Ohio's Outrageous Lack of Commitment to its public school students
Ohio's leaders have spent the last 15 years taking money public school students need and have subsidized wealthy adults' public school tuitions and scandal-ridden, failing charter schools.
I haven’t spent much time talking about my time in the Ohio House of Representatives on this or my former Blogspot location. I don’t know why. The school funding and reform plan I did — the Evidence Based Model — won a national award for being the country’s most non-partisan and innovative education reform of the year, after all.
But we couldn’t fully fund it. Not even close. We did a 10-year phase in, which is about double the length of the current Fair School Funding Plan. And we were hammered for it. Even though at the time we were hemorrhaging money as a state. Remember the Great Recession? Yeah. We decided to put another $3 billion into public education at the height of that disaster.
So the decade-long phase in, coupled with the price tag and the fact it was Democrats who designed it, gave Republican Gov. John Kasich and his Republican General Assembly colleagues all the excuse they needed to ditch the plan in his first biennial budget.
“Unsustainable”, they claimed.
“Ted Strickland's evidence-based model was unfunded, filled with unfunded mandates on cash-strapped districts, and has been unsuccessful in the states in which it has been implemented,” Kasich claimed.
That claim ended up being total bullshit, by the way.
The other state that implemented the Evidence Based Model and stuck with it — Wyoming — has been consistently rated as a top 7 school system in the country by Education Week’s Quality Counts report (which they stopped doing last year) while Ohio dropped from 5th the year EBM won that national award to middle of the pack.
And there were no mandates in EBM (though the as-introduced version did have them, to be fair). In fact, it ended up being the exact opposite of an unfunded mandate. How do I know that?
Because I got rid of them in the House when I was Chairman of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee.
Say that 10 times fast.
I insisted that what mandates were in the plan would only take effect when the thing was fully funded and districts had the money to do them. The only mandate in the final bill was to go to All-Day Kindergarten. I don’t hear anyone bitching about that anymore, do you? Remember when half-day kindergarten was the norm?
Anyway.
Every so often, I like to go back and see what would have happened if Ohio had continued to fully fund the Evidence Based Model like Wyoming did. So that’s what I did this weekend. And I found an amazing outcome:
Instead of investing money in Ohio’s public school students through the Evidence Based Model, Ohio Republicans invested that money in private school tuition subsidies for adults and Ohio’s privately run, scandal ridden charter schools.
That’s right. Ohio Republicans, who spent 2010 and 2011 telling everyone how we couldn’t spend all that money on public school students did somehow find the money to send that same amount to private and charter schools. And I don’t need to remind anyone that zero of the dollars spent subsidizing adult’s private school tuitions has ever been audited.
That’s right.
It’s literally unaccounted for.
How did I reach this conclusion, you ask?
Well, in 2009 when we passed the EBM, I insisted on including a district-level simulation (known as a “run” in Ohio education policy parlance) for a fully funded EBM. It was the first time in Ohio history that the state actually put to paper what it was promising to provide students into the future. I figured that if we put it out there, maybe the public would hold future GA’s and Governor’s to it.
Boy was I wrong about that.
But I kept that final, fully funded run. And here’s what it says: A fully funded EBM would have provided $9.8 billion to Ohio’s public school students. A fully funded Fair School Funding Plan (which could be fully funded in the 26-27 school year if the GA follows through on its promises) meanwhile provides $7.4 billion to Ohio’s public school students.
That’s a $2.4 billion difference.
Wanna guess how much we’re spending on Charters and Vouchers this year?
That’s right. $2.4 billion1. The difference is literally $21 million — a negligible amount. And that’s assuming the state fully funds it. Apparently spending $2.4 billion on 1.6 million public school students is unsustainable, but putting $2.4 billion into schools that educate less than 1/4 that amount is sustainable, if wildly less efficient.
If it doesn’t (a very distinct possibility), then Ohio’s Republicans have actually invested more in charters and vouchers than what they said in 2010 was unsustainable to invest in public school students
So what can we learn from this? Politicians are full of shit.
Actions over words.
Everything they don’t support is unsustainable. Everything they do support is untouchable.
If only Ohio’s Republican legislators and Governors were as supportive of Ohio’s 1.6 million public school students as they have been of Ohio’s 300,000 private and charter school parents. Instead, they’ve forced the typical Ohio public school district to nearly double the percentage of local revenue they’ve had to raise to make up for Ohio Republicans’ failures. And I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, which types of kids and parents are hurt the most by that, do I? Of course it’s poorer students and parents.
Don’t forget that Ohio now provides Ohio’s Charter Schools (all but 5 of which rated in the bottom 25% of all schools nationally) more money on average than 1 in 5 Ohio school districts spend per equivalent pupil, including all their local property tax money.
So when you hear House Speaker Matt Huffman declare that fully funding the Fair School Funding Plan — which is $2.4 billion cheaper than the EBM from 2010 — would be “unsustainable” understand that he’s full of shit. What he’s really telling you is that he’d rather give all your hard-earned tax dollars to wealthy private school parents so they can get a publicly funded tuition subsidy.
And he’d rather you keep doubling your property taxes every 15 years to pay for it.
Because your kids don’t mean shit to him.
I had to estimate the voucher amount because while we know how many students have taken vouchers this year, we don’t know the average amount they got. So I multiplied this year’s voucher enrollment by last year’s per pupil voucher amount.