I continue with that plea.

However, yesterday, a Twitter account with 1.4 million followers named “Wall Street Apes”, which has focused a lot on alleged Medicaid and other “frauds” perpetrated by Democratic-friendly organizations, pointed out that Focus Learning Academy of Northern Columbus received about $10 million in state aid while including Islamic education in their curriculum and, of course, focusing on the Somali community in Columbus (which has exploded in population over the last 20 years) — the immigrant group the account hates the most.

Here’s what they’re really going to hate, though.

Focus Learning Academy of Northern Columbus is on the state’s highest-performing charter school list and has received about $3 million in quality school grants since 2019.

There have been, in fact, 5 Focus Learning Academies operating throughout Columbus, not just the one Wall Street Apes posted about. One each for Southwest, Southeast, Northern and Central Columbus. Along with Focus North High School.

The Northern, Southwestern and Southeastern Columbus schools have been operating since 2002. Central Columbus has been in operation since 2020 and Focus North High School has been operating since 2011. Those 5 schools have received $145 million since 2019, and probably another $100 million plus before 2019.1

In addition to these charter schools, about $15 million of Ohio taxpayer money last year went to illegally subsidize tuition at 20 Islamic private schools (I say illegal because the overall program has been deemed unconstitutional, not because it’s going to Islamic private schools).

But the biggest thing about all these things is this:

This was all the idea of Ohio Republicans, including MAGA Republicans, in the Ohio General Assembly. Especially Jon Husted, who I profiled earlier this year about this.

But here’s the thing: The First Amendment requires no establishment of religion.

So in order for the shit tons of money that have been transferred from Ohio’s 1.6 million public school children to go instead to for-profit charter school operators and the wealthy adults already sending their kids to Ohio’s Catholic Schools, some has to go to Ohio’s Islamic Schools.

Either all religious schools get the money, or none do. That’s how the First Amendment works.

Oh yeah.

One more thing: The Ohio Constitution explicitly states that “no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

So the issue isn’t that Islamic schools are getting taxpayer money; it’s that any religious schools are.

Which is one of the major reasons why the taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy was struck down last year.

And it’s perhaps why we should look at religiously oriented charter schools, like Focus and others, as well.

This has resulted in about $2.3 billion less revenue collected on Ohio businesses last year than would have been collected if businesses contributed the same share of the property taxes sent to public schools in 19862.

What would that look like for school districts?

Here’s how much property taxes could be reduced in each district if the state returned to the 50-50 split between commercial and residential property taxpayers.

Some districts would actually see a residential property tax increase because their utility taxes have gone through the roof during the fracking boom and their dependence on residential property tax has actually dropped.

But overall, you’re looking at about a 20% cut in the typical (median) district.

I get it, though. Doing a broad-based tax reform measure that would instantly hike taxes on all Ohio businesses probably won’t ever happen, even if the result would be property tax cuts and fully funded public education formulas.

Let’s look deeper, though.

Tax abatements have also dramatically curtailed the ability of school districts to collect revenue from businesses. Tax abated property accounts for about 40% of all commercial property in the state of Ohio3.

That’s just stunning. I mean, I get that maybe you need to drop a few of these things to attract business. But it seems like we’re giving it out for every business, doesn’t it?

Can you imagine if 40% of homeowners didn’t have to pay any property taxes for the next 30 years, as many data centers do now4?

Exactly.

Again, though, looking to hike taxes on 40% of Ohio’s commercial property seems like too heavy of a lift.

Let’s narrow our focus even more, shall we?

So.

Data centers.

Data centers now cost the state (and its schools) $1.6 billion5. That represents more than 70% of all the lost business property tax revenue school districts have seen since 1986.

Just from this one industry.

In addition, because the state got rid of its tangible personal property tax in 2005, data centers pay zero taxes on its equipment — kind of beneficial for a business predicated on literally stacking equipment in massive buildings.

Loudon County, Virginia, does tax the equipment and collects $600 million a year6 just in that county. You add that $600 million to the $1.6 billion the state has handed out to data centers and you have just about the amount of money lost to business tax cuts since 1986.

State lawmakers have in their hand a straightforward way to cut about 20% or so of Ohio’s residential property tax bill by taxing data centers and applying an equipment tax on them. That could then restore roughly the same 50-50 share of the local property tax bill between businesses and residential/agricultural property.

You wouldn’t have to touch any other business taxes or abatements. Data center tax reform alone could pay for that residential property tax cut. That’s how massive the investment in these things has been here.

I would suggest directing those data center tax reforms to all but pay for the full implementation of the Fair School Funding Plan.

Directing it to fully fund the FSFP would mean that residential property taxpayers wouldn’t see the immediate tax cut benefit. However, over time, they would need to pass fewer and smaller levies.

So you would see the shift back to a 50-50 cost sharing. It would just be slower and take time (though in some districts that would see a larger state funding boost, you’d likely see a more immediate drop7).

Call it the Reducing Excessive Levies and Investing in Education Funding (RELIEF) Act or something.

The goal is simple: Tie the data center tax reform package to fulfilling the state’s duty to our kids while providing a mechanism to allow districts and communities to vote themselves property tax cuts on their appropriate timeline.

All it will take is a willingness to stand up to data centers and the AI industry. I feel like that may just happen, depending on November’s outcome.

So…

Vote accordingly!

Now we come to find out that typical graduates from 19% of Ohio’s Charter High Schools don’t make more than the federal poverty line ($15,960) during the entire time state data measures their income, sometimes as long as 6 years.

Typical graduates from all but 1 of Ohio’s 613 traditional public school districts (Fairland Local in Lawrence County) do that within the timeline. Even Youngstown, which has been under state control for a decade now because their academic performance was so “poor” gets out in 5 years — one year short of the maximum.

In fact, typical graduates from 87% of Ohio’s traditional public schools are out of poverty by their second year after graduation.

Meanwhile, only 30% of Ohio Charter Schools have their typical graduates out of poverty by year 2 after graduation. The typical Ohio Charter School graduate doesn’t get out of poverty until a full year after the typical Traditional Public School1 and even the typical Big 8 urban graduate.

And 19% of Charter Schools never make it during the timeline the state studies.

These aren’t students who go to college. All they have is their high school degree — the closest we can get to understanding the true value of each school’s education.

We saw recently that Charter School graduates make about 20% less over their lifetimes than graduates from traditional public schools. Now we find out the truly devastating results on our youngest citizens — lengthy stays in poverty.

Here’s how the Department of Health and Human Services describes the human impact of poverty:

And Ohio Charter Schools, despite receiving $20 billion over the last 30 years and incredible accountability protections from powerful Ohio Republican politicians, are now contributing to greater poverty rates.

I’m at the point now that if someone wanted to shut down these things and start over, I wouldn’t object very strongly. Because while I think that Charter Schools could play a role in the state’s overall educational structure, the way Ohio’s schools currently operate actually harms Ohio’s students, and our local economy.

Here are the 22 Charter Schools whose graduates never climb out of poverty — sometimes by a lot. For example, after 6 years, graduates from the Cleveland Academy for Scholarship Technology and Leadership don’t even make 2/3 of the federal poverty line for a single person2!

Just one more nugget: Towpath Trail High School. Remember them? They just got one of 2 federal grants to expand their operation — theirs will go into Youngstown.

They actually produce graduates who earn less than the CHARTER SCHOOL median for each post-graduate year!

They take more than 1 year longer than the typical charter school to eclipse the federal poverty line and about 3 years longer than the typical school district.

Their larger graduation classes of 2019 and 2020 were still near or below the poverty line in years 3–4. The class of 2020 was at $14,228 in year 4 — more than $1,300 below the poverty line.

And they have the worst income-related data of any of the other 4 charters that got federal money and have high school graduates the state tracks.

So, hey, I have an idea! Let’s give them the federal taxpayer money to expand!?!?!?!?!

The charters whose students do better (though, importantly, not better overall than school districts)?

They’re getting capital money to fix their buildings. Not expand.

Can’t make this up.

This stuff’s gotta change. Like quick. But until the leaders in Columbus wake up to the wreck they’ve created in the name of political power, I fear more kids will be left behind, impoverished.

And pissed.

I know I am.

Why am I so pessimistic?

Well, since the 2019-2020 school year, Ohio has done a mini version of this called the Quality Community and Stem School Grant Program. The state has spent $473 million on this program — jumping from $30 million a year in the beginning to $115 million last year.

The idea is to provide a funding boost to the best charter schools in the state.

However, there is also a list I’ve written about before called the Comprehensive Support and Improvement Schools, which the state describes this way:

Guys. Guess what? Would it shock you to learn that $29 million of the $473 million the state has spent on “high quality” charter schools has gone to charters that have been on the state’s lowest-performing schools list, sometimes since before the “high quality” program started doling out money?

Well. It shouldn’t.

Here they are. You’ll see, for example, that the Charles School at Ohio Dominican University has received $4.1 million in so-called “quality” charter school funding from the state — getting some every year it’s been available. Yet they have been on the state’s lowest-performing schools list before the “quality” charter school grant ever existed!

And they’re not alone.

Citizens Academy Southeast received $7.2 million since the 2022-2023 school year, yet last year they landed on the lowest-performing schools list — perhaps suggesting the quality charter school grant program isn’t making charter schools better for kids?

I dunno, maybe?

Zenith Academy has been on the lowest-performing schools list since 2018. But that didn’t stop the state from giving the school more than $1 million a year each of the last 3 school years because it’s so “high quality”.

Thankfully, none of the $20 million in federal awards announced this month is going to a school on the lowest-performing schools list.

However, the money is going to some pretty suspect schools.

Take Towpath Trail High School in Akron.

Their 4-year graduation rate is 49.9%. That’s 17 percentage points worse than the lowest-performing public school district — Dayton.

But wait, you say. Isn’t Towpath Trail a dropout recovery school?

Yes, Sen. Husted and Vivek. It is.

But you know what I (and, importantly, state law) say about Ohio’s Dropout Recovery charter schools, right? They don’t have to have a single dropout in them. And only 50% plus 1 student has to be in academic crisis.

Here’s how the state defines who may attend “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools:

“(1) Any community school that operates a drug recovery program in cooperation with a court; or

(2) Any community school in which the majority of students are enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program operated by the school that meets the following criteria:

(a) The program serves only students not younger than sixteen years of age and not older than twenty-one years of age;

(b) The program enrolls students who, at the time of their initial enrollment, either, or both, are at least one grade level behind their cohort age groups or experience crises that significantly interfere with their academic progress such that they are prevented from continuing their traditional programs.”

Yeah. I’m not sure that’s gonna work out, using federal money to expand Towpath Trail to Youngstown.

You know how else I know? Because Ohio got this same grant in 2015, importantly, after lying to federal officials. Then the grant was for $71 million. And, despite the warnings from me and others about how there aren’t enough high-performing charters in Ohio to warrant that kind of money, the state only spent $8 million of the $71 million allotted.

That’s right. Ohio returned $63 million.

Look. Maybe Ohio charters have turned a corner. Maybe they’re going to take this opportunity to self reflect and do better.

And maybe the Browns win the Super Bowl.

But I’m guessing it’s going to devolve into what the state program did — funding poor performing charter schools because there are simply so damn many of them here that it’s impossible to spend $105 million federal dollars without funding at least a few crappy ones.

Truly sad. And disgusting.

Ohio Charter Schools get smoked on state report cards by Ohio School Districts.

I know, Charter School honks, you only want your performance to be compared with the Big 8 urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.

See, here’s the problem: 53% of the kids in Ohio charter schools come from those 8 districts.

That means 47% do not.

You can’t take $1.5 billion in state aid from kids attending all but a handful of school districts and then demand your performance be compared with 8 of those 607 districts — the 8 that are typically among the state’s lowest performing1.

Here’s what this piss-poor Charter School performance looks like in charts:

The second chart kind of says it all.

Meanwhile, districts outperformed their overall grade share in every A, B and C category. Just a horrific performance by Charter Schools, considering they’ve had 30 years, $20 billion, just a fraction of the government oversight and incredible legislative and gubernatorial protection to achieve these gawd awful results.

In only 3 categories are more than 40% of Charter School grades C or higher: Overall (53%), Gap Closing (52.2%) and Progress (79%).

On the District side, the only categories where less than 86% of their grades are C or higher are Early Literacy (66%) and Progress (58%). That’s right. In all categories, the vast majority of School District grades are C or higher.

Take it easy, Charter Honk.

Just because Charters do better on the Progress rating2 does not mean they’re better schools. Why can I say that with confidence?

Because Charters do so fantastically worse on the 6 other measures, including a stunning 58% 1 Star ratings on College, Career, Work and Military Readiness!

That CCWMR rating seems to be keeping in line with my post from this morning outlining how Charter School graduates make 20% less over their lifetimes than traditional public school graduates, which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Look, guys. All I can do is keep pointing all this out and hope that elected officials in Columbus stop drinking the Charter School Kool-Aid at some point.

To recap, here’s all we’ve found out over the last couple weeks about these things:

• They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card

• More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.

• More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.

• About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.

• More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.

• They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.

• They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.

• They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.

• They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).

• They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.

• Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.

• That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.

• More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.

• More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.

• They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

Will any of this finally break through?

I guess we’ll find out in a couple months.

I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Who cares how you scored on a test in 10th grade if 5 years later you’re making 20% less income, right?

That’s right. Charter schools cost their graduates billions of dollars in lost income over their lifetimes. Which makes sense, I suppose, given how much these things have cost taxpayers over our lifetimes.

Here’s some amazing tidbits as well from this newly released data:

• Charter school graduates never outearn their traditional school counterparts. Every year, they earn less.

• The 10 worst graduation rates are all charters, headed up by (of course) the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (now defunct because it stole more than $120 million of our money)

Just as a friendly reminder, Sen. Jon Husted is the only honorary degree recipient from the school. Might be something ot keep in mind this fall.

So, let’s take an inventory of the state of Ohio’s $1.6 billion annual charter school regime Husted created, shall we?

• More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.

• More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.

• About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.

• More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.

• They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.

• They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.

• They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.

• They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).

• They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.

• Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.

• That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.

• More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.

• More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.

• They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

Is this enough to inspire the legislature and Governor to finally do their jobs and deeply scale back the $1.6 billion we spend annually on these things?

I mean, that would go a long way toward fully funding Ohio’s formula to pay for the needs of the 85 percent of students attending Ohio’s traditional public schools, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t they rather invest in the schools whose graduates make hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their lifetime than charter school graduates?

Yeah. I don’t know about you, but for me?

It.

Is.

Time.

But now that there’s a potential cheating scandal roiling Ohio’s Charter Schools — more than 1 in 10 Ohio Charter Schools are on the list of suspect schools — what’s interesting is looking at the other lists upon which these suspected cheating Charter Schools appear.

For example, let’s look at the high-performing Charter School list. Why is there one of these? Because these schools go to the front of the line to buy school property and get a share of the $105 million federal grant announced last year by U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

So would there be potentially 105 million reasons for these schools to juice their numbers a little bit so they can meet the rather lax definition of “high-performing” in state law?

Yet as of now, they are in line to potentially collect a portion of $105 million in federal money meant to grow and develop high-quality Charter Schools.

What a shitshow.

Oh yeah. Almost forgot!

Back to the Charter School cheating scandal.

Of the 61 schools listed on the “high-performing” Charter School list, 16 also appear on the list of potential cheating schools. That’s 26 percent of the so-called “high-performing” Charter Schools. That’s also nearly 1/2 of all the Charter Schools on the list of potentially cheating schools.

Can I prove that angling for a share of $105 million inspired these questionable testing practices in Ohio Charter Schools?

Not right now.

But boy, it’s suspicious, don’t you think?

Once again, Ohio lawmakers seem intent on shining a bright light on how Ohio's notorious, $1.6 billion Charter School sector remains a national humiliation.

Time to fix it. Like, yesterday.

According to the Ohio Department of Education,1 “DEW has identified significant testing anomalies at 52 additional school buildings statewide that may result in further investigation.”

Of those 52, 37 — or more than 7 in 10 — are Ohio Charter Schools. Need I remind you that there are 340 Charter Schools currently open in Ohio. There are 2,978 traditional public school buildings.

That’s right. Ohio Charter Schools make up 10 percent of all Ohio school buildings, yet they make up more than 70 percent of the buildings where testing anomalies happened.

The state spent $125.9 million in state money for those 37 Charter Schools last year — an average of $13,250 per pupil, which made up about 81 percent of all per pupil spending in those charters.

In the 8 school districts where the remaining 15 anomalous traditional public schools reside (six of which happened in Steubenville), the state spends, on average $8,389 per pupil, which is less than 1/2 of all the spending in those districts.

In fact, if you don’t count the three schools from Cleveland Municipal School District that came back with anomalous results, the average public school district that has an anomalous school in it spends less per pupil — even with their property tax included — than the average anomalous charter school. Don’t include the one from Cincinnati as well? Publics spend almost $1,000 less per pupil. Even with their property tax revenue included.

Add that to these charts that show how charters make up a wildly disproportionate share of Ohio’s underperforming school buildings and, well, maybe it’s time to really take a hard look at this sector.

I don’t know. You’d think that after 30 years and $20 billion you could do better than 1 in 5 schools on the lowest-performing-schools-in-the-state list and 1 in 10 under investigation for forging test scores.

Think the Legislative Father of Ohio’s charter school system, Jon Husted, will get any questions about this system he set up?

Yeah, me neither.

I could be wrong, I suppose.

He sure as hell should!

I do.

But I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with the Columbus Dispatch story the other day about a proposal to allow the state to convert struggling traditional public schools with Charter Schools.

See, the story links to Ohio’s official list of Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CIS) Schools, which does indeed reveal that 117 of Ohio’s 2,978 traditional public school buildings qualify as needing these interventions. And yes, 34 of those 2,978 traditional public schools have been on the list since 2018.

But the list also includes Ohio Charter Schools. And wow. Does it include Ohio Charter Schools.

In the 2024-2025 school year, there were 340 Ohio charter schools in operation. And 114 of them ended up on the CSI list. Nearly 6 in 10 were on that list since 2018. For those who are visual learners, here’s what the percentage of CSI traditional and Charter buildings look like compared with their overall number.

Um. Yeah.

Tell me again why the state should be suggesting to anyone that Charter Schools have the solution to fixing what ails struggling traditional public schools when nearly 1 in 5 of Ohio’s Charter Schools have been on the state’s lowest performing schools list for 8 years?

I thought so.

In the Dispatch story, Akron School Board President Barbara Sykes, who witnessed Ohio’s Charter School explosion as a member of the Ohio General Assembly, asked the most relevant question: “How did you determine that the charter school would have a better outcome than the public school?”

What’s amazing to me is there is no follow up on that question in the story.

In fact, I would argue that be the only story.

And where are the legislators drafting bills to require any Ohio Charter School that finds itself on this list to be taken over by Ohio’s Traditional Public Schools, the way the state wants Charters to take over Traditionals?

Because it sure seems like going in reverse would be better for kids than what these clowns want to do.

Or how about this one: more than 90 percent of all so-called Dropout Recovery Charter Schools are on the list.

That’s right. Take a look below:

And before you complain about the extraordinarily challenged kids these schools educate, need I remind you that in order to qualify as a Dropout Recovery Charter School in Ohio, you only need to be one of the following:

“(1) Any community school that operates a drug recovery program in cooperation with a court; or

(2) Any community school in which the majority of students (emphasis added) are enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program operated by the school that meets the following criteria:

(a) The program serves only students not younger than sixteen years of age and not older than twenty-one years of age;

(b) The program enrolls students who, at the time of their initial enrollment, either, or both, are at least one grade level behind their cohort age groups or experience crises that significantly interfere with their academic progress such that they are prevented from continuing their traditional programs.”

So less than 50% of your students do not have to be struggling in any way and NONE have to be actual dropouts, the way you and I define them.

Even if you eliminate the “Dropout Recovery” schools from the equation, there are still more than 15% of Ohio Charter schools on this list — more than 5x the rate of Ohio’s Traditional Public Schools overall, and a slightly higher rate than Ohio’s Big 8 urban districts.

I thought these things were supposed to be decidedly better than urban districts, not slightly worse. Since when did “we produce similar results” become the battle cry of the great Ohio Education Reform Movement?

Which tells me this: Ohio’s Charter Schools shouldn’t be offered as a solution to really anything education related1.

We’ve had these things in Ohio for 30 years now. What have we gotten from them? Let’s take a look:

• More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list

• More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list

• About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018

• More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed

• They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings

• They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend

• They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives

• They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland)

• They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.

• Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools

• That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students

Charter Schools are now a $1.6 billion a year program, with only expansion and zero additional accountability being proposed by the current crowd at the statehouse and Governor. That money comes directly out of the same funding pot meant to fund kids in Ohio’s traditional public schools — preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to traditional public school students.

It’s time to reign in this budget hog and start giving it lots of GLP-1s.

Like LOTS of GLP-1s.

Like maybe ALL the GLP-1s.

One of the big things EdChoice providers pitched their parents at the time of EdChoice Expansion was how this program would allow them to grant their teachers a more competitive salary. Here’s how Immaculate Heart of Mary put it in their presentation:

I wanted to see if that actually happened, but it’s impossible using state data because they don’t track it.

However, there are some private schools that are unionized. The largest of these private school teachers’ unions is the one governing Ohio’s largest Diocese — Columbus.

And while the state does NOT track private school teacher salaries, fortunately for transparency, the teachers’ union in Columbus does post its salary schedules — yet another reason to be pro-union, amirite?

Anyway, what I did is look at how their salary schedules changed between 2019-2020 to 2024-2025 (because that’s the last year we have complete EdChoice data). In order to track how Columbus’ private school teachers’ salaries were moving prior to the real huge, infusion of taxpayer funding, I went back as far as the 2015-2016 school year to track raises from then as well.

In addition, I looked at the change in unconstitutional EdChoice taxpayer tuition subsidies from Franklin County school districts between the 2019-2020 and 2024-2025 school years. Here’s that data:

At the end of the day, here’s what I found1:

Something even more remarkable? Starting teacher salaries in Columbus’ Catholic schools are actually growing slower than they did prior to the unconstitutional EdChoice explosion — likely because the schools have decided to sacrifice their starting teachers’ EdChoice -fueled increases to give bigger boosts to the salaries of mid to later career educators for retention purposes. While the schools now clearly have enough taxpayer money to bump starting salaries higher, they did not do that.

It’s important to point out that this is an estimate only. And it assumes that the Columbus Catholic schools only take kids from Franklin County (which can be inferred by the contracts’ description of the pay scale as “the basic salary paid a full-time teacher in the Franklin County schools in the Diocese of Columbus”). So no kids from surrounding counties are assumed here, even though plenty do attend Diocesan schools.

So that percentage is likely even a little less.

In addition, these salary increases are likely among the highest private school teacher increases in the state because most private school teachers are not in a union. So the chances of non-union teachers garnering larger increases than union ones aren’t great.

For example, Ohio’s Charter School teachers (nearly all of whom are not unionized) make about 37% less, on average, than Ohio’s traditional public school teachers. This, despite the state providing nearly double the per pupil aid to Charters that Traditional districts receive.

I digress.

Back to the private school side, the Cleveland Diocese said in its video explaining the boon EdChoice would be for teachers that 95 percent of the Cleveland Diocese teachers make less than the average public school district teacher ($69,081 at the time) and more than half in 2023 made between $25,000 to $40,000 a year.

“But universal EdChoice will change all that!” their announcer proclaims.

It made a relatively minor, 3-5% difference in the largest, unionized group of Catholic School educators in the state.

What do you think it’s going to to for the Cleveland Diocese where only its high school teachers are unionized?

Once again, this is only an estimate. I wish we actually knew how private school teacher salaries have changed post-unconstitutional EdChoice explosion.

However, despite trying to convince parents that their unconstitutional, taxpayer funding tuition subsidies were going to boost teacher salaries, it looks like about 95 percent of your money has gone elsewhere.

Where? The state says you have no right to know.

Yeah. Maybe we should.

I have to admit that property taxes make my eyes glaze over. There are so many ins and outs to Ohio’s system that I just sometimes have to take a break and lots of headache medicine.

Not really, but you get the point.

So I wanted to try to address some of the chatter out there about how school districts are allegedly gaming the property tax system to somehow cry poor so they can manipulate well-meaning homeowners into raising their property taxes again (because who doesn’t like running levy campaigns every two years! It’s so much fun dividing communities against each other, amirite!) — an argument that Ohio State PoliSci Prof Vladimir made not long ago, which I took some time knocking around last week.

There are several issues with Ohio’s property tax system, and if you really want to get into Ohio property tax details, I’d highly recommend reading anything by Howard Fleeter.

Guy’s an Ohio Property Tax savant.

But I wanted to try to simplify it for everyone (even Kogan, if that’s possible?). So I decided to take on the HB 920 issue.

What is HB 920? Simple. It’s the reason you’ve had more property tax levies in Ohio than any other state since 1976 (about 12,000 or so). And it’s not even close.

Why does it do that? Because the provision, which voters put into the constitution about 50 years ago, says that any gain in property value a home accrues will not mean higher property taxes get paid by that homeowner. The county has to go in and lower the tax rate for that home so the school district, park district, whatever collects the same amount of property tax that it did when the levy was initially passed. That’s why you see some crazy disparities between voted and effective tax rates.

For example, in my hometown of Hudson, there are 118 voted mills (the property tax measure we use). Meaning without any reductions, a homeowner would pay $4,130 for every $100,000 of value1. Instead, they pay at a rate of 53 mills. So they’ll pay $1,855 a year — less than 1/2 of the voted tax rate.

Even if your home was worth $100,000 10 years ago and is worth $300,000 now, your property tax bill will be pretty much the same, assuming no new levies. You’ll have to pay more on a few of those mills2 , but overall, your taxes will be essentially flat and not go up 200% like your property value did absent any new levies.

I want to reiterate that Ohio is the only place where this happens. And what it means is that school districts have to go for more frequent levies and at larger rates to make up for those reductions in HB 920.

Like, 12,000 more levies.

So here’s what I decided to ask:

Unfortunately, the Ohio Department of Taxation does not have easily obtainable tax data by school district for 1975. The farthest back their data goes is 1986, which was 10 years after HB 920 passed.

But for this exercise, I decided to just start at 1986. The average tax rate was likely a little lower in 1986 than 1975 (according to Fleeter’s statewide analysis), so this will ensure a pretty conservative estimate. If the tax rates were higher in 1975, then obviously school districts would raise more today than this estimate will show. But since we don’t have district-level data from 1975, I’m going with 1986.

Caveat over.

So, what would have happened to Ohio’s property taxes if HB 920 hadn’t been there and no school district raised a single new levy on residential property since 19863?

I took what every school district’s effective tax rate was in 1986 and applied it to the district’s taxable value in 2025. To be clear, there are a few school districts that were merged, dissolved or otherwise I couldn’t quite match. But I was able to match more than 600 school districts. Here is the top line:

If you want to see how each district did, look below:

Several districts are raising about the same amount of money. But instead of having zero levies since 1986 to raise that money, which HB 920 prevented them from doing, there have been about 265 school district operating levies a year. That’s 265 times that school districts are forced to divide their communities over property taxes. And they have to do this every few years.

You’ll also see that the Major Urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) have the largest variance — because their valuations have climbed the slowest. So they’ve had to go for the most frequent, biggest levies to keep pace.

Meanwhile, Wealthy Suburban districts are next highest — because their property valuations have skyrocketed, so they’re able to pass levies and get additional money to pay for additional opportunities that urban districts can’t.

Meanwhile, rural Appalachian districts have mostly stuck around the same as simple growth because they’ve almost all hit the 20-mill floor — at which point districts get growth on their levies.

Here’s something else.

In 1986, only 5 school districts raised income tax revenue4.

Today? There are 223 districts who now raise $737.7 million of income tax.

Let’s do a little math here, shall we?

Combining the property with income tax changes, districts are raising about $2.5 billion more today than they would have if the districts hadn’t raised a single new property tax since 1986 and HB 920 didn’t exist.

Before you yell, “Greedy commie bastards!”, let me give you this additional nugget:

Ohio’s own school funding formula states that Ohio is now $2.7 billion short of full funding — just about the additional amount school districts are now raising locally above what simple growth would have gotten them.

So it appears that school districts are raising the state funding shortfall locally.

Amazing, isn’t it? That Ohio school districts’ property tax frequency and growth can be almost entirely tied to two things: HB 920 and the failure of the state to adequately fund public schools for 30 years.

Not greedy teacher unions.

Not swollen administrative budgets.

Not tricky school treasurers.

None of that crap.

Just state policy decisions that stifle school districts’ ability to raise local revenue, forcing them to go to the ballot more than 12,000 times since HB 920 passed. All to raise enough money to cover 1) what HB 920 wouldn’t let them cover and 2) what the state has failed to provide students.

Oh yeah. One more thing.

In 1986, Ohio school districts raised $1.03 billion in Tangible Personal Property (TPP) taxes. Wanna guess how much they’re raising today?

$0.

That’s right. The TPP was supposed to be replaced by the Commercial Activity Tax (CAT) when it was phased out starting in 2005. However, the CAT never fully replaced the TPP and the state stopped directly replacing the TPP money with CAT money all together in 20185.

So when you fold in the $1.03 billion loss in TPP, you’re looking at local school districts only raising about $1.5 billion more than they would have if they had frozen their 1986 property tax rates and HB 920 didn’t exist. That’s $1.2 billion less than what the Fair School Funding Plan says the state is short.

This $1.2 billion most likely will be represented by reductions in school programming — districts making cuts, in other words. So they haven’t been able to make up for the losses from big state policy decisions, even though they’re raising more money than simple growth would have provided. Instead, they’ve had to cut programming — a fact all of us who have kids in schools have experienced directly.

One way to look at this $1.2 billion difference is as a lost opportunity cost for three generations of Ohio kids. All caused by three state policy decisions6:

1. HB 920

2. Failing to fully fund its school funding model

3. Eliminating TPP without replacing it

So whenever you hear that bullshit “schools are greedy” or “schools are making things seem worse than they are to get more money” argument, remember this very simple fact:

What have they done instead? Forked over billions of of our tax dollars to privately run, mostly failing charter schools and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies for millionaires, not a penny of which has ever been publicly audited.

How much do those cost? About $2.5 billion — a similar amount to how short the state is on paying for its school funding model, which also nearly matches the amount of additional local revenue school districts have raised in excess of simple property value growth since 1986.

Sometimes these things are complex and complicated.

This, my friends, ain’t that.

Ohio’s public school districts overall have been responsible stewards of public money — don’t let anyone tell you they haven’t. Are there occasional problems in public school stewardship? Of course there are, just like there are in any system of humans interacting with money (Enron, Worldcom, Madoff, Lehman Brothers, Crypto, etc.).

But because public school districts are publicly audited and are accountable to publicly elected bodies that meet in the open, we find out about these miscreants early on, shut them down and return responsible stewardship.

We don’t get rid of public schools because some treasurer makes off with the district credit card. That’s batshit. But that’s what anti-public school district advocates desperately want you to think.

Don’t.

It’s pretty clear.

Pretty simple.

Pretty obvious.

Pretty sad.

And I don’t know about you, but for me?

Pretty damn enraging.

It’s been awhile, Fordham.

I have a history with the Fordham Institute — even penning a joint blog with one of the organization’s researchers some time back.

So I decided to take a look at what they’ve been doing recently. And lo, and behold, Ohio State University Political Science Professor Vladimir Kogan just wrote about how we shouldn’t blame EdChoice tuition subsidies for school district financial problems.

You’ll never guess who he blames. Of course. It’s those greedy school districts again. As it always is with these people.

See, Ohio school enrollment has dropped over the last 15 years and school district employment has ticked up at the same time. Must be greed, not need, right?

Let’s debunk Prof. Kogan’s alleged “debunking” of public school advocates’ arguments in turn. I gotta admit. I kinda miss doing this!

First things first

Let me say right off the top that Ohio’s own school funding formula says that Ohio students are receiving about $2.7 billion fewer state dollars than they need … even with the enrollment drop! So the enrollment thing isn’t even really a thing because the state’s formula quite literally IS the thing.

One more item. 2010 was the height of the Great Recession. I know. I was there. In the legislature. Writing the state’s school funding formula. We had to cut state funding for schools that year because we had no money. Federal money saved the day.

So to use 2010 as a starting point as Kogan does throughout his piece is nuts. Because the assumption he’s making is that our fiscal house was in order then and isn’t now.

In fact, the economic situation today is far better than 2010 when we were literally losing $250 million a month in income tax revenue.

You know how else I know we’re better off economically today than 2010? Because the Evidence Based Model of school funding I drafted was $3 billion short of what students needed. So we proposed a 10-year phase in of the EBM. The Fair School Funding Plan phase in — for less money than EBM — was supposed to be 6 years.

So Kogan’s whole assumption here than 2010 was a reasonable baseline is bonkers to me, as someone who was actually there doing this stuff, because staffing levels from 2010 were, um, understaffed to begin with!

Anyway, let’s have some fun with his argument, shall we?

Point #1: Ohio’s declining enrollment should mean declining cost

This enrollment drop thing does a lot of Kogan’s heavy lifting. He says that while school district enrollment has dropped by 15 percent between 2010 and 2025, district employment has increased by 3 percent.

See?

There isn’t a 1:1 ratio, guys, so something nefarious or at least fiscally irresponsible is happening because employment hasn’t dropped by the same (or very nearly the same) percentage!

As ridiculous as that sounds, if you think about it for a even a scant moment, that’s exactly what this actual Ohio State Professor is arguing. Though, I suppose we should give him credit for not saying it directly. He’s merely implying that school districts should see an equal, or substantially equal, drop in their employees.

See, here’s the thing. This Ohio State Professor doesn’t know how to count kids.

I swear to God. He doesn’t know how to count.

Which is why when you actually look at enrollment numbers, here’s what you get:

That’s a 12.9 percent enrollment drop, not the 15 percent Kogan mentions. Why is Kogan’s number so much lower? Because he used Average Daily Membership, not headcounts for the last few years. ADM is always lower than actual enrollment for a variety of accounting reasons I won’t bore you to explain1. However, even the Ohio Department of Education’s2 spreadsheets warn researchers that “This data is NOT equivalent to the ADM (average daily membership) that is used for funding purposes.”

Yes. The Department put NOT in ALLCAPS. So you wouldn’t miss it.

Yet this OSU Prof did. He missed the ALLCAPS (or he didn’t bother getting each spreadsheet, instead relying on AI bots or something?)

So he artificially lowered the last few years’ public school district enrollment to inflate the enrollment drop by a couple percentage points.

Why would he do that?

Well, here’s the population of people age 5 to 17 for those same years:

They look pretty similar, don’t they? The lines, I mean.

Nearly all the student population loss in Ohio’s public school districts can, in fact, be attributed to the loss in overall student population3.

So it’s not that families and students are abandoning public schools at all, actually, which is certainly what Kogan and others want you to infer. It’s that we have fewer kids today than 15 years ago.

Which brings me back to EdChoice. See, Kogan claims that public school advocates are arguing that EdChoice is draining kids from school districts and he claims those arguments are bunk.

Which would be true … if we were arguing that.

But we’re not.

Quite the opposite, in fact. From the beginning, we’ve been arguing that this money is simply subsidizing private school tuition for parents who can already afford to send their kids to private school because they are currently sending their kids to private schools — something proven by the private schools’ own presentations to parents explaining EdChoice, as I demonstrated in the Mustang Trilogy

This is a really long-winded way of saying he is simply misrepresenting our actual argument, which is that the money is being drained away from kids in public schools to pay for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies.

Point #2: Vouchers have not caused a drop in funding for public school districts

This is what Kogan and his ilk simply do not understand, or (more likely) do understand but deliberately ignore:

I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this, but this inconvenient fact is always ignored by these guys. Probably because they know it’s such a problem for them constitutionally.

If you are not fully funding the educations of public school students out of that pot (which the state is clearly failing to do), while you are exploding funding for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies from that same pot, it’s a math problem.

THAT is what Judge Jaiza Page found compelling in her ruling last year calling EdChoice unconstitutional, not as Kogan so dismissively put it: “the mere possibility that voucher funding would’ve been redirected to public schools, no matter how unlikely, appeared to have been sufficient to convince Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page when she moved to block the EdChoice program last summer.”

No, buddy. It’s the fact that the money literally comes out of the same funding line that convinced Judge Page. But go ahead. Keep insulting the Judge’s intelligence. I’m sure that’ll go over great in court.

See, there’s no nebulous guessing here that voucher money would have otherwise been used to fund public school students.

It literally would have been … because it’s the same funding line!

Now if Kogan took one more step and started supporting funding these things out of their own line item, we might be getting somewhere. But somehow they never do quite get there, do they?

Point #3: School Districts underestimated how much state funding they would receive on their 5-year forecasts, so EdChoice hasn’t hurt them.

This is so silly, it’d be funny if it weren’t portrayed as Kogan’s big Gotcha! moment.

Ohio’s 5-year forecasts (which are ridiculous since state funding is only done on two-year cycles, but I digress) are estimates. And they are notoriously pessimistic. Why? Because school district treasurers have had it drilled into them to be conservative from birth, it seems. To be fair, this pessimism is due to the state screwing them over for so many years.

But is it surprising that a group of folks who are trained to be conservative and pessimistic in their estimates end up producing conservative and pessimistic estimates?

No.

In fact, it should be something for Kogan and his friends to champion as fiscally responsible!

Ohio’s five-year forecasts are bullshit, as any school treasurer will tell you. Because beyond the biennial budget, they are simply guessing. And the fact that state aid comes in higher than a conservative guess from five years earlier shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Unless you’re an Ohio State PoliSci Prof, apparently.

Let’s look at the actual money, shall we, as I did a few weeks ago.

Remember that all these increases are coming out of the same pot of money!

Kids in public schools are getting 14.4 percent more state aid in 2026-2027 than they did in 2020-2021. But private schools are getting 224 percent more and Charter Schools are getting almost 50 percent more.

Just in terms of overall share of the state aid, kids in public schools will get about 72 percent of the state aid this school year.

Mind you, kids in public schools make up 83 percent of students enrolled in all Ohio educational settings. And they only get 72 percent of the money the state spends on K-12 education.

In 2020-2021, they got about 80 percent. Still less than their enrollment share, but a little better.

The inflation rate since 2020-2021 is 28%.

That means that the state of Ohio has kept up with about half the inflation rate for kids in public school districts.

But please, Prof. Kogan, tell me more about how 5-year forecasts coming in under actual funding levels proves that state aid is working out great for kids in public schools?

Point #4 Public School Employment is up while enrollment is down

Another bullshit Gotcha! here.

Let’s dispense of this argument with a little bit of math, shall we?

Ok. The average Ohio school district had 2,798 students in 2010. The average Ohio school district had 2,453 students in 2025. So that’s a drop of 345 students. Let’s assume each district has 13 grades for K-12. So that’s 26.53 students per grade.

Kogan’s argument is this: there should be an employment drop commensurate with the enrollment drop.

See, here’s the thing the OSU Prof misses: those 26.53 students are, um, spread throughout the grade!

So depending on how many classrooms of students you have, that could be as few as 2 or 3 students per classroom, or maybe as many as 5 or 6.

So let’s say it’s the larger number for argument’s sake and you lop off a teacher per grade. The average number of teachers per school district in 2010 was 173 — a reminder that 173 teachers was understaffed in 2010, according to the state’s own funding formula. So now you have, what, maybe 6-12 fewer teachers, depending on the already understaffed school district?

Is that going to have the massive ripple effect on the administrative need that Kogan seems to think it should? Are you having to close buildings because you lose a classroom worth of students in each grade in an already understaffed building?

Again, it depends on the district.

But on average? No.

And this gets back to what I mentioned earlier — his assumption that we had employment levels right in 2010. We did not. The state’s formula then had a $3 billion shortfall (about $4.5 billion in inflation adjusted dollars). So if we were understaffing public education in 2010, we’re certainly not overstaffing it now, even if overall employment has slightly ticked up.

Let’s look at the expenditure data to test this, shall we?

If you look at what school districts spent per equivalent pupil in 2012 (the state didn’t use the Expenditure Flow Model until then) vs. 2025, what you’ll find is that, adjusted for inflation, overall spending was up about 10 percent, but that wasn’t driven by a spike in administrators, as Kogan and others try implying all the time.

More than half of the increase can be accounted for in Pupil, Staff and Operations Support Services increases. The largest single dollar increase was still in Instruction, though. Administrative costs grew at the second smallest dollar amount during the period.

The bottom line is that a small percentage of the expenditure pot has been removed from instruction and re-allocated to pupil support services (counseling, health, psychologists, etc.). Everywhere else, the share of the spend remained pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago.

So his argument, both stated and implied, that school districts are bloated because they have more employees despite having fewer students and more of those employees are administrators, is simply bunk.

Again, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here that the Fair School Funding Plan — the state’s own funding formula — says the state is spending $2.7 billion less than what students need, even with enrollment drops.

How could that be, you ask? Because we’ve never properly staffed or funded public education, as the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four different times.

But, like Kogan, let’s ignore that rather major point.

How districts are spending money hasn’t changed much during that period, and if anything they’ve had to sacrifice some instructional spend to improve student support (or wraparound) services.

And how has all of this been paid for? With larger and more frequent property tax levies because the state is underfunding its own formula to pay for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies for millionaires. That’s what happens when you take nearly $2.5 billion from the pot meant to fund public school students and instead send it to privately run charter schools and unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidies.

It’s really quite simple, I think.

One more thing: As the parent of a fourth-year Ohio State Engineering student, I sure am glad he’s not in PoliSci.

Which is why I’ve always said that if the robed politicians on the Ohio Supreme Court decide to ignore the Constitution and keep the unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy in place, the best way to minimize its effect on public school students is to require accountability for private schools.

Because they want zero.

Always have.

It’s why they’ve never been audited. Or why they get to pick the tests their students take. Though it is interesting that, despite the fact that no students getting publicly subsidized tuition were tested before I inserted the testing provision into House Bill 1 in 2009, the provision requiring subsidized students get tested remains in law — perhaps the last remnant of the historic, and national award-winning bill (informally bearing my name1) that was the original fix to Ohio’s unconstitutional school funding system.

Here’s the problem, though. There aren’t report cards outlining how private school students are faring on these tests the way there are on public school students, even though now at the Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Cuyahoga Falls, the public fully pays for their students’ tuitions in many cases.

IHMS is becoming a poster child of sorts for all that’s wrong with Ohio’s taxpayer tuition subsidy program, what with their principal and pastor both bragging on social media about their awesome Mustangs while they’re admitting that taxpayer subsidies are allowing them to re-direct Parish resources to wealthier students and away from poorer ones.

We know they’re good at car shopping, especially as taxpayers are forced to unconstitutionally subsidize their school to the tune of $1.5 million a year.

But how do those students actually perform?

First of all, I want to be clear that it is really difficult to do apples-to-apples comparisons on state tests administered to Ohio’s public school students and students receiving unconstitutional tuition subsidies.

What we can do, though, is see how each sector performs on their tests and whether they are over or underperforming their school’s demographic makeup. So it’s not looking at what percentage of students in each school are testing proficient or better. It’s whether those students’ scores are outperforming their demographic makeup. For as we have known for years, standardized test scores are dictated as much by their takers’ wealth as their takers’ learning.

First of all, let’s look at Cuyahoga Falls City Schools’ performance. Again, they’re taking the rigorous state tests.

Here’s what we see in their scores and their change between the 23-24 school year and 24-25 school year (the only two years that we can compare with IHMS because those are the only two years of testing we have on IHMS):

Looks like you’re looking at some drops in performance among the grades, right? So bad news for Cuyahoga Falls?

But now, let’s take a look at Cuyahoga Falls’ demographic makeup.

In 2023-2024, 54.5 percent of CFCS’s students were economically disadvantaged. In 2024-2025, 63.6 percent were. While that jump is largely attributable to a change in the way that economically disadvantaged students are counted. However, it is fair to assume that 50 percent of the demographic change was due to real poverty change, not just accounting.

So what does that do to CFCS’s performance2? It boosts the percentage score increase by 1.4 percent, which means that the following occurs:

In other words, the drop in performance from 2023-2024 to 2024-2025 in the Falls can be attributed almost entirely to the demographic shift. As poverty goes up, performance should go down. In the Falls, though, performance actually did go up, despite poverty increasing in the district3.

Let’s look at IMHS now, shall we?

First, their demographic change:

As you can see, the opposite happened in IMHS. There are only 15 of 282 EdChoice students that are low-income qualified now. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were 51. That’s a huge shift away from low income students. Which means we should see a corresponding test score improvement, right?

Welp, not exactly.

Instead, there were significant test score drops at IMHS, despite that significant increase in percentage of EdChoice students who were not classified as low income.

Applying the same weighting to IMHS that was applied to CFCS indicates an even worse outcome for IMHS — an adjusted drop of 3.1 percent.

So what’s the bottom line on the performance?

Cuyahoga Falls City Schools saw an increase in Economically Disadvantaged students and still improved their test scores when adjusting for that, or at least outperformed expectations. Meanwhile, IMHS saw an increase in wealthier students, yet saw a significant performance drop among their EdChoice students’ scores.

At the end of the day, here’s what we know about IMHS:

1. Starting in 2023-2024, they’re received about $1.5 million a year from taxpayers through the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy program — an amount so large that nearly all their students’ tuitions are completely paid for by taxpayers.

2. Their top administrators drive newer Mustangs.

3. Their parish resources have shifted from predominantly helping the school’s poorer students to exclusively helping the school’s wealthier ones.

4. Their EdChoice students’ performance has gotten worse since they’ve started getting the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies, despite their student population getting wealthier.

5. We have no idea how much of the $400,000-$800,000 of Parish and Cleveland Diocese money the school says EdChoice has freed up goes to students versus overhead (or Mustangs), though judging by the students’ performance drop, I’m guessing it didn’t go to help kids much.

6. We have no idea how this school spends its money. And that’s by design.

There are more private schools getting at least 70 percent of their students on unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies than there are public school districts. So you know this is going on throughout the state.

What started a week ago as a look into a private school’s social media post about Mustang-driving administrators has really exposed the seamy underbelly of Ohio’s unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy program.

What’s more chilling to me is that this is just one of more than 612 private schools in this state where this stuff is happening.

Will state leaders do anything about this unconstitutional waste of taxpayer dollars that has forced all of us to raise our property taxes so much we’re seriously considering getting rid of property taxes?

Not without all of us forcing them to. Remember what my journalism mentor always told me: If they’re getting away with it, it’s your fault.

So let’s do something about this. Seems like we have an election coming up in a few months. Maybe that’s the time.

Yeah. That’s the perfect time.

3

For anyone who doesn’t like me picking 50% as the midpoint for what percentage of the change in poverty could be attributable to real poverty change, I had Claude look at the effect on overall proficiency depending on what percentage of the change can be attributed to real poverty change vs. accounting:

Some of the most interesting feedback I got was pointing out some things I missed. See, I was so angry about Ohio taxpayers now subsidizing more than 80% of the cost of educating students at this private school — where we have no idea how that money’s being spent and that no public school student receives that much of their educational cost from the state — that I missed a couple other very important points.

Point One: Ohio Taxpayers Fully Subsidize the Private School Tuitions of families making $172,575 or less at Immaculate Heart of Mary School

The unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy is only a part of the story. See, each student at the school also gets a so-called “Angel Scholarship”. What is an Angel Scholarship? It’s an official Scholarship Granting Organization. What’s that, you ask? It’s an organization that allows you to contribute to it and get a full tax credit on your state income tax return. Which, once again, denies tax dollars for public school students. The “Angel Scholarship” is the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland’s official SGO. And it most recently raised about $8.1 million — all of which was paid for by reduced income taxes that would have otherwise gone to local public school students.

For a good rundown of this scheme, I recommend this post from Policy Matters’ Madelaine Matej MacQueen.

So the private school tuitions of students whose parents make $172,575 a year or less (that’s 450% of poverty for a family of 5, which is the example the school used in its presentation to parents about EdChoice) at Immaculate Heart of Mary are now fully taxpayer subsidized.

So the state fully pays for private school educations, but won’t even pay for 1/2 the cost of a public school student’s education while committing less of its budget to public school students than it ever has?

Fucking outrageous.

Onward.

Point Two: Immaculate Heart of Mary uses Parish and Diocese money to subsidize only the tuitions adults making $290,100 or more pay

Again, I was so incensed that EdChoice was allowing the school to turn a profit that I overlooked something in the school’s breakdown of how EdChoice and the Angel Scholarship would operate for the millionaires going to the school.

See that? The Parish and Diocese chip in a little more than $4,000 to help the adults who make more than $290,100 a year “afford” their then-$6,300 tuition.

And give them a $1,254 tuition CUT to boot!

How much is the Parish and Diocese helping its “poorest” adults?

Try $0. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

It’s in the school’s own presentation!

This seems at, shall we say … odds(?) with this webpage from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Now, to be fair, families of 5 making $172,450 a year aren’t exactly the kind of poor folks the Church are talking about here.

But it is incredibly telling that this Catholic school is using $4,000 of its and the Diocese’s money to subsidize the tuitions for millionaires while providing nothing for the poorer members of the flock.

Why are they able to do this?

You, Dear Ohio taxpayer. It’s because of you they’re able to redirect their commitment from the poorest of their students to their wealthiest.

It is your charity — unconstitutionally forced upon you by legislative ideologues — that permit this Catholic school to ignore their own call to charity.

I don’t care if you’re pro-tuition subsidy, or believe, as I (and the courts) do, that they’re unconstitutional.

Can we all agree that’s just sick?

Leave it to Rev. James Singler and Principal Barbara Seislove of Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Cuyahoga Falls, though, to gloat just a little bit too much.

See, the Immaculate Heart of Mary mascot is a mustang. So these two thought it’d be really cute to do a vertical video of them playing with their newer Ford Mustangs (one is a red convertible even!).

Let’s get past the idea of a Catholic priest and Catholic school administrator showing off their Ford Mustangs and whether that’s what Jesus would have done.

Let’s, instead, look at their finances, such as we can.

Here’s how much money and how many of their students are now being subsidized by Ohio taxpayers through the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy:

That’s right.

Those two 18-23 model Mustangs1 were likely purchased right around the time the Immaculate Heart of Mary started collecting $1.5 million a year of your tax dollars to unconstitutionally subsidize the tuitions of effectively all their students — all of whom who were already in the school.

Wanna know something else? I started pulling on this loose thread, and wowza did it unwind an EdChoice smoking gun. See, their tuition also went up dramatically. Because they don’t have to report these things publicly, I had to do a little Googling to find these data. But here they are2:

So that’s confirmation of what those of us fighting these unconstitutional subsidies have said: Subsidies lead to higher tuition.

However, what I’ve discovered at Immaculate Heart of Mary School is that the tuition hike does not mean the parents have to pay the school more, or even pay the same as they always have.

Nope.

In fact, the school, when it did its presentation to parents about EdChoice in 2023 explained it this way: “No matter what your family’s scholarship package will look like, each family will NOT pay more than their current tuition rate as charged through FACTS at re-enrollment (February 2023).”

So if parents aren’t covering the now 26-40 percent additional tuition hike, “Who is then,” you ask?

Well …

YOU ARE!

Helpfully, the school explained how this would work for those receiving the full tuition subsidy and those receiving the minimum (families making more than 750% of poverty … millionnaires, for all intents and purposes).

Here are the actual slides from their presentation:

So taxpayers are now allowing this private school to, um, TURN A PROFIT!

That’s right.

Turn.

A.

Fucking.

Profit.

WWJD, amirite?

But don’t worry. Rich people make out too, as the school gleefully declares.

So millionaires get a $1,254 tuition cut, even with a 26% tuition hike and the school, once again, gets to turn a fucking $4,629 profit!

Want some more outrage?

The reason the school increased tuition above the $5,020 prior to EdChoice was to game the system. So they could turn a profit!

Sorry, “reinvest” the money.

The full tuition reimbursement amount would have been more than the school’s posted tuition. So they simply increased it, allowing their parents to get the full per pupil funding from the state, and cleaned up.

But they didn’t think to do this scheme on their own. You know who asked them to update their tuition rate to a higher one?

THE FUCKING STATE!

IT’S THERE IN BLACK AND WHITE!

STATE OFFICIALS KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN AND THEY WANTED IT TO HAPPEN! SO THEY TOLD PRIVATE SCHOOLS TO INCREASE THEIR TUITION SO YOU WOULD PAY THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE AMOUNT!

Helpfully, once again, as if to rub salt in the wound of our overburdened taxpayers, the school actually posted what percentage of their students’ funding would now come from you, the taxpayer.

Before:

After:

Look at that shit! Can you believe it?

Look at how little the Parish investment is in their kids now versus prior to lawmakers deciding to send $1.5 million a year of our money to the school?

Look at that!

I mean.

Look at that!

I remind you that this is just one private school. There are now more private schools receiving unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies than there are public school districts. So this is definitely happening all around the state.

Final outrage (I promise): We have no right to know how that money is being spent, which means we have no idea whether that excess taxpayer money is going to pay for Mustangs or new learning tools for the kids. Because not a single penny of any tuition subsidy since they started shoveling it out in 1997 has ever been audited.

What’s the bottom line here?

I think it’s best put this way:

The state is now subsidizing about 80 percent of an Immaculate Heart of Mary School student’s education.

Wanna take a gander at how many kids attending Ohio public school districts have 80 percent of their educational cost picked up by the state?

Not one.

Not a single Ohio public school student has 80 percent of their funding picked up by the state. The closest are students in Scioto County’s Washington-Nile Local School District at 77 percent. Kids in only 13 of 612 school districts receive more than 70 percent of their funding from state sources.

And it’s not like the parents at Immaculate Heart couldn’t pay the freight before EdChoice came around. The school demonstrated in its own pie chart that even its poorest parents could pick up 61 percent of the cost!

You know how else I know that?

Because their enrollment was the same before and after EdChoice!

Yet here we are with taxpayers subsidizing this school to such a degree that they are making between $430,000 to $840,000 a year3 in taxpayer-funded profit to “reinvest.”

SIDEBAR: Can you imagine if state leaders took this approach to public school students? And how much it would reduce our property taxes if they did?

I digress.

Can I prove that any of that “reinvestment” paid for a couple of sick Mustangs for the Principal and Parish priest?

No.

Would it shock me if it did?

Um.

No.

I guess one more.

In a recent post from Northeast Ohio Advocates for Catholic School, posted on the Diocese’s official website, Frank O’Linn — the Superintendent of Schools for the Diocese — claims that taxpayers get a better deal by subsidizing the private school tuitions of millionaires than they do paying for public schools.

Why?

Because we’re paying more now for the educations of kids in public, private and charters schools than ever before.

I shit you not.

Here’s his argument in a nutshell:

“There is no mention that for the most recent fiscal year, “the state of Ohio spent more on primary and secondary education than at any other time in state history. And state education spending will continue to increase” per the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Nary a word can be heard about the 24.9% increase in state appropriations over the 6 years of phasing in the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding plan, from $12.2 Billion in FY2021 to $15.3 Billion in FY2027 according to LSC Greenbooks. Mind you, that is merely the state portion, on top of the soaring property tax revenues funding traditional public schools, which combined amounted to $32.8 Billion in total K-12 spending in FY2024, the most recent year for which combined data is available.”

See? He got us. We’ve got money hand over fist. And the only reason a record number of schools are now forecasting funding shortfalls is too much spending. Or something like that.

Here’s the problem. Apparently the Superintendent of Catholic Schools in Cleveland doesn’t understand that when he’s looking at the “24.9% increase in state appropriations” since FY2021, those include increases to ALL K-12 education funding, including Charter Schools and Private Schools through tuition subsidies.

Do y’all want to hazard a guess as to how much of the $3.1 billion increase between FY21 and FY27 was due to the funding increases given to Charter Schools and Private School tuition subsidies?

Try 47% of the increase. That’s right. A cool $1.33 billion more is being spent on EdChoice tuition subsidies and largely failing Charter Schools.

Wanna see what the percentage increase is for each sector?

That’s right. Kids in public schools are getting 14.4 percent more state aid in 2026-2027 than they did in 2020-2021. But private schools are getting 224% more and Charter Schools are getting almost 50 percent more.

Just in terms of overall share of the state aid, kids in public schools will get about 72 percent of the state aid.

In 2020-2021, they got about 80 percent.

Just for shits and gigs, I took a look at the inflation rate since 2020-2021. Wanna guess what that number is? If you guessed 28%, you’d be correct, kids!

That means that the state of Ohio has kept up with about half the inflation rate for kids in public school districts.

Meanwhile, they’re giving Charter Schools (which are far less efficient than public schools because spend more than double the amount of per pupil revenue on administratuive costs that public schools) nearly double the inflationary increase and private schools about 10 times the inflation rate.

Must be nice, right?

Oh yeah. One more thing. According to O’Linn’s own source, the Ohio Legislative Service Commission Greenbook from last budget, FY2027 will be a $900 million cut in overall K-12 spending from the 2023-2024 school year. So even his bullshit comparison is bullshit.

Like I said, guys. I can’t make it up.

Let’s look at his complete misunderstanding of the Cupp Report as well1.

In his analysis, O’Linn is trying to tell us that public schools get plenty of money because the amount of state and local aid they’re getting has gone up so much.

What he fails to mention is that the percentage of local funding2 has jumped from 51 percent in FY2015 to 55 percent in FY2025. So while state aid for Charter Schools and EdChoice has exploded, so has local revenue to make up for their siphoning off all that state funding.

Need I remind anyone here that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4 times that relying too much on property taxes is unconstitutional? Forcing districts to go for more levies by shoveling billions to unaccountable private schools and less accountable Charter Schools seems to run contrary to that principle.

Apparently, O’Linn also ignored in his original LSC source the statement explaining how this works. I’ve posted it below for you to peruse at your leisure.

See, O’Linn makes a big deal (in BOLD, so it’s a big deal!) about how:

“The district’s complaints are meritless because state scholarships are funded separately from the recently enhanced district formula, a truth that even the most overzealous scholarship opponents have begun to acknowledge following last month’s circuit court hearing.”

But that’s not what the LSC document you quoted from says, Frank! (see, BOLD=important point!)

Because that’s how this works — charters, tutition subsidies and traditional school aid all come out of the same state funding line item. And is a major reason why Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page ruled EdChoice unconstitutional last year. Because if you move money to Charters and private schools, there is less for kids in public schools.

That’s just math.

Notice the other thing O’Linn didn’t mention: performance. I kind of miss batting back the original argument for these things — giving poor, underprivileged kids the opportunity to escape “failing schools” to go to private schools (hint: private schools didn’t actually do any of that).

But not even O’Linn can make that argument anymore. It’s all about choice for choice’s sake. In other words, it’s all about the adults. Kids? Not so much.

Another thing he doesn’t mention? His schools’ spending and revenue patterns.

But he doesn’t have to do that. Why? Because Ohio legislators have never in 30 years required a single penny of taxpayer funded tuition subsidy be accounted for publicly.

So that $1.3 billion many of his schools will gobble up next school year? We have no idea how much of it is being spent on administrators, teachers, support staff, busing, buildings, anything, the way we know how public school money is spent.

All this guy does is try to play into the same tired trope of ungrateful public schools grossly misspending public dollars. Meanwhile, we have no idea how his schools are spending, or misspending public dollars. Or performing, for that matter.

But I guess we can just take his word for it.

I mean his organization has a solid history of telling the truth about important stuff, right?

Um, yeah.

Because suddenly his party has made fraud a central theme of their national effort to retain power.

Why is Husted sweating over that?

Let me explain.

First, a little history.

When I won my House seat in 2006, I came to Columbus for an oreintation session. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission puts it on every year for new State Reps and Senators to go over how things work in the legislature.

Every year the House Speaker and Senate President comes to speak, welcoming in the new class. So the year I was elected, then-House Speaker Jon Husted came and spoke. And since I was a fresh-eyed, newly elected state Rep whose primary focus was school funding, I asked him about why the state hadn’t fixed the school funding system, despite 4 court rulings ordering them to do so.

He blathered about how much more money we’re spending on education overall. Like that was some consolation given that I knew that all the increase was clearly going to fund Charter Schools (the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy program was back then a very tiny portion of the state budget).

So I explained that other states had figured it out. I mentioned Iowa, Indiana and New Mexico. I asked why we couldn’t figure out systems like these other states. His response? “That’s what you’re here to do.”

“Great! Just don’t table my amendments,” I replied.

He, of course, always did that when he was in charge.

Interestingly, after this exchange another freshman State Rep named Matt Huffman (yes, that Matt Huffman) came up to me and asked several questions about school funding and the other states’ solutions. He was absolutely sincere then about learnig about those other states’ solutions.

Not so much anymore.

Fast forward a couple years. Now Democrats hold the gavel in the House. Husted is in the Senate. And he became the point man to undermine Gov. Ted Strickland’s Evidence Based Model of school funding. I was the point man who fixed it in the House.

During the course of the development of that model, Husted would frequently take potshots at the plan. Finally, one day, I popped off and said something to the effect of (couldn’t find the actual story, but I know it’s out there somewhere) “I think it’s rich that Sen. Husted, who spent the last decade perpetuating an unconstitutional school funding system would try to block the only serious effort to address the Ohio Supreme Court’s rulings.”

I remember colleagues who told me that language was too strong. Times have changed haven’t they?

Anyway, what I didn’t know then, but I do know now is that the reason Jon Husted was so opposed to the Evidence Based Model had nothing to do with the model itself. It was all about Charter Schools. And the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) — who spent 18 years collecting more than a billion dollars to “educate” children it could never prove it was actually educating.

State Auditor Keith Faber eventually hit ECOT with a claim that it illegally took $117 million in taxpayer money to “educate” kids it never had — just for 3 of its 18 school years. Make no mistake; ECOT did this every year it was in existence. In fact, the state caught them doing it in its first year of existence. Then-Auditor Jim Petro hit them with about a $2 million fine, along with this little chestnut:

““ECOT’s significant operating loss of $3,280,160 and net loss of $3,806,248 cause substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. ECOT has an accumulated deficit of $3,806,248 and a net working capital deficit of $4,217,999. Note 17 describes management’s plans regarding these losses.”

Why did they continue to exist, then?

Jon Husted.

See, Jon Husted is the one person most responsbile for the exponential growth of Ohio Charter Schools — a group that even national charter school advocates call the Wild, Wild West — and ECOT’s survival. Don’t get me wrong. He had lots of help from his Republican colleagues over the last 3 decades.

But Husted is Patient Zero.

He remains the only person to have received an honorary ECOT diploma .

He is one of two Ohio politicians (all ECOT graduation speakers were Republicans — the last was Tucker Carlson, of all people) to speak at 2 ECOT graduations. And he was the person ECOT founder Bill Lager credited during these ceremonies for saving ECOT. In addition, he did the following:

• Husted introduced the bill allowing for-profit charters in Ohio, exempting them from Public Records Law: http://lsc.state.oh.us/analyses/anh124.nsf/All%20House%20Bills%20and%20Resolutions/AE715CF0B91BA7F385256ACB00480285

• The final version of bill turned into the Wild, Wild West bill opening the doors to all kinds of new charters and sponsors: http://lsc.state.oh.us/analyses/fnla124.nsf/All%20Bills%20and%20Resolutions/1FA59868B44C0C0385256CEC00555822

• Husted was the chief sponsor of the original legislation vastly expanding Ohio’s Charter Schools.

• Husted also only limited charter school growth for charters sponsored by Public School Districts, allowing privately run charters to grow unabated.

• When I was in the House working on the Evidence Based Model during the Great Recession, I suggested we cut online school funding, like ECOT, by 70 percent because they don’t have buildings, buses, etc. that regular schools had. Husted insisted that we keep paying ECOT as much as paid brick and mortar schools.

Why did he do all this? Because his two biggest political patrons at the time were 1) David Brennan, who ran White Hat Management and was the state’s Charter School and Voucher Godfather as well as its biggest Republican political donor at the time and 2) Bill Lager, who ran ECOT.

Husted spent his Ohio legislative career creating carve outs for these guys’ schools, protecting them from oversight, and reaping the political benefits for him and his legislative colleagues. All while Ohio Charter Schools repeatedly failed kids. I mean, here’s a list of ECOT’s “accomplishments”:

• According to state data from the 2016-2017 school year, every penny sent from a school district to ECOT — more than $100 million — came from a district that outperformed the online school by at least 4 of 13 state report card categories.

• An astonishing 1 out of every 4 dollars sent to ECOT came from a district that outperformed ECOT on every comparable measure.

• While ECOT did graduate large numbers of students, they failed to graduate about twice as many as they actually graduated.

• The New York Times found that it produced more high school dropouts than any school in the nation.

• Less than 3 percent of their graduates ever received a college degree.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Husted also created the unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy program when he was House Speaker in 2005? Yeah.

He actually bragged about it last year … after it was ruled unconsitutional!

So the reason we have no idea how more than $5 billion of our tax dollars have been spent in private schools?

Jon Husted.

The reason ECOT was able to make off with upwards of $200-300 million over 18 years, despite failing kids and creating more dropouts than any other school in the country?

Jon Husted.

The reason we haven’t been able to sufficiently fund the educations of millions of Ohio children for 30 years?

Jon Husted.

The reason you’ve watched you property taxes skyrocket to make up for that failure?

Jon Husted.

And this isn’t even accounting the fact that he appeared as a witness in the state’s largest ever political bribery trial.

So when Ka$h and the Trump Gang showed up yesterday to brag about how they’ve allegedly rolled up $50 million in Medicaid fraud, and allowed Dave Yost — the other two-time ECOT speaker who famously gave them an excellence in auditing award during an ECOT graduation ceremony while they were ripping off millions from taxpayers — I rolled my eyes.

For if these clowns really wanted to uncover Ohio taxpayer fraud, all they have to do is look at the guy who’s sitting at J.D. Vance’s old Senate desk.

Ohioans aren’t stupid, though. We know what Jon Husted did to allow his buddies to get rich by defrauding taxpayers while hurting our school children and raising our property taxes.

Ka$h’s press conference ain’t covering up that shit.

So when national Republicans try to use fraud as a way to pivot off their horrible affordability messaging, running a guy in Ohio who created, perpetuated and protected the greatest taxpayer fraud in the state’s history, along with being knee-deep in the state’s largest bribery scandal is, um, a problem.

See why dude’s sweating bullets?

All I can say is, “Good. It’s about goddamn time.”

But the problem is that the program simply cannot exist in this state under the current Ohio Constitution. And capping income at $500,000 to keep Jeffrey Epstein buddy Les Wexner from getting the unconstitutional subsidy is not even close to what needs done (though I admit, it may help give cover to the robed politicians on Ohio’s Supreme Court).

As I’ve pointed out previously:

The only way to really address Judge Page’s decision is to do the following: kill EdChoice, transfer that money instead to fully fund the Fair School Funding Plan, require any voucher recipient to have spent at least 180 days attending a public school prior to receiving a voucher, give the same amount of state aid to the student as they would have received in their public school, require any voucher recipient school to accept anyone who applies, require the schools to not charge any tuition above the voucher amount (which was the case in the beginning), require the voucher money to be publicly audited and limit the vouchers to non-religious schools.

And there is still the one-system constitutional question that I don’t think even this solution would address. As I’ve mentioned before, more private schools get taxpayer funded tuition subsidies than there are public school districts — an insane, but true fact.

So while I am enjoying watching legislators recognize EdChoice is in real danger of being killed — as well as encouraged to see their panic, their nibbling around the edges ain’t cutting it.

Frankly the only way to meet constitutional muster is to kill the current program.

Ultimately, the chart above is the unconstitutional tuition subsidy proponents’ biggest issue. The overvaluation of these unconstitutional subsidies and funding them out of the same state budget line item that funds public school students has meant that Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students don’t receive what the state’s own funding formula says they need.

One more thing I wanted to mention today is Honesty for Ohio Education put out a really interesting website and spreadsheet that does a couple things: breaks down the cost of and investment in unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies in every school district and then, importantly, further breaks it down by state House and Senate seats.

The site reminds me of the Know Your Charter site I developed a decade ago while at Innovation Ohio. Same idea, only with charter schools. Put out the information so the public can see how these so-called educational options are funded compared with your kids’ public school educations and pressure the politicians to fix the issue.

Here’s an example of what the Honesty site provides:

Very clean, clear and useful information for anyone who wants to use it1.

On their master spreadsheet, they also include lots of additional demographic and other information, which will help those who want to find out, for example, whether the funding disparities are greater in districts with higher rates of economically disadvantaged students.

Again. Another useful tool in the fight for Ohio’s public education students.

So use it!

1

I understand why they chose the $8,408 number because that’s the maximum a private school gets for a high school student. And it’s greater than what public school kids get in 85 percent of Ohio’s public school districts. However, wealthier and K-8 students don’t receive that much, so I would have created a district-level per pupil amount.

But while I nerdishly quibble with that data, using the $8,408 amount is absolutely defensible (as you can see in the chart below) and the overall net effect would show the same thing regardless — on a per pupil basis, more state taxpayer revenue subsidizes private school tuitions for mostly religious schools than goes to kids in public schools

.

Credit where credit is due. I’ve said for years that the No. 1 reason Ohio Republicans have been able to run roughshod over both public K-12 and higher education systems is because the folks running those systems have let them.

As my mentor at the Beacon Journal used to tell me: If they’re getting away with it, it’s your fault.

These folks too afraid of being cut worse, just let Ohio Republicans cut them bad and offer mostly tepid resistance.

Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised that Kent State University President Ted Diacon took on Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s call to close his and other public universities. And you know what? He sounded awfully 10th period-y doing it.

Point of personal privilege: As a Kent State grad, the husband of a triple KSU grad and the son of two KSU grads who met at KSU, I have to say I was pretty damn proud that it was my alma mater — and home — who stood fast and stood first.

“At Kent State, state appropriations now account for roughly 22% of our operating budget. In the (Gov. James A. Rhodes) era, that figure was closer to 75%. The universities didn’t drift into this moment. Even though public investment was quietly withdrawn over decades, our institutions have continued to deliver ever-improving results.”

Sounds a lot like this chart I posted a few weeks back, doesn’t it?

Again, state support for tuition (state share of instruction is the official, lifeless bureaucratic name) has dropped to its smallest share of the state budget ever — less than 1/2 what it was in the 1970s — the Rhodes Era Diacon mentioned.

Enrollment has been a challenge at public universities serving first-generation students because those students typically come from working class families who can’t afford to pay $20-25,000 a year for college. If the state simply committed the same percentage o the state budget to tuition support as it did 30 years ago, we’d essentially have free 2-year and all-but-free 4-year tuition for Ohio families.

This doesn’t even contemplate higher taxes or anything. Just a similar commitment to our kids’ futures that our parents made for us. It’s no more complicated than that.

See, I bet that if you made college affordable, schools whose enrollment comes from working-class families would have far less of an enrollment problem.

But Vivek doesn’t think so. He wants to shut down those schools. In the middle of the Innovation Age.

Because he’s an asshole billionnaire.

Which brings me back to Diacon. He invited Vivek to show up at Kent State and see all the great work it’s able to do, despite state neglect. I hope he tells Vivek, “imagine what we could do if you cared about pubic higher education as much as Republican Gov. James Rhodes did?”

I don’t know if he will. But man, am I glad that he called bullshit on Vivek. Because what the billionaire who shipped his company to Texas from Ohio is talking about is that: Bullshit.

I hope more education leaders follow Diacon in calling out the bullshit. I hope they recognize their own power (imagine if every school district brought 1 school bus full of kids to the capital during budget season? Think those assholes would think twice about cutting education if 612 busloads of kids showed up?).

I hope more education leaders dare the state to follow through with its threats to eliminate funding if those schools dare tell the truth on history, sociology, etc.

I hope more education leaders use their voices to advocate for their students, institutions and state.

I hope this is the beginning.

For this is the way.

I mean, look at this clown Brian Massie sitting behind a Resolute Desk replica, thinking he’s some kind of alternate-universe President cosplaying as a shades-wearing trucker. Once again proving that money can’t buy you brains.

When asked to explain how services like parks, police, fire, developmental disabilities, zoos, schools, roads, bridges, etc. were supposed to replace $24.7 billion in revenue, these numbskulls actually think it’s all public education’s fault.

Because of course it is.

See, these geniuses think that that all Ohio’s public school districts need to do to continue educating Ohio’s 1.6 million school children competently is “cutting costs and reducing unneeded spending, particularly with public schools. Massie [King of the Morons] said he thinks the consolidation of school districts should be considered to decrease administrative costs.”

Look, I know these numbers are really, really big. And they may scare someone who thinks wearing a trucker hat with shades behind a fake Resolute Desk makes him look, I dunno, awesome? But that is just fucking stupid.

You know how I know that? Because the state tracks actual spending in public school districts. You wanna know how much school districts spent on administration with all revenue included — local property and income taxes, along with federal and state funding combined?

That number is $3.3 billion.

Which leaves a $21 billion hole.

So even if you got rid of all spending on administration in public school districts, you’d still leave a $21 billion budget hole!

See?

Morons.

Which means either you create the largest income and/or sales tax increases in state history (creating the largest income and/or sales taxes in the country) to make up that difference, or schools, police, fire, EMS, developmental disabilities, zoos … um … close.

They don’t consolidate, like these morons think.

They fucking close!

Because removing that amount of money isn’t some stupid Declaration of Independence cosplay, like these idiots think.

Did you also notice, by the way, that the amount that would be lost if you eliminate property taxes is just about the total amount of money that Ohio public school districts spend in a year?

I mean, these idiots don’t know the scale of their folly. I guess that’s why they’re idiots, though, right?

All this stupid measure does is declare us independent from good roads, bridges, schools, zoos, fire, police, EMS, etc.

I was encouraged to see that they felt the need to pull the little stunt they did yesterday to claim they’re halfway to the needed signatures to get on the November ballot. See, you need at least double the number of signatures you really need to guarantee you’re on the ballot.

Again. Morons.

So in order to get to 413,000 valid signatures, they need 826,000, not the 600,000 or so they’re targeting. So they are actually only 37 percent of the way to getting what they need to get on the ballot.

I’m also glad to see an anti-moron group has sprung up to fight this absurdly stupid effort. Don’t take anything for granted, even Titanic stupidity.

And look, I agree that property taxes are too high.

But the reasons for that are pretty straight forward, starting with the General Assembly and Governor’s decision to stand up a second, private school system in this state, which has robbed state revenue for public schools and forced them to go the ballot more often and for bigger money than they used to. Also, the state not long ago required a crazy property tax revaluation that drove up the charges. Finally, Ohio has consistently cut taxes for rich people and businesses while foisting the responsibility onto homeowners.

What happened? Well, lots of things actually. There’s been an explosion of tax abatements, as well eliminating wholesale taxes on businesses like the Tangible Personal Property tax.

You also may notice that the shift to homeowners has happened under nearly exclusive Republican control of the Governor’s mansion and General Assembly starting in 1992.

Wanna guess the political affiliation of these anti-property tax people?

Despite Massie ( the dude trying to act like a Trucker President) claiming he’s “non-partisan” on this issue, here’s his actual voter registration:

You guessed it. Republican.

So this is the guy who’s bitching about property taxes being too high when it’s been Ohio Republicans like him that have forced homeowners to constantly raise their property taxes over the last 30 years.

Now you understand why instead of fighting the Ohio General Assembly’s failure to properly fund public education for the last 30 years while they divert taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools, cut taxes for rich people (like Massie and his buddies) and foist the formerly shared property tax responsibility from businesses and homeowners to mainly homeowners, Massie and his clown carnival say, “Fuck it. Burn it all!”

Because they’re morons.