The Cleveland School Voucher Program Case

Vouchers have grown into an important and powerful tool that government can use to provide directed goods and services to specific groups. Voucher systems have become a highly effective tool that is not only used for food/nutritional and housing services, but secondary educational and child-care services, as well. Although voucher systems continue to remain a heated public and political debate, success stories, as the one mentioned in the case examined will only give rise to such systems in the provisioning of public education in years to come.

The Cleveland School Voucher Program case exposes several management issues that can unravel during the implementation of voucher systems, specifically in the realms of secondary education. Three noted management challenges risen in the case surrounded Ohio Department of Education ability to ensure competition among suppliers (recruitment of private schools), gain political/constituent climate (community support), and overcome information asymmetries (marketing of voucher program), all mentioned in by Salamon as management challenges that typically accompany voucher system operations. This case paper will first provide a synopsis of the pilot school voucher program implemented in Cleveland. It will then explore the three challenges that arose in the case. Lastly, the paper will assess how future school voucher systems can mitigate issues that were posed in Cleveland.

After several decades of economic downturn, Cleveland’s public education system was receiving national attention in all of the wrong ways, specifically for poor performance. Funding cuts had resulted in the cutback on all-day kindergarten, and only a meager 12 percent of all 9th graders were passing state required test ...

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... blame on the overall political and constituent climate that posed threats to the marketing and recruitment efforts of Holt and the program. The negative connation that was established from the public backlash and conflicting debates also stemmed from the political and constituent climate in Cleveland at the time of school voucher launch. Voucher programs, specifically ones dealing with secondary education are only expected to increase. State and local governments finding a means to the address the opposing viewpoints on vouchers would have negated much of the turmoil that was stirred in Cleveland.

Bibliography

Kennedy School of Government Case Program, “The Cleveland School Voucher Program: A

Question of Choice” 1999, (accessed March 31,2014).

Steuerle, C. Eugene and Eric C. Twombly, “Vouchers,” in Salamon, ed., Tools of Government,

2002, ch. 14.