New Ohio Budget Fully Funds Next Step in the Fair School Funding Plan, but also Explosively Expands School Vouchers

On Tuesday, July 4, 2023, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed into law a state budget that is simultaneously a triumph and a tragedy for the more than 1.6 million students in the state’s public schools. While there are several other gains and losses for Ohio’s public schools in this FY 2024-2025 biennial budget, there are two primary budget issues with immediate as well as long-term consequences for Ohio’s children and their teachers:

• the budget’s on-schedule, next step of the phase-in of a new school funding formula, and
• an outrageous expansion of EdChoice private school tuition vouchers.

New Ohio Budget Funds 2nd of Three Steps in Fair School Funding Plan’s Phase-In

In the press coverage of a budget that is thousands of pages long, we can find bits and pieces on the importance of funding for the Fair School Funding Plan.  For the Plain Dealer, Jeremy Pelzer and Laura Hancock report: “The legislature’s compromise budget would kick in about $1.8 billion for K-12 education over the next two years as the next leg of the… school funding plan. That’s what the House’s budget called for; the Senate’s plan sought about $541 million less than what the House budget calls for.”

Until last week, the continued phase-in of the Fair School Funding Plan was threatened by Ohio Senate leadership, but Jason Stephens, the Ohio House Speaker, held his coalition together to defeat an attempt by the Ohio Senate to tinker with the mathematical details of the formula at the expense of local public school districts. The Columbus Dispatch‘s Anna Staver quotes House Budget Chairman Jay Edwards, who “said his chamber’s big focus was education. ‘The fact that we were able to claw back the $550 million that the Senate took out of our public schools is, I think, a big win,’ Edwards said.”  Staver quotes Senate President Matt Huffman disparaging the investment in the Fair School Funding Plan and calling it “unsustainable in the long run.”

The Ohio Education Association, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, and Policy Matters Ohio released a joint statement beautifully explaining why a technical school funding formula matters so much that it is arguably this year’s top Ohio budget priority: “Ohio’s students deserve fully funded, high quality, local public schools that help them reach their fullest potential, and it is the responsibility of our state legislators to enact a system that achieves this.  Legislators in the Ohio House took this responsibility seriously by passing a budget that increases state funding to public schools by nearly $1 billion and continues Ohio’s progress toward a full phase-in of the Fair School Funding Plan—a funding formula based on what it actually costs school districts to educate their students. They also ensured that the data being used in that funding formula is current and accounts for the additional costs of educating students with disabilities and students who are learning the English language. It is a monumental step forward that the House’s school funding commitment will be enacted in this budget, despite attempts by the Senate majority to cut more than $500 million from our schools. After decades of non-compliance with Ohio Supreme Court rulings, the legislature is on the brink of finally meeting its constitutional responsibility to fairly fund Ohio’s public schools.”

It is important to note that the Senate’s budget plan, now defeated, threatened district-to-district equity. The Ohio House beat back an Ohio Senate effort to make the mathematical school funding formula less sensitive to each school district’s capacity to raise its required local share of funding through voted property taxes.  By reducing the state’s contribution to overall funding of public education, the Senate would have made local school districts more reliant on passing local property taxes, and would, therefore, have made it far more difficult for poorer communities to maintain quality public schools.

New Ohio Budget Includes Outrageous Universal Private School Tuition Voucher Entitlement

The Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben describes the universal EdChoice voucher program that is part of the new Ohio budget: “The… budget included near-universal private school scholarship eligibility, in which households earning up to 450 percent of the federal poverty level, or $135,000 for a family of four, qualify for a full scholarship  The scholarships amount to $6,165 for K-8 students and $8,407 for high schoolers.  But the financial help doesn’t stop there, even for those families making more than $135,000 annually. ‘Scholarships for students in families with incomes above 450% will be means-tested with scholarship amounts adjusted based on their income,’ Senate President Matt Huffman’s office said in announcing the new budget. ‘Every student in Ohio will be eligible for a scholarship worth at least 10% of the maximum scholarship regardless of income.'”  Notice that Huffman sells his program with the term “scholarship,” a positive spin on “voucher entitlement.”

In the early years, promoters of school vouchers argued that private school choice would expand opportunity for the poor. The EdChoice voucher plan in Ohio’s new budget—making students in families with income at 450% of the federal poverty level ($135,000) eligible for a full voucher, and students in families with even higher incomes eligible for a 50% or 25% or a minimal 10% voucher as family income gets higher—only exacerbates a current trend that tilts Ohio voucher use to middle and upper income families. While political conservatives like Matt Huffman don’t usually promote government entitlements, this new Ohio voucher plan is a blatant entitlement for the rich—families who were previously ineligible because their incomes are too high.

Dangerously, legislators have established no control or cap on future growth of the new budget’s universal voucher program.  While there is a specified budget allocation for the Fair School Funding Plan, the legislature has—without any way to estimate how many students will ask for a voucher—provided a guarantee of a voucher for any child or adolescent. Once voucher plans are enacted, they tend to grow. Columbia University school privatization expert, Dr. Samuel Abrams explains: “In fiscal year 2008, total spending on vouchers in Ohio was $69,772,755. By fiscal year 2019, total spending for all five then-existing voucher programs amounted to $360,646,965, an increase of 416 percent and an annual growth rate of 16.1 percent.” (Other problems with expanding Ohio vouchers are described here.)

Staver quotes Senate President Huffman saying he worries that funding for the Fair School Funding Plan might be “unsustainable in the long run.” Isn’t it really the new Ohio budget’s unlimited, uncapped, uncontrollable voucher entitlement funded from the school foundation budget line that is unsustainable?  Legislators have launched this program in a year when legislators bragged about sufficient revenue thanks to a thriving economy.  What will be the consequences in a lean budget year?

As we consider the two primary education provisions in the new Ohio budget, there is reason to celebrate and reason to worry. Clearly public school parents, teachers and citizens who prize the public schools at the center of our communities have a lot of work to do to ensure that in two years, the next session of the legislature will finish up establishing the Fair School Funding Plan that promises adequate school funding, fairly distributed.