On Wednesday, four key organizations announced ALL in for Ohio Kids, a statewide campaign to demand that the Ohio Senate will pass a major a new school funding formula as part of the FY 2022-23 state budget.
The new coalition brings together four organizations: the Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers, representing public school teachers; the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, pulling together public school parents and community members; and Policy Matters Ohio, adding the weight of complex policy expertise.
A new school funding plan, developed over several years, was passed on April 21st by the Ohio House of Representatives as part of the FY 2022-2023 state budget and submitted to the Ohio Senate. The Ohio Legislature must, by law, come up with a compromise by June 30.
With Ohio’s Republican supermajority House and Senate, you might suppose that members of the Ohio Senate would simply affirm the proposal forwarded by their colleagues in the House. You would be wrong. While the plan was originally sponsored by and developed under the guidance of House Speaker Bob Cupp and passed by the Ohio House in a stand alone bill in December by a vote of 87-9, the Senate Finance Committee Chairman Matt Dolan refused to bring the House bill forward for a vote by the full Senate. Therefore, the bill died at the end of the FY 20-21 legislative session.
The New All In for Ohio Kids Campaign and Policy Matters’ Wendy Patton Release Major Report
Outlining Ohio’s urgent need for the Fair School Funding Plan, Policy Matters’ state fiscal expert Wendy Patton released a position paper as part of the launch of the All in for Ohio Kids Campaign: “For many years Ohio lawmakers have provided neither sufficient nor fair distribution of state support. Even as policymakers have expected public schools to do more, they have cut state aid to public schools over time, by allowing it to be eroded by inflation and diversion of funds to charter schools… and vouchers… As a result, public schools have increasingly relied on local resources, which causes unequal funding…. This is because our state’s school funding system relies heavily on property taxes, which advantages wealthier districts… As corporations eliminated jobs with living wages in Ohio, racial discrimination in employment and government-sanctioned segregation forced Black, Indigenous and other people of color into neighborhoods of concentrated poverty…. Schools in these communities need additional resources, but the declining local tax base cannot generate what’s needed. Many rural and small-town districts have faced economic challenges that make it hard for them to provide local funding.”
Patton outlines what has happened to the state’s level of investment in public schools: “On average, local governments paid for the greater part of school funding in each of the last 40 years but three, 1987-1989. At times, the gap narrowed between state and local share, but the 2006-07 budget halted that progress by eliminating major business taxes and phasing in big state income tax cuts. Gov. Ted. Strickland made positive steps using federal stimulus…. But Gov. John Kasich promptly reversed that effort with a $1.8 billion cut to school funding imposed over the two-year budget of 2012-13. School funding has lagged ever since. By 2020, the state share of school funding had fallen to its lowest point since 1985. Lawmakers…. also changed the formula for granting state aid four times over the past dozen years. Uncertainty in state aid makes planning and staffing hard for districts.”
Although the Ohio Constitution requires the state to establish a “thorough and efficient system” of public schools, and despite that the 1997 Ohio Supreme Court declared the state’s school funding unconstitutional and overly reliant on local property taxes—a decision whose demands have never been met, Patton describes the state’s funding of public education today as “a system of Band-Aids and patches”: “Today there is little connection between the funding of Ohio’s schools and the cost of educating a student: Formula funding is simply frozen at 2019 levels. Lawmakers provided no increase to cover the effect of inflation and the rising cost of education since then. According to projections used in the governor’s budget, between 2019 and 2023, state formula funding for public education will lose over $600 million in value as a result of inflation.”
Patton castigates the legislature for diverting an ever growing amount of state education dollars to charter schools and private school tuition vouchers at the same time Ohio’s legislators have failed to fund the public schools which serve 1.6 million Ohio students. Funding for charter schools is by school district deduction, which counts the student as though enrolled in the public school district, sends the state’s basic aid school funding amount to the public district, but then deducts from the local school district budget the state’s allocation for each charter school student. In many cases, the state charter school deduction from the school district’s budget is significantly more than the district receives in basic aid for that same student. Patton provides an example: “Columbus received $4,815 per student in the 2018-19 school year in state formula funding, but the district had to provide an average of $8,305 per student in the 2018-19 school year to students at charter schools. In other words, for every charter student, Columbus must provide $3,489 more than it receives from the state.”
One of the state’s voucher programs, EdChoice, works the same way. The state sends the school district’s basic aid amount but then deducts $4,650 for every K-8 voucher and $6,000 for every high school student voucher. And because EdChoice voucher qualification rules limit the vouchers only to students living in the attendance area of a school designated by the federal government for Title I, school district deduction EdChoice vouchers are concentrated in areas of family poverty. Here is Patton’s explanation: “The use of vouchers is heavily concentrated in a limited number of districts. Fifteen of the 31 districts that transferred 10% or more of their total state aid to vouchers are located in Cuyahoga County.” Cuyahoga County, an urban county with significant child poverty, includes Cleveland, to which the state has assigned its own voucher program, and several inner-ring suburbs with concentrations of children from poor families who qualify for the EdChoice Program. The irony in the majority of these school districts is that students taking vouchers out of the public system are students who have never been enrolled in public schools. Students already enrolled in private and religious schools are extracting state dollars out of public school districts serving concentrations of poor students, districts where more money is desperately needed for the students who are enrolled.
Patton concludes: The Fair School Funding Plan is based on the actual cost of education…. When fully funded, it would help nearly all public schools by boosting the average state per-pupil aid from $6,835 to $8,459…. A predictable formula would create stability and certainty in planning and hiring… The funding for economically disadvantaged students would increase from $272 to $422 per student…. This will help students experiencing poverty and give needed resources to schools that serve communities where poverty is concentrated.” She adds: “The Fair School Funding Plan… would separate charter and voucher funding from the state’s formula funding system… Charter and voucher programs would… be funded through a separate line item in the state budget.”
What Is Holding Up Support for the Fair School Funding Plan in the Ohio Senate When Public Schools Are Desperately in Need?
Here is the problem: Senate President Matt Huffman’s website defines him this way: “President Huffman is devoted to quality school choices for all families, lowering taxes and reducing regulations on Ohio’s small business.” And the Ohio Coalition for Adequacy and Equity of School Funding quotes Senate Finance Committee Chairman Matt Dolan: “Where a child gets educated is not as important to us as: ‘The child gets educated.'” Huffman and Dolan are committed to marketplace school choice at public expense; neither is committed to public education as one of our most essential community institutions and our mutual obligation to our children.
The All In for Ohio Kids Campaign is all about calling members of the Ohio Senate to uphold the state’s constitutional mandate for adequate public school funding, distributed equitably according to need and considering each school district’s capacity to raise local school taxes. The Ohio Constitution does not provide for diverting public dollars to privately operated charter schools or, as tuition vouchers, to pay for private schooling.
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