Another budget season is upon many states.
For those who care about public education, it’s an important time to watch the politicians like a hawk. Because especially for those red states that are fully immersed in the universal voucher scam being pushed by right-wing billionaires, this is where the rubber hits the road. And where all the false promises and scams get exposed.
It’s also critical to understand all this in light of Trump’s attack on the Department of Education and the federal funding that flows to public schools across the country. Because as I will detail in future posts, the disaster I describe below—the undermining of public schools, giveaways to low-performing for-profit companies, and increase in property taxes—will get far worse under Trump’s and the GOP’s national education plan.
Consider what’s happening in Ohio and other states a sneak preview of a horror movie, produced by Trump, Devos and Linda McMahon.
With the help of former Ohio legislator and public school advocate and expert Steve Dyer (sign up for his Substack here; it’s invaluable), I’m going to present Ohio as a case study of how these right-wing privatization schemes not only destroy public schools and overall outcomes, but also lead to skyrocketing property taxes at the local level (ie. it’s not your local government’s fault—it’s your states' politicians).
I’ll walk you through some slides Steve shared with Blue Ohio last week to illustrate this all clearly:
Point one: Ohio’s Unconstitutional System
Ohio has long had a problem that the state short-shrifted public school funding, relying too much on local property taxpayers to foot the bill, which also creates unequal results. This was the foundation of the Ohio Supreme Court decision in 1997 (called DeRolph) that struck down Ohio’s school funding system as unconstitutional: “Until a complete systematic overhaul of the system is accomplished, it will continue to be far from thorough and efficient and will continue to shortchange our students.”
Point Two: Never Remedied
The Court-ordered overhaul has never taken place on a sustained basis. The 2010-2011 year (Democratic Governor Ted Strickland’s last budget) was the first time on record that the state share of school funding was greater than the local share. But with Republicans in office ever since, that was the high watermark—the state share soon plunged even lower than the level that was ruled unconstitutional. Even with a recent increase due to a bipartisan plan that was finally agreed to (more on that later), the funding breakdown is still as bad as it was when the entire system was declared unconstitutional (and is about to get worse):
Point Three: Less Funding Now than Then
Adjusted for inflation, the amount of state dollars NOW going to public schools is considerably less than when the Supreme Court issued that ruling
Point Four: Explosion in Privatization Funding
Since that decision, one major change that HAS occurred has been, essentially, the creation of two other state-funded school systems: first came a private charter system (so poorly constructed and unregulated it became known as the “Wild West” among nation charter school advocates), followed in more recent years by the exploding universal voucher system—which, believe it or not, is more “wild” and even less accountable than the “Wild West” charter system.
The chart below shows how spending in both systems (blue is charters, red is vouchers) has skyrocketed to over $1 billion each:
So Ohio is basically funding three separate $1 billion-plus systems of education.
Point Five: Public Schools Pay the Price
These two new $1B+ systems have led to a decline in the share of education funding that goes to traditional public schools (the schools the state is constitutionally obligated to support in an efficient and effective manner):
So even though the entire system remains less funded than the Ohio Constitution requires, public school students receive a lower percentage of funds than their percentage of the education population:
Point Six: Far Greater State Support for Private Students
The state provides far greater (per pupil support) to private students via vouchers than traditional public school students:
In some communities, the voucher amount per student can total five or ten times(!) (Upper Arlington, for example, as I explain here) what the state provides to public school students in the same community.
Point Seven: Vouchers Largely Fund Families Who Already Attend and Can Afford Private Schools
This higher level of private voucher funding occurs even though—with the introduction of universal vouchers—a large portion (70% is generally the number in states throughout the country) of voucher recipients are families who were already attending private schools, and could already afford the tuition of that school. That means most vouchers are paying the tuition of families to simply continue to do what they were already doing, and could already afford to do. Think of it as a private tuition rebate the public is paying for.
As Dyer explained to me previously: ““[N]early $9 out of every $10 going to subsidize private school tuitions through regular EdChoice went to subsidize families who could already afford to send their kids to private schools…[M]ore new [] voucher (high school) recipients come from families making more than $150,000 a year than families making less than $120,000 a year.”
Similarly, numerous newspaper investigations have unearthed the reality that the communities that are most utilizing vouchers are the most well-off suburbs of Ohio’s larger cities. The rest of Ohio hardly uses private vouchers, although their tax dollars are paying for them. Most don’t have private schools to begin with.
Point Eight: Privatization Outcomes are NOT Good
Neither the charter school nor private voucher systems are leading to improved results.
Of those students who DO use a voucher to change from a public to a private school (again, most are using the voucher to attend the private school they already attended), data shows that the vast majority go to schools with lower performance than the schools they are leaving:
Why are outcomes worse?
First, for vouchers, there is zero accountability for how these funds are being spent. We have no idea where the money goes, and no way to assess (or assert any control over) how these schools are performing. The politicians in Columbus refuse to seek any accountability on this spending, and refuse to even require these voucher recipient schools to take the same tests as public schools. So it’s now more than $1 billion going out the door annually in a wholly unaccountable way. To make matters worse, this amount of money is fueling a new industry of low-flying for-profit schools that accept vouchers, allowing them to make profits while knowing they will face no accountability for what they do with these funds.
As for charter schools, they have been rife with problems from the outset, fueled a massive scandal (ECOT) that went unaddressed for years because of how much of the money they converted into political donations, and have generated an entire for-profit industry as well. Performance will naturally suffer as a result of all of this.
But perhaps the worst part is that amid the variety of charter schools out there, the state chooses to provide far more funding to the charter schools that perform worse than the ones that perform well.
Here, for example, is the current DeWine proposed budget. Even though it is clear which charters are performing well and which aren’t (most), the state affirmatively chooses to fund those that perform worse—worse than public schools, and worse than the better performing charter schools (which receive less money).
That’s right—they reward the worst-performing charter schools with funding increases:
Point Nine: Resegregation
In addition to draining funds from public schools, and delivering worse results, the privatization of Ohio schools is also resegregating education in Ohio. The students opting to use vouchers turn out to be disproportionately more white than the student population of those districts.
This obviously flies in the face of the original “sales pitch” of vouchers, which was that this was to help kids in “failing urban districts” get more opportunity through private schools. That is NOT what’s happening.
Point Ten: Fueling Higher Property Taxes
The underfunding of public education, and the diversion of funds into the two failing private systems, has driven property taxes skyrocketing throughout the state. That’s because local governments are forced to make up the gap left by the lower share of state support.
In this way, local property taxes are being increased by the statehouse politicians failing to fund public schools. Every time they underfund public schools, every time they impose an unfunded mandate on local school districts, and every time they divert dollars to their failing and reckless privatization experiments, pressure builds to fill the hole through higher property taxes. And they are rising as a result.
This IS the state’s policy.
Here’s how much this is costing you:
And don’t forget, it was the overreliance on local property taxes that was a key reason that the entire system was deemed unconstitutional. The problem is only worse now.
Point Eleven: DeWine Hocus Pocus
DeWine’s current budget is a perfect case study of how all this has worked for years.
As a little background: there was a laudable bipartisan plan agreed to a few years ago that—if fully funded—reverses this direction and achieves the threshold of constitutional support of Ohio public schools. This was not the Democratic plan. But a bipartisan plan agreed to by GOP legislative leadership. That’s why you see the one-time spike in funding by the state in the first chart above.
In his budget proposal, DeWine embraces that plan, which seems good on the surface.
But don’t be fooled….
He doesn’t fund the plan.
Worse, he actually cuts money to the formula that supports public schools, while adding big bucks to more vouchers and charter schools (and as explained above, the poor performing charters get most of the money!?!). (*He does give dollars to “non-formula” aspects of public schools, but that does not have the same impact or certitude of “formula dollars”. The “formula” dollars are what count.).
So if DeWine is committing to the “plan,” but not funding the plan, who does?
As always, local districts do, which means more property taxes. Here’s a chart showing how much his plan is underfunding local districts—know that every minus sign in that fourth column essentially means more property taxes (or local income taxes) over time for you and your community to make up the difference:
These are precisely the budget tricks that, together, have led to an overall decrease in school funding, worse outcomes and higher property taxes—year after year.
Point Twelve: It Will Get Worse
As bad as DeWine’s budget is, it is likely the high water mark for the year. Speaker Matt Huffman announced at the beginning of the year that public school funding is “unsustainable,” and is a voucher zealot, so expect the House to only take things in a worse direction in the coming weeks and months.
Bottom line:
It’s a horrible case study. Depressing.
A state that pioneered public education and a system of local public schools—placing this commitment in the Constitution itself—has tanked that system due to a lack of commitment to public funding and a reckless, pay-to-play driven privatization experiment that has funded worse schools, resegregation, all while depriving public schools of the funds they need to perform as they once did.
As these defunding and reckless experiments have grown, a school system ranked in the top 5 in America in 2010 (according to Education Week), is now mired in the mid-20s. Yet the state’s GOP keeps accelerating the very practices that sparked that calamitous fall. And Governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is already promising to double down on all this failure.
But this is way beyond Ohio.
2023 was actually the year that the universalization of vouchers spread like wildfire across America. As ProPublica summarized: “vouchers have expanded to become available to most or all children in 10 states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.” All of these states are seeing similar impacts from their privatization schemes: huge budget holes risking public education funding, tuition rebates for the private education of well-off families, and scandalous giveaways to unaccountable and poor performing private schools. States Texas and Tennessee.
And Trump’s plan for the Department of Education—and particularly, diverting Title I and IDEA Funds (which support public schools) into even more vouchers—will only make this problem worse throughout the country. I’ll detail how in coming posts.
Make Noise
As I wrote about shortly after the election, Kentucky voters trounced the referendum that would’ve brought universal vouchers to Kentucky. The effort to bring vouchers lost in every county.
This mirrors the result of every referendum that has ever been held on vouchers.
This is a key lesson: the majority of voters support their public schools, and they intuitively know that vouchers and privatization schemes will undermine them. So when the question is called via an up-or-down referendum, they vote it down. Always.
Which tells us: we need to make this issue front and center beyond referenda. We need to make it an issue at the federal level. And especially at the state level, where most of the damage is happening.
We must make sure every voter knows exactly what’s happening to a core public service they value, and make it an issue in every candidate election going forward.
Do that well, and we can turn it around.
Day 94 — March 4, 2025
Trump’s address to Congress was, according to even the Fox News analyst Brit Hume, “the most partisan speech I’ve ever heard a president give.” And it included a non-stop litany of lies and disinformation, so much so that it took CNN’s fact-checker an entire eleven minutes to set the record straight. (We now have two responses to these addresses: the Democratic response, and the even longer fact check). Then there were the things not said—the “reverse lies,” I’d call them—such as claiming to be pursuing cancer cures when it fact Trump is making cures less likely by gutting NIH:
In addition to the lies, the atmosphere and tone felt like an autocrat’s speech. Take this quote about Greenland, for example, voicing an attitude that reflects Putin’s approach to the world—just more openly and aggressively.
Far more dark than even the evening’s speech, Trump engaged in a different autocratic step earlier in the day, threatening colleges and universities that “allow illegal protests.” He threatened to defund such schools, and to arrest and/or deport “[a]gitators” involved in protests.
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