it is awarded to them. Policy Matters Ohio, an independent Think Tank also noted that students in the voucher program, in addition to being more likely to come from private schools or from higher performing public schools, are less likely to be African-African than the students in the district at large. Noting that just 53 percent of Cleveland voucher students were African American in the 2000-2001 school year, while 71 percent of CMSD students in the previous year were African American.
It can then be surmised that although vouchers have provided the opportunity for African American parents to jettison the public schools and enroll their children in participating voucher schools, only few have done so. The few who have done so are derived of parents who were already in positions to send their children to private schools, and also in positions to supplement any additional cost and inconvenience that may arise as a result of not attending the conveniently located local public schools. Until vouchers are utilized by those they are truly intended to aid we will never have enough evidence to gauge the success of school vouchers.
6.3. The Unexpressed Outcomes of School Vouchers in Cleveland