Why Does Mike DeWine Hate Ohio's Public School Students?
His budget thumbs its nose at 1.6 million students and lines the pockets of wealthy private school parents.
I know my headline is a bit much, but I’m getting tired of writing the same shit over and over again. I swear to God. It’s the same, exact shit that’s been written about Ohio’s governors and legislative leaders since the 1990s.
These guys just will not pay what they need to pay in order for your kids to be educated well. Instead, they heap more and more burden on your backs, forcing you to pay property taxes or deny your kids the opportunities these leaders’ kids all had.
It’s disgusting.
So let’s start with DeWine’s introduction of his budget last week. Lots of headlines about how he’s going to fully implement the state’s Fair School Funding Plan — the last, best hope for the state to fulfill its constitutional obligations to our kids.
However, now that we have the district-level funding simulations, we know that initial rollout was all bullshit. How so?
Because between this school year and the last school year of the Governor’s proposed budget, we’re looking at a massive reduction in the state share calculation the state will now use to determine how much of that formula cost should be picked up by them (whose constitutional duty it is to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools) and how much we’re going to have to pick up because they don’t want to meet that constitutional obligation.
While we don’t have the actual line-by-line calculation yet1 to know how much state money is being left on the table, we know the result: Mike DeWine thinks you guys should have to pay for the state’s school funding formula, not the state itself.
“You want your Fair School Funding Plan? Fine. You pay for it. Because your property taxes aren’t high enough already. You can afford it.”
Honest to God. That’s what he’s saying.
“How can you say that?” you ask. Simple. Look at the funding between this school year and the last school year covered by his budget. You’ll see that total state aid is actually $17.6 million less, even though the Fair School Funding Plan is fully implemented.
How can that be? Because if you look at column I and column K in that spreadsheet, you’ll see that the amount of that fully funded formula the state will be picking up is now, on average, 18.2% lower2.
That’s right.
The state now figures you should be responsible to pick up nearly 20% of the cost of the state’s own school funding formula.
Yes. That is the exact opposite of what four Ohio Supreme Court cases ruled 3 decades ago. Not that these guys give a shit.
Here’s another thing: Prior to DeWine’s budget, 5 of Ohio’s 8 school district types were, on average, assumed to need the state to pick up 50% or more of the cost of the state’s funding formula.
Now only 2 of Ohio’s 8 different types of districts would be more than 50% — and that’s only 55%.
Why did they do this? Are local property taxpayers somehow more able to pick up the cost in 2 years than they are today? Of course not.
Mike DeWine doesn’t want to provide what your kids need to succeed. He’d rather you keep doing that.
This is a complete abandonment of the state’s responsibility to provide a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.
Why would they do this to Ohio’s 1.6 million public school students?
Simple: They want to keep lining the pockets of wealthy private school parents by using your tax dollars to subsidize those adults’ private school tuition.
See, while money for your kids’ education will be cut over the next two years, money for wealthy private school parents’ private school tuition subsidies will jump by 17%. Even charter schools will get a 12% increase.
But at least we still won’t get to audit the more than $1 billion annually projected to be sent to private schools — just as we haven’t been able to audit a single penny of the $8 billion we’ll have sent to subsidize private school tuitions by the end of this biennial budget.
And I guess charter schools have earned that funding increase for having only 5 of their 300+ schools ranked above the top 25% of schools nationally.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but it still pisses me right off.
But don’t worry, dear reader. This is only going to get worse, not better. Because now House Speaker Matt Huffman — whose detestation of Ohio’s public school students is even more nakedly obvious — gets his turn with the budget.
I’ll end with a story.
In the early 1990s, Gov. George Voinovich was facing a lawsuit over the way Ohio funded its public schools. In response, he claimed that he was going to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools.
However, in House hearings, state Rep. Wayne Jones asked a simple question about how the governor reached that amount. And he was correct. It was all smoke and mirrors.
Back then, Voinovich increased the property tax rate he assumed everyone could charge themselves and claimed that was a massive school funding increase. But in reality, all that did was put more of the burden on the backs of property taxpayers3.
Last week, Mike DeWine did the same thing, only with a more sophisticated calculation.
Both governors, 30 years apart, made the same play: Tell Ohio’s public school students that they really care about their futures with one hand while using the other hand to plunge a stiletto between our kids’ shoulder blades.
It’s like this was the plan all along.
Same shit. Different decade.
My best guess is this would be about $300-350 million, but that’s just a guess. We need to see the detailed calculations, which are usually provided on the state’s payment reports.
I’m expressing this as a percentage drop, not a percentage point drop. So a drop from 20% to 15% I’m saying is a a 20% drop because it’s 1/5 less. I think it’s more helpful to see what the relative drop is compared with the previous years’ commitment.
This used to be called the “charge off”. Voinovich’s move to increase the charge off from 20 to 23 mills created something called “phantom revenue”. That’s because that change to 23 mills assumed that districts could raise a certain amount of money, but state law actually didn’t allow them to raise that amount of money. So the difference between what the state thought you were raising and what you were actually raising was called phantom revenue. We started to get rid of it in the Evidence Based Model, but it didn’t really go away until the Fair School Funding Plan. This is essentially what DeWine is doing now — creating another phantom revenue problem for Ohio’s public schools. For obvious reasons, I put this in a footnote because this kind of weed (no, not that kind) investigation is really for the Ohio ed funding nerds out there.