Looking for some factsgettyOhio currently operates five taxpayer-funded school voucher programs, spending over a billion dollars a year to send students to private schools. A new Senate bill aims to bring some transparency to how those taxpayer dollars are being spent and allow a more fact-based discussion of voucher policies.Senate Bill 443 is entitled the “Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act,” and it calls for the state to collect more data about how the taxpayer-funded vouchers are being used.The bill requires students attending a school under a general state education voucher program (called “scholarship students” in the bill) to take the same annual standardized state test as students in public schools are required to take. Currently, they have a wide choice of alternative tests, making comparison largely impossible. The bill would also require the school receiving the voucher money to report on how it spends those funds. Additional reporting requirements include reporting the school’s total enrollment, the number of “scholarship students" enrolled and a breakdown of how many students had attended public, private, or charter schools in the preceding year. The receiving schools would also report how many enrolled students had disabilities or are English language learners, as well as how many students left without completing the school year.The school would be required to report what services it offers for students with Individualized Education Programs (IEP). The school would also report any faith-based instruction and the school’s source of accreditation (if any). MORE FOR YOUThe bill would also require the schools to report information on a publicly accessible website, including information that would allow an individual to compare the performance data of enrolled students with “the performance data of similar students enrolled in the school district in which the school is located.” The website would also include data about the economic levels represented by the student body. Debates about taxpayer-funded school vouchers often include critical questions. Are the vouchers “rescuing” poor students or subsidizing wealthy ones who already attend private school? Are IEP students served by voucher-accepting schools? Do the voucher schools get better results than public schools, and is there a way for families to find out as they “shop”? Are these schools, run by unelected individuals, handling taxpayer dollars responsibly? SB 443 would help provide information needed to inform those discussions. Ohio’s EdChoice voucher was expanded in 2023 to become universal, meaning all Ohio families are now eligible. After several hundred Ohio school districts took the state to court over the program, Judge Jaiza Page of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas granted summary judgments against the program; the state took its appeal to the 10th District Court of Appeals. There the court questioned the state’s “parental rights” argument for choice by noting that not all parents (rural, special needs, LGBTQ, etc.) would get to exercise a choice; the state made the extraordinary argument that the ability to apply to a school constituted choice even if the student could expect to be rejected.At the same time, Ohio was told by the courts thirty years ago to fix its public school funding system, and finally settled on the Cupp-Patterson Plan to start in 2022. By 2025, some legislators were already questioning whether there was enough money to fund the plan, all of which makes the one billion going to private schools more contentious.SB 443 is sponsored by state Sens. Louis “Bill” Blessing, a Cincinnati-area Republican, and Kent Smith, a Euclid Democrat. “If you are going to take state dollars there has to be a degree of transparency and oversight for something like that," Blessing said at a press conference Wednesday, May 27.Meanwhile, the group Honesty for Ohio is launching its Voucher Accountability Project on Tuesday, June 2. The coalition includes both major teacher unions, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, the Ohio PTA, ACLU Ohio, and Parents United for Public Schools.