This election, many Ohioans will be voting on school levies. Seven school districts in Franklin County alone are asking for additional property tax funding this cycle. A few districts are going back to voters after failing to secure levies in past elections.
Education funding is a complicated and controversial topic, leading one listener to submit a question to 星空无限传媒's Curious Cbus project asking, 鈥淲hatever happened to the Ohio Supreme Court decision that funding public education through property taxes was unconstitutional?鈥�
To tackle that question, Curious Cbus editor Michael De Bonis spoke with the host of All Sides with Anna Staver and 星空无限传媒's resident education funding expert, Anna Staver. She makes sense of education funding by using a quirky metaphor: it鈥檚 like baking a cake.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
De Bonis: This listener's question mentions an Ohio Supreme Court case. This is the so-called DeRolph case, a series of decisions the court made about 20 years ago. Can you walk us through that?
Staver: This is a case that goes all the way back to 1991. It gets its name from a Perry County student named Nathan DeRolph. The plaintiffs in this case argued that the way we funded public schools violated our state's constitution.
One thing you need to know is that every state鈥檚 constitution says something different about education. Our constitution has this line 鈥淭he General Assembly will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.鈥� DeRolph v. State of Ohio was really about what that sentence meant. What is a thorough and efficient system of common schools?
The plaintiffs said relying heavily on property taxes was educating by zip code. The rich districts spent more. They had better buildings, teachers and technology. There was a lot of conversation about building quality. And in 1994, a Perry County judge ruled that education is a fundamental right in the state of Ohio and the legislature had to do a better job financing it.
It was a landmark ruling, but it didn't make its way to the Supreme Court until 1998. That鈥檚 when the justices finally said our system was unconstitutional and ordered a 鈥渃omplete systematic overhaul.鈥�
You鈥檇 think that would be the end of the story, right? It was not because the case bounced back and around through a whole bunch of state and federal hoops.
The justices were asked to reconsider. They reconsider again in 2002. The plaintiffs file a motion for compliance in 2003. And essentially, this has been a big question ever since. Has the General Assembly done enough to be in compliance? Because the court never said you can't rely on property taxes to an extent. What it said was the formula in the DeRolph case wasn't fair, not that property taxes could never be a part of the equation.
De Bonis: In the wake of those DeRolph decisions, how did the state respond? What sort of moves did they make?
Staver: They did a bunch of stuff. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the construction of school buildings. That was important for rural and Appalachian schools. There were a lot of districts with 100-year-old buildings with leaky roofs and bad textbooks and mold. So, there was a huge investment into bringing school buildings physically up to where they should be.
The state also sent more per-pupil funding. We're going to get into that more later. But just a couple of years ago, we rewrote our school funding formula, and that represented many, many years of work with public education advocates and state lawmakers. It took almost a decade to get this new formula passed.
De Bonis: What are the major sources of funding for K-12 education in Ohio currently?
Staver: There are three major funding sources: the federal government, the state government and your local property taxes. The federal piece is pretty small. It's about 10 to 12% of what it costs to educate a student. So the federal government鈥揳s surprising as that might be鈥搊nly kicks in a little bit, right?
The rest of that 90% is split between the state and local districts. The split is determined through a formula, and that formula looks at things like incomes and property values in a district. The richer the district, the less money the state gives, which means local property owners pay higher taxes.
De Bonis: This sounds like a pretty complicated formula. As a way to explain it, you've said that school funding is like a cake, right?
Staver: This is how I think about school funding. I want you to imagine a layer cake, whatever flavor floats your boat. But picture all those layers separated by frosting.
The bottom layer in the cake is what it costs to educate an average Ohio student. Not a gifted kid. Not a kid with special needs. The average student in the average school, that's your bottom layer. And you get that amount of money for every single student in your district.
All the layers on top are for all of those special cases: ESL students, gifted students, students who live in low-income families, students with learning disabilities, students who are on the autism spectrum. The size of those layers is based on how many of those children are in your district.
So when you add it all up, when the cake is baked, that's what Ohio says it should cost your district to educate all of its students.
Now, here's the thing. The state doesn鈥檛 give districts the entire cake. This is where we get into property taxes. It's called state share of instruction.
It's how big of a slice I'm going to give you as the district. Olentangy鈥揳 school district north of where we are in Columbus鈥搕hey get a pretty small slice of cake from the state. It costs about $13,000 to educate an elementary school student in Olentangy. The state kicks in around $1,000.
Most of Olentangy鈥檚 cake is baked by local residents, which is why it has higher property taxes than folks in Columbus.
For the Columbus City Schools district, the state cuts them a bigger slice of cake.
That's how it works. We figure out how much cake you need to educate all your kids. And then the state says, 鈥淥kay, this is the slice I'm going to give you. If you want to fill in the rest, you鈥檝e got to bake it yourself.鈥�
De Bonis: How does the state determine the size of the slice of cake for each district?
Staver: This is part of that new fair school funding formula. It looks at two criteria. They look at property values, i.e. how much the homes and businesses and things are worth. And they also look at income.
This determines where you fall on the spectrum of high-wealth to low-wealth districts. Then, they decide how big of a slice to give you.
De Bonis: Sticking with the cake analogy, you wanted to say something about the 鈥渋ngredients,鈥� right?
Staver: Yes, the cake analogy also works in one other way.
Anyone who bakes a cake knows that throwing a bunch of stuff in a bowl without measuring is going to produce terrible results. You're going to get a pretty awful cake if you don't measure it out.
Public school advocates say this is what Ohio has traditionally done. The numbers we've come up with for, say, educating students in poverty don't have much basis in reality.
They're essentially saying our recipes are all wrong and our cakes are bad. And that's a really big deal.
When we wrote the new funding formula, we did try to improve the recipes.
For example, we stopped using a statewide average for an average kid in an average school. Instead, we created averages for all 600 districts to be more accurate with that base layer recipe.
We also requested a bunch of studies on these different 鈥渃ategoricals,鈥� that's the fancy word for those top layers. We commissioned studies on what these different layers might cost. But there's a lot of fighting in the legislature about how those studies get conducted and whether they're accurate, because if the recipe is wrong, the cake doesn't come out right, essentially.
De Bonis: How does education funding work in other states around the country and how does Ohio rank in terms of per-pupil funding and funding equity?
Staver: This is a complicated question because there's really two things going on there. In terms of per pupil funding, just how much we're spending on kids, a lot of studies put us right around 20th in the nation. So that would be higher than Michigan, West Virginia, Kentucky, but lower than Pennsylvania.
Funding equity is an entirely different question. It asks: Is funding adequate for students from all backgrounds to achieve common outcome goals? It's not a question of how much per kid, but whether we've developed the right recipes.
Here鈥檚 the complication. There are schools in Olentangy who spend way less per pupil than Columbus, like I'm talking elementary schools that spend $10,000 less per student. And it's not because the kids in Olentangy are underfunded. It's one of the highest-performing districts in the state. It's because those students have very different needs.
So even though they're $10,000 apart in funding, that doesn't mean one is underfunded and one is overfunded.
There's this annual study from the University of Miami. It puts Ohio 21st overall for funding equity, but I think that number doesn't give you the whole story.
We ranked high on fiscal effort, the amount of money we're giving out. We got medium on statewide adequacy, which is how much spending you get compared to the estimated amount to achieve average test scores.
But we ranked low on equal opportunity. We were actually 46th for equitable distribution of funding. That means our poorest schools and our richest schools are just fundamentally funded differently.
De Bonis: Looking back at this landmark Ohio Supreme Court case and where we are now, can we say that Ohio's education funding model is constitutional?
Staver: That is the billion-dollar question. It honestly depends on who you ask. Everyone agrees that the fair school funding plan was a win and a step in the right direction.
Now we're entering into year four of implementation. They thought it would take six years to get fully funded. You have to ramp up to that. So, everyone thinks that was a good step because it made some significant changes that we've been talking about.
But Ohio's public school advocates say it's not enough. They worry about those recipes, whether we're actually trying to understand what it costs to educate children in poverty.
They also have a lot of questions about vouchers. Now, we did change the way we funded vouchers in that formula, but we've also gone to universal vouchers, and we're spending about $1 billion a year on kids who go to private schools. There's a whole court case about it.
When you talk to conservatives like Senate President Matt Huffman, he says, absolutely, this is constitutional. We invested heavily in school buildings. We rewrote the formula. He says that if we took this to court, it would be judged constitutional.
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