Dear Ohio Anti-Property Tax Campaign, the State of Ohio should NOT pay for education alone
The Ohio Supreme Court called for a reduction in schools' overreliance on property tax, not those taxes' elimination.
Look, I’m very sympathetic to proponents of the misguided property tax abolitionists’ claims to want to force the state to live up to its constitutional obligations to our kids. I’ve said over and over again that the state’s refusal to fully fund its own school funding system, as well as the massive diversion in state funding to unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies and failing Charter Schools, has caused a tectonic shift in the way local communities have had to fund schools.
In fact, I demonstrated not long ago that, adjusted for inflation, Ohio is spending less state money on public education today than at any point since 1997.
But I have never said we should get rid of property taxes.
Importantly, neither has the Ohio Supreme Court. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the DeRolph school funding case that, I fear, has come to become Legend in Ohio — that property taxes paying for schools is unconstitutional.
It is not.
What is unconstitutional is the state’s overreliance on property taxes to pay for schools because not all school districts can meet their students’ educational needs through that mechanism. As the Court found below in 1997:
“The factors which contribute to the unworkability of the system and which must be eliminated are (1) the operation of the School Foundation Program, (2) the emphasis of Ohio’s school funding system on local property tax, (emphasis added)(3) the requirement of school district borrowing through the spending reserve and emergency school assistance loan programs, and (4) the lack of sufficient funding in the General Assembly’s biennium budget for the construction and maintenance of public school buildings.” — DeRolph v. State I, 1997-Ohio-84
In fact, I think property taxes and tax levies in general help keep districts honest and force them to build healthy relationships with their communities, parents and students. Because if districts don’t, their funding will be deeply affected.
However, levies have to be reasonable. Districts should not have to go out for levies every couple years, or seek huge sums of money to fund basic district needs so that state leaders can subsidize private school tuitions for wealthy families or continue to invest more per pupil state funding in failing Charter Schools than is invested in 97% of Ohio’s Public School children.
Here’s the problem for the property tax abolitionists: According to the latest data available, Ohio School Districts raise $13.7 billion in local property taxes. They raised $737 million in local income taxes in the 2024-2025 school year. So all tolled, they collect about $14.5 billion in local revenue every year.
What does that mean?
It means that either the state makes up that $13.7 billion, or local income taxes will need to be increased substantially, or … disaster.
What’s disaster? A few examples:
School districts closing
Massive reductions in staff
No busing for any students
Forced mergers with districts in ways that make no sense for communities
High school football only being played in districts that can afford to field teams and by kids who can afford to pay for all their equipment.
You know. Disaster.
It is deeply disingenuous for proponents of the property tax elimination effort like Brian Massie to claim that eliminating more than 1/2 of School Districts’ revenue will force districts or the nebulous “government” to “adjust to proper size.”
Do School Districts need to be more efficient? Sure. But are they wasting 81% of their money, like Rocky River collects in property taxes?
C’mon, man.
No one believes that, do they?
And what are these proponents’ answer to this?
Run government more like a business (funny that these folks never explain which business they’d like government to model, but I digress)?
Well, we already have business-run schools, and results haven’t been awesome on performance or efficiency. The private sector’s answer — Charter Schools — as I’ve said before, are less efficient at driving money to kids than Charter Schools are, and get far worse academic results ( they’ve earned 1/2 of all failing grades on state report cards since 2005, despite being graded three times less frequently than Public School Districts).
Setting aside the academics, on efficiency alone, Ohio Charter Schools are worse than their pubic sector counterparts. On average, Ohio Charter Schools — the private sector “fix” for public education — spend about double the amount on administrators than Ohio’s Public School Districts do.
Which accounts for how Charter Schools are able to spend about $1,000 more per pupil than Ohio’s Public School Districts even though School Districts collect local property taxes that Charter Schools do not. All for far worse results!
So what’s the answer these anti-property tax people give for how to replace the $13.7 billion in local property taxes?
Who knows.
At most, the Fair School Funding Plan is $3 billion plus short of full funding — and that’s if you include the most generous poverty and other weights in the formula.
Let’s say the state fulfills that obligation (which they won’t). That still leaves a $10.7 billion hole in school district budgets.
Where does that come from?
No answers.
If these property tax abolitionists wanted to be helpful, maybe they would do a ballot issue that would require school districts to reduce their property taxes by however much their state aid increases as the Fair School Funding Plan gets implemented? Still misguided, but at least it’s tethered to some sense of reality.
Or how about a ballot issue forcing the state to fully fund its own school funding formula, as calculated by an apolitical, independent school funding commission that adjusts the funding amounts annually based on actual cost and need?
Or how about a ballot issue stating that no Ohio school district can be forced to provide more than 50% of their funding from local revenue sources for the basic aid amounts provided in the state funding formula?
Or how about a ballot issue creating a statewide property tax for basic educational needs (like Indiana does) so that levies would only be needed to fund things like eight years of Chinese language classes or something?
Or how about a ballot issue eliminating HB 920 from the Ohio Constitution — the provision that has driven much of Ohio school districts’ levy chasing since the 1970s?
Again, all these ideas would need more research and fleshing out. But all of them would result in property tax cuts, reductions in levy frequency and size with none leading to the absolute disaster the current property tax abolitionists’ plan does.
By the way, this post is just about the harmful impact on school districts.
About 1 in 4 property tax dollars go to fund other things like villages, cities, townships, counties, libraries, mental health services, public health districts, boards of developmental disabilities, police, fire, ems, road repairs, bridges, sewers, water, zoos, etc.
The more I look at this, the more I see this as pretty simple: We can’t eliminate property taxes with no plan for replacement or even an answer to the “then what?” question.
To be the most generous to the abolitionists, they have let their anger and frustration cloud their judgement. A less generous interpretation? They want to kill public schools, defund police, fire, ems, roads, sewers, bridges, zoos and libraries.
Either way. Not good.