I do.

But I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with the Columbus Dispatch story the other day about a proposal to allow the state to convert struggling traditional public schools with Charter Schools.

See, the story links to Ohio’s official list of Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CIS) Schools, which does indeed reveal that 117 of Ohio’s 2,978 traditional public school buildings qualify as needing these interventions. And yes, 34 of those 2,978 traditional public schools have been on the list since 2018.

But the list also includes Ohio Charter Schools. And wow. Does it include Ohio Charter Schools.

In the 2024-2025 school year, there were 340 Ohio charter schools in operation. And 114 of them ended up on the CSI list. Nearly 6 in 10 were on that list since 2018. For those who are visual learners, here’s what the percentage of CSI traditional and Charter buildings look like compared with their overall number.

Um. Yeah.

Tell me again why the state should be suggesting to anyone that Charter Schools have the solution to fixing what ails struggling traditional public schools when nearly 1 in 5 of Ohio’s Charter Schools have been on the state’s lowest performing schools list for 8 years?

I thought so.

In the Dispatch story, Akron School Board President Barbara Sykes, who witnessed Ohio’s Charter School explosion as a member of the Ohio General Assembly, asked the most relevant question: “How did you determine that the charter school would have a better outcome than the public school?”

What’s amazing to me is there is no follow up on that question in the story.

In fact, I would argue that be the only story.

And where are the legislators drafting bills to require any Ohio Charter School that finds itself on this list to be taken over by Ohio’s Traditional Public Schools, the way the state wants Charters to take over Traditionals?

Because it sure seems like going in reverse would be better for kids than what these clowns want to do.

Or how about this one: more than 90 percent of all so-called Dropout Recovery Charter Schools are on the list.

That’s right. Take a look below:

And before you complain about the extraordinarily challenged kids these schools educate, need I remind you that in order to qualify as a Dropout Recovery Charter School in Ohio, you only need to be one of the following:

“(1) Any community school that operates a drug recovery program in cooperation with a court; or

(2) Any community school in which the majority of students (emphasis added) are enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program operated by the school that meets the following criteria:

(a) The program serves only students not younger than sixteen years of age and not older than twenty-one years of age;

(b) The program enrolls students who, at the time of their initial enrollment, either, or both, are at least one grade level behind their cohort age groups or experience crises that significantly interfere with their academic progress such that they are prevented from continuing their traditional programs.”

So less than 50% of your students do not have to be struggling in any way and NONE have to be actual dropouts, the way you and I define them.

Even if you eliminate the “Dropout Recovery” schools from the equation, there are still more than 15% of Ohio Charter schools on this list — more than 5x the rate of Ohio’s Traditional Public Schools overall, and a slightly higher rate than Ohio’s Big 8 urban districts.

I thought these things were supposed to be decidedly better than urban districts, not slightly worse. Since when did “we produce similar results” become the battle cry of the great Ohio Education Reform Movement?

Which tells me this: Ohio’s Charter Schools shouldn’t be offered as a solution to really anything education related1.

We’ve had these things in Ohio for 30 years now. What have we gotten from them? Let’s take a look:

• More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list

• More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list

• About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018

• More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed

• They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings

• They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend

• They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives

• They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland)

• They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.

• Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools

• That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students

Charter Schools are now a $1.6 billion a year program, with only expansion and zero additional accountability being proposed by the current crowd at the statehouse and Governor. That money comes directly out of the same funding pot meant to fund kids in Ohio’s traditional public schools — preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to traditional public school students.

It’s time to reign in this budget hog and start giving it lots of GLP-1s.

Like LOTS of GLP-1s.

Like maybe ALL the GLP-1s.

One of the big things EdChoice providers pitched their parents at the time of EdChoice Expansion was how this program would allow them to grant their teachers a more competitive salary. Here’s how Immaculate Heart of Mary put it in their presentation:

I wanted to see if that actually happened, but it’s impossible using state data because they don’t track it.

However, there are some private schools that are unionized. The largest of these private school teachers’ unions is the one governing Ohio’s largest Diocese — Columbus.

And while the state does NOT track private school teacher salaries, fortunately for transparency, the teachers’ union in Columbus does post its salary schedules — yet another reason to be pro-union, amirite?

Anyway, what I did is look at how their salary schedules changed between 2019-2020 to 2024-2025 (because that’s the last year we have complete EdChoice data). In order to track how Columbus’ private school teachers’ salaries were moving prior to the real huge, infusion of taxpayer funding, I went back as far as the 2015-2016 school year to track raises from then as well.

In addition, I looked at the change in unconstitutional EdChoice taxpayer tuition subsidies from Franklin County school districts between the 2019-2020 and 2024-2025 school years. Here’s that data:

At the end of the day, here’s what I found1:

Something even more remarkable? Starting teacher salaries in Columbus’ Catholic schools are actually growing slower than they did prior to the unconstitutional EdChoice explosion — likely because the schools have decided to sacrifice their starting teachers’ EdChoice -fueled increases to give bigger boosts to the salaries of mid to later career educators for retention purposes. While the schools now clearly have enough taxpayer money to bump starting salaries higher, they did not do that.

It’s important to point out that this is an estimate only. And it assumes that the Columbus Catholic schools only take kids from Franklin County (which can be inferred by the contracts’ description of the pay scale as “the basic salary paid a full-time teacher in the Franklin County schools in the Diocese of Columbus”). So no kids from surrounding counties are assumed here, even though plenty do attend Diocesan schools.

So that percentage is likely even a little less.

In addition, these salary increases are likely among the highest private school teacher increases in the state because most private school teachers are not in a union. So the chances of non-union teachers garnering larger increases than union ones aren’t great.

For example, Ohio’s Charter School teachers (nearly all of whom are not unionized) make about 37% less, on average, than Ohio’s traditional public school teachers. This, despite the state providing nearly double the per pupil aid to Charters that Traditional districts receive.

I digress.

Back to the private school side, the Cleveland Diocese said in its video explaining the boon EdChoice would be for teachers that 95 percent of the Cleveland Diocese teachers make less than the average public school district teacher ($69,081 at the time) and more than half in 2023 made between $25,000 to $40,000 a year.

“But universal EdChoice will change all that!” their announcer proclaims.

It made a relatively minor, 3-5% difference in the largest, unionized group of Catholic School educators in the state.

What do you think it’s going to to for the Cleveland Diocese where only its high school teachers are unionized?

Once again, this is only an estimate. I wish we actually knew how private school teacher salaries have changed post-unconstitutional EdChoice explosion.

However, despite trying to convince parents that their unconstitutional, taxpayer funding tuition subsidies were going to boost teacher salaries, it looks like about 95 percent of your money has gone elsewhere.

Where? The state says you have no right to know.

Yeah. Maybe we should.

I have to admit that property taxes make my eyes glaze over. There are so many ins and outs to Ohio’s system that I just sometimes have to take a break and lots of headache medicine.

Not really, but you get the point.

So I wanted to try to address some of the chatter out there about how school districts are allegedly gaming the property tax system to somehow cry poor so they can manipulate well-meaning homeowners into raising their property taxes again (because who doesn’t like running levy campaigns every two years! It’s so much fun dividing communities against each other, amirite!) — an argument that Ohio State PoliSci Prof Vladimir made not long ago, which I took some time knocking around last week.

There are several issues with Ohio’s property tax system, and if you really want to get into Ohio property tax details, I’d highly recommend reading anything by Howard Fleeter.

Guy’s an Ohio Property Tax savant.

But I wanted to try to simplify it for everyone (even Kogan, if that’s possible?). So I decided to take on the HB 920 issue.

What is HB 920? Simple. It’s the reason you’ve had more property tax levies in Ohio than any other state since 1976 (about 12,000 or so). And it’s not even close.

Why does it do that? Because the provision, which voters put into the constitution about 50 years ago, says that any gain in property value a home accrues will not mean higher property taxes get paid by that homeowner. The county has to go in and lower the tax rate for that home so the school district, park district, whatever collects the same amount of property tax that it did when the levy was initially passed. That’s why you see some crazy disparities between voted and effective tax rates.

For example, in my hometown of Hudson, there are 118 voted mills (the property tax measure we use). Meaning without any reductions, a homeowner would pay $4,130 for every $100,000 of value1. Instead, they pay at a rate of 53 mills. So they’ll pay $1,855 a year — less than 1/2 of the voted tax rate.

Even if your home was worth $100,000 10 years ago and is worth $300,000 now, your property tax bill will be pretty much the same, assuming no new levies. You’ll have to pay more on a few of those mills2 , but overall, your taxes will be essentially flat and not go up 200% like your property value did absent any new levies.

I want to reiterate that Ohio is the only place where this happens. And what it means is that school districts have to go for more frequent levies and at larger rates to make up for those reductions in HB 920.

Like, 12,000 more levies.

So here’s what I decided to ask:

Unfortunately, the Ohio Department of Taxation does not have easily obtainable tax data by school district for 1975. The farthest back their data goes is 1986, which was 10 years after HB 920 passed.

But for this exercise, I decided to just start at 1986. The average tax rate was likely a little lower in 1986 than 1975 (according to Fleeter’s statewide analysis), so this will ensure a pretty conservative estimate. If the tax rates were higher in 1975, then obviously school districts would raise more today than this estimate will show. But since we don’t have district-level data from 1975, I’m going with 1986.

Caveat over.

So, what would have happened to Ohio’s property taxes if HB 920 hadn’t been there and no school district raised a single new levy on residential property since 19863?

I took what every school district’s effective tax rate was in 1986 and applied it to the district’s taxable value in 2025. To be clear, there are a few school districts that were merged, dissolved or otherwise I couldn’t quite match. But I was able to match more than 600 school districts. Here is the top line:

If you want to see how each district did, look below:

Several districts are raising about the same amount of money. But instead of having zero levies since 1986 to raise that money, which HB 920 prevented them from doing, there have been about 265 school district operating levies a year. That’s 265 times that school districts are forced to divide their communities over property taxes. And they have to do this every few years.

You’ll also see that the Major Urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) have the largest variance — because their valuations have climbed the slowest. So they’ve had to go for the most frequent, biggest levies to keep pace.

Meanwhile, Wealthy Suburban districts are next highest — because their property valuations have skyrocketed, so they’re able to pass levies and get additional money to pay for additional opportunities that urban districts can’t.

Meanwhile, rural Appalachian districts have mostly stuck around the same as simple growth because they’ve almost all hit the 20-mill floor — at which point districts get growth on their levies.

Here’s something else.

In 1986, only 5 school districts raised income tax revenue4.

Today? There are 223 districts who now raise $737.7 million of income tax.

Let’s do a little math here, shall we?

Combining the property with income tax changes, districts are raising about $2.5 billion more today than they would have if the districts hadn’t raised a single new property tax since 1986 and HB 920 didn’t exist.

Before you yell, “Greedy commie bastards!”, let me give you this additional nugget:

Ohio’s own school funding formula states that Ohio is now $2.7 billion short of full funding — just about the additional amount school districts are now raising locally above what simple growth would have gotten them.

So it appears that school districts are raising the state funding shortfall locally.

Amazing, isn’t it? That Ohio school districts’ property tax frequency and growth can be almost entirely tied to two things: HB 920 and the failure of the state to adequately fund public schools for 30 years.

Not greedy teacher unions.

Not swollen administrative budgets.

Not tricky school treasurers.

None of that crap.

Just state policy decisions that stifle school districts’ ability to raise local revenue, forcing them to go to the ballot more than 12,000 times since HB 920 passed. All to raise enough money to cover 1) what HB 920 wouldn’t let them cover and 2) what the state has failed to provide students.

Oh yeah. One more thing.

In 1986, Ohio school districts raised $1.03 billion in Tangible Personal Property (TPP) taxes. Wanna guess how much they’re raising today?

$0.

That’s right. The TPP was supposed to be replaced by the Commercial Activity Tax (CAT) when it was phased out starting in 2005. However, the CAT never fully replaced the TPP and the state stopped directly replacing the TPP money with CAT money all together in 20185.

So when you fold in the $1.03 billion loss in TPP, you’re looking at local school districts only raising about $1.5 billion more than they would have if they had frozen their 1986 property tax rates and HB 920 didn’t exist. That’s $1.2 billion less than what the Fair School Funding Plan says the state is short.

This $1.2 billion most likely will be represented by reductions in school programming — districts making cuts, in other words. So they haven’t been able to make up for the losses from big state policy decisions, even though they’re raising more money than simple growth would have provided. Instead, they’ve had to cut programming — a fact all of us who have kids in schools have experienced directly.

One way to look at this $1.2 billion difference is as a lost opportunity cost for three generations of Ohio kids. All caused by three state policy decisions6:

1. HB 920

2. Failing to fully fund its school funding model

3. Eliminating TPP without replacing it

So whenever you hear that bullshit “schools are greedy” or “schools are making things seem worse than they are to get more money” argument, remember this very simple fact:

What have they done instead? Forked over billions of of our tax dollars to privately run, mostly failing charter schools and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies for millionaires, not a penny of which has ever been publicly audited.

How much do those cost? About $2.5 billion — a similar amount to how short the state is on paying for its school funding model, which also nearly matches the amount of additional local revenue school districts have raised in excess of simple property value growth since 1986.

Sometimes these things are complex and complicated.

This, my friends, ain’t that.

Ohio’s public school districts overall have been responsible stewards of public money — don’t let anyone tell you they haven’t. Are there occasional problems in public school stewardship? Of course there are, just like there are in any system of humans interacting with money (Enron, Worldcom, Madoff, Lehman Brothers, Crypto, etc.).

But because public school districts are publicly audited and are accountable to publicly elected bodies that meet in the open, we find out about these miscreants early on, shut them down and return responsible stewardship.

We don’t get rid of public schools because some treasurer makes off with the district credit card. That’s batshit. But that’s what anti-public school district advocates desperately want you to think.

Don’t.

It’s pretty clear.

Pretty simple.

Pretty obvious.

Pretty sad.

And I don’t know about you, but for me?

Pretty damn enraging.

It’s been awhile, Fordham.

I have a history with the Fordham Institute — even penning a joint blog with one of the organization’s researchers some time back.

So I decided to take a look at what they’ve been doing recently. And lo, and behold, Ohio State University Political Science Professor Vladimir Kogan just wrote about how we shouldn’t blame EdChoice tuition subsidies for school district financial problems.

You’ll never guess who he blames. Of course. It’s those greedy school districts again. As it always is with these people.

See, Ohio school enrollment has dropped over the last 15 years and school district employment has ticked up at the same time. Must be greed, not need, right?

Let’s debunk Prof. Kogan’s alleged “debunking” of public school advocates’ arguments in turn. I gotta admit. I kinda miss doing this!

First things first

Let me say right off the top that Ohio’s own school funding formula says that Ohio students are receiving about $2.7 billion fewer state dollars than they need … even with the enrollment drop! So the enrollment thing isn’t even really a thing because the state’s formula quite literally IS the thing.

One more item. 2010 was the height of the Great Recession. I know. I was there. In the legislature. Writing the state’s school funding formula. We had to cut state funding for schools that year because we had no money. Federal money saved the day.

So to use 2010 as a starting point as Kogan does throughout his piece is nuts. Because the assumption he’s making is that our fiscal house was in order then and isn’t now.

In fact, the economic situation today is far better than 2010 when we were literally losing $250 million a month in income tax revenue.

You know how else I know we’re better off economically today than 2010? Because the Evidence Based Model of school funding I drafted was $3 billion short of what students needed. So we proposed a 10-year phase in of the EBM. The Fair School Funding Plan phase in — for less money than EBM — was supposed to be 6 years.

So Kogan’s whole assumption here than 2010 was a reasonable baseline is bonkers to me, as someone who was actually there doing this stuff, because staffing levels from 2010 were, um, understaffed to begin with!

Anyway, let’s have some fun with his argument, shall we?

Point #1: Ohio’s declining enrollment should mean declining cost

This enrollment drop thing does a lot of Kogan’s heavy lifting. He says that while school district enrollment has dropped by 15 percent between 2010 and 2025, district employment has increased by 3 percent.

See?

There isn’t a 1:1 ratio, guys, so something nefarious or at least fiscally irresponsible is happening because employment hasn’t dropped by the same (or very nearly the same) percentage!

As ridiculous as that sounds, if you think about it for a even a scant moment, that’s exactly what this actual Ohio State Professor is arguing. Though, I suppose we should give him credit for not saying it directly. He’s merely implying that school districts should see an equal, or substantially equal, drop in their employees.

See, here’s the thing. This Ohio State Professor doesn’t know how to count kids.

I swear to God. He doesn’t know how to count.

Which is why when you actually look at enrollment numbers, here’s what you get:

That’s a 12.9 percent enrollment drop, not the 15 percent Kogan mentions. Why is Kogan’s number so much lower? Because he used Average Daily Membership, not headcounts for the last few years. ADM is always lower than actual enrollment for a variety of accounting reasons I won’t bore you to explain1. However, even the Ohio Department of Education’s2 spreadsheets warn researchers that “This data is NOT equivalent to the ADM (average daily membership) that is used for funding purposes.”

Yes. The Department put NOT in ALLCAPS. So you wouldn’t miss it.

Yet this OSU Prof did. He missed the ALLCAPS (or he didn’t bother getting each spreadsheet, instead relying on AI bots or something?)

So he artificially lowered the last few years’ public school district enrollment to inflate the enrollment drop by a couple percentage points.

Why would he do that?

Well, here’s the population of people age 5 to 17 for those same years:

They look pretty similar, don’t they? The lines, I mean.

Nearly all the student population loss in Ohio’s public school districts can, in fact, be attributed to the loss in overall student population3.

So it’s not that families and students are abandoning public schools at all, actually, which is certainly what Kogan and others want you to infer. It’s that we have fewer kids today than 15 years ago.

Which brings me back to EdChoice. See, Kogan claims that public school advocates are arguing that EdChoice is draining kids from school districts and he claims those arguments are bunk.

Which would be true … if we were arguing that.

But we’re not.

Quite the opposite, in fact. From the beginning, we’ve been arguing that this money is simply subsidizing private school tuition for parents who can already afford to send their kids to private school because they are currently sending their kids to private schools — something proven by the private schools’ own presentations to parents explaining EdChoice, as I demonstrated in the Mustang Trilogy

This is a really long-winded way of saying he is simply misrepresenting our actual argument, which is that the money is being drained away from kids in public schools to pay for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies.

Point #2: Vouchers have not caused a drop in funding for public school districts

This is what Kogan and his ilk simply do not understand, or (more likely) do understand but deliberately ignore:

I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this, but this inconvenient fact is always ignored by these guys. Probably because they know it’s such a problem for them constitutionally.

If you are not fully funding the educations of public school students out of that pot (which the state is clearly failing to do), while you are exploding funding for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies from that same pot, it’s a math problem.

THAT is what Judge Jaiza Page found compelling in her ruling last year calling EdChoice unconstitutional, not as Kogan so dismissively put it: “the mere possibility that voucher funding would’ve been redirected to public schools, no matter how unlikely, appeared to have been sufficient to convince Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page when she moved to block the EdChoice program last summer.”

No, buddy. It’s the fact that the money literally comes out of the same funding line that convinced Judge Page. But go ahead. Keep insulting the Judge’s intelligence. I’m sure that’ll go over great in court.

See, there’s no nebulous guessing here that voucher money would have otherwise been used to fund public school students.

It literally would have been … because it’s the same funding line!

Now if Kogan took one more step and started supporting funding these things out of their own line item, we might be getting somewhere. But somehow they never do quite get there, do they?

Point #3: School Districts underestimated how much state funding they would receive on their 5-year forecasts, so EdChoice hasn’t hurt them.

This is so silly, it’d be funny if it weren’t portrayed as Kogan’s big Gotcha! moment.

Ohio’s 5-year forecasts (which are ridiculous since state funding is only done on two-year cycles, but I digress) are estimates. And they are notoriously pessimistic. Why? Because school district treasurers have had it drilled into them to be conservative from birth, it seems. To be fair, this pessimism is due to the state screwing them over for so many years.

But is it surprising that a group of folks who are trained to be conservative and pessimistic in their estimates end up producing conservative and pessimistic estimates?

No.

In fact, it should be something for Kogan and his friends to champion as fiscally responsible!

Ohio’s five-year forecasts are bullshit, as any school treasurer will tell you. Because beyond the biennial budget, they are simply guessing. And the fact that state aid comes in higher than a conservative guess from five years earlier shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Unless you’re an Ohio State PoliSci Prof, apparently.

Let’s look at the actual money, shall we, as I did a few weeks ago.

Remember that all these increases are coming out of the same pot of money!

Kids in public schools are getting 14.4 percent more state aid in 2026-2027 than they did in 2020-2021. But private schools are getting 224 percent more and Charter Schools are getting almost 50 percent more.

Just in terms of overall share of the state aid, kids in public schools will get about 72 percent of the state aid this school year.

Mind you, kids in public schools make up 83 percent of students enrolled in all Ohio educational settings. And they only get 72 percent of the money the state spends on K-12 education.

In 2020-2021, they got about 80 percent. Still less than their enrollment share, but a little better.

The inflation rate since 2020-2021 is 28%.

That means that the state of Ohio has kept up with about half the inflation rate for kids in public school districts.

But please, Prof. Kogan, tell me more about how 5-year forecasts coming in under actual funding levels proves that state aid is working out great for kids in public schools?

Point #4 Public School Employment is up while enrollment is down

Another bullshit Gotcha! here.

Let’s dispense of this argument with a little bit of math, shall we?

Ok. The average Ohio school district had 2,798 students in 2010. The average Ohio school district had 2,453 students in 2025. So that’s a drop of 345 students. Let’s assume each district has 13 grades for K-12. So that’s 26.53 students per grade.

Kogan’s argument is this: there should be an employment drop commensurate with the enrollment drop.

See, here’s the thing the OSU Prof misses: those 26.53 students are, um, spread throughout the grade!

So depending on how many classrooms of students you have, that could be as few as 2 or 3 students per classroom, or maybe as many as 5 or 6.

So let’s say it’s the larger number for argument’s sake and you lop off a teacher per grade. The average number of teachers per school district in 2010 was 173 — a reminder that 173 teachers was understaffed in 2010, according to the state’s own funding formula. So now you have, what, maybe 6-12 fewer teachers, depending on the already understaffed school district?

Is that going to have the massive ripple effect on the administrative need that Kogan seems to think it should? Are you having to close buildings because you lose a classroom worth of students in each grade in an already understaffed building?

Again, it depends on the district.

But on average? No.

And this gets back to what I mentioned earlier — his assumption that we had employment levels right in 2010. We did not. The state’s formula then had a $3 billion shortfall (about $4.5 billion in inflation adjusted dollars). So if we were understaffing public education in 2010, we’re certainly not overstaffing it now, even if overall employment has slightly ticked up.

Let’s look at the expenditure data to test this, shall we?

If you look at what school districts spent per equivalent pupil in 2012 (the state didn’t use the Expenditure Flow Model until then) vs. 2025, what you’ll find is that, adjusted for inflation, overall spending was up about 10 percent, but that wasn’t driven by a spike in administrators, as Kogan and others try implying all the time.

More than half of the increase can be accounted for in Pupil, Staff and Operations Support Services increases. The largest single dollar increase was still in Instruction, though. Administrative costs grew at the second smallest dollar amount during the period.

The bottom line is that a small percentage of the expenditure pot has been removed from instruction and re-allocated to pupil support services (counseling, health, psychologists, etc.). Everywhere else, the share of the spend remained pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago.

So his argument, both stated and implied, that school districts are bloated because they have more employees despite having fewer students and more of those employees are administrators, is simply bunk.

Again, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here that the Fair School Funding Plan — the state’s own funding formula — says the state is spending $2.7 billion less than what students need, even with enrollment drops.

How could that be, you ask? Because we’ve never properly staffed or funded public education, as the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four different times.

But, like Kogan, let’s ignore that rather major point.

How districts are spending money hasn’t changed much during that period, and if anything they’ve had to sacrifice some instructional spend to improve student support (or wraparound) services.

And how has all of this been paid for? With larger and more frequent property tax levies because the state is underfunding its own formula to pay for unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies for millionaires. That’s what happens when you take nearly $2.5 billion from the pot meant to fund public school students and instead send it to privately run charter schools and unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidies.

It’s really quite simple, I think.

One more thing: As the parent of a fourth-year Ohio State Engineering student, I sure am glad he’s not in PoliSci.

Which is why I’ve always said that if the robed politicians on the Ohio Supreme Court decide to ignore the Constitution and keep the unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy in place, the best way to minimize its effect on public school students is to require accountability for private schools.

Because they want zero.

Always have.

It’s why they’ve never been audited. Or why they get to pick the tests their students take. Though it is interesting that, despite the fact that no students getting publicly subsidized tuition were tested before I inserted the testing provision into House Bill 1 in 2009, the provision requiring subsidized students get tested remains in law — perhaps the last remnant of the historic, and national award-winning bill (informally bearing my name1) that was the original fix to Ohio’s unconstitutional school funding system.

Here’s the problem, though. There aren’t report cards outlining how private school students are faring on these tests the way there are on public school students, even though now at the Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Cuyahoga Falls, the public fully pays for their students’ tuitions in many cases.

IHMS is becoming a poster child of sorts for all that’s wrong with Ohio’s taxpayer tuition subsidy program, what with their principal and pastor both bragging on social media about their awesome Mustangs while they’re admitting that taxpayer subsidies are allowing them to re-direct Parish resources to wealthier students and away from poorer ones.

We know they’re good at car shopping, especially as taxpayers are forced to unconstitutionally subsidize their school to the tune of $1.5 million a year.

But how do those students actually perform?

First of all, I want to be clear that it is really difficult to do apples-to-apples comparisons on state tests administered to Ohio’s public school students and students receiving unconstitutional tuition subsidies.

What we can do, though, is see how each sector performs on their tests and whether they are over or underperforming their school’s demographic makeup. So it’s not looking at what percentage of students in each school are testing proficient or better. It’s whether those students’ scores are outperforming their demographic makeup. For as we have known for years, standardized test scores are dictated as much by their takers’ wealth as their takers’ learning.

First of all, let’s look at Cuyahoga Falls City Schools’ performance. Again, they’re taking the rigorous state tests.

Here’s what we see in their scores and their change between the 23-24 school year and 24-25 school year (the only two years that we can compare with IHMS because those are the only two years of testing we have on IHMS):

Looks like you’re looking at some drops in performance among the grades, right? So bad news for Cuyahoga Falls?

But now, let’s take a look at Cuyahoga Falls’ demographic makeup.

In 2023-2024, 54.5 percent of CFCS’s students were economically disadvantaged. In 2024-2025, 63.6 percent were. While that jump is largely attributable to a change in the way that economically disadvantaged students are counted. However, it is fair to assume that 50 percent of the demographic change was due to real poverty change, not just accounting.

So what does that do to CFCS’s performance2? It boosts the percentage score increase by 1.4 percent, which means that the following occurs:

In other words, the drop in performance from 2023-2024 to 2024-2025 in the Falls can be attributed almost entirely to the demographic shift. As poverty goes up, performance should go down. In the Falls, though, performance actually did go up, despite poverty increasing in the district3.

Let’s look at IMHS now, shall we?

First, their demographic change:

As you can see, the opposite happened in IMHS. There are only 15 of 282 EdChoice students that are low-income qualified now. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were 51. That’s a huge shift away from low income students. Which means we should see a corresponding test score improvement, right?

Welp, not exactly.

Instead, there were significant test score drops at IMHS, despite that significant increase in percentage of EdChoice students who were not classified as low income.

Applying the same weighting to IMHS that was applied to CFCS indicates an even worse outcome for IMHS — an adjusted drop of 3.1 percent.

So what’s the bottom line on the performance?

Cuyahoga Falls City Schools saw an increase in Economically Disadvantaged students and still improved their test scores when adjusting for that, or at least outperformed expectations. Meanwhile, IMHS saw an increase in wealthier students, yet saw a significant performance drop among their EdChoice students’ scores.

At the end of the day, here’s what we know about IMHS:

1. Starting in 2023-2024, they’re received about $1.5 million a year from taxpayers through the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy program — an amount so large that nearly all their students’ tuitions are completely paid for by taxpayers.

2. Their top administrators drive newer Mustangs.

3. Their parish resources have shifted from predominantly helping the school’s poorer students to exclusively helping the school’s wealthier ones.

4. Their EdChoice students’ performance has gotten worse since they’ve started getting the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies, despite their student population getting wealthier.

5. We have no idea how much of the $400,000-$800,000 of Parish and Cleveland Diocese money the school says EdChoice has freed up goes to students versus overhead (or Mustangs), though judging by the students’ performance drop, I’m guessing it didn’t go to help kids much.

6. We have no idea how this school spends its money. And that’s by design.

There are more private schools getting at least 70 percent of their students on unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies than there are public school districts. So you know this is going on throughout the state.

What started a week ago as a look into a private school’s social media post about Mustang-driving administrators has really exposed the seamy underbelly of Ohio’s unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy program.

What’s more chilling to me is that this is just one of more than 612 private schools in this state where this stuff is happening.

Will state leaders do anything about this unconstitutional waste of taxpayer dollars that has forced all of us to raise our property taxes so much we’re seriously considering getting rid of property taxes?

Not without all of us forcing them to. Remember what my journalism mentor always told me: If they’re getting away with it, it’s your fault.

So let’s do something about this. Seems like we have an election coming up in a few months. Maybe that’s the time.

Yeah. That’s the perfect time.

3

For anyone who doesn’t like me picking 50% as the midpoint for what percentage of the change in poverty could be attributable to real poverty change, I had Claude look at the effect on overall proficiency depending on what percentage of the change can be attributed to real poverty change vs. accounting:

Some of the most interesting feedback I got was pointing out some things I missed. See, I was so angry about Ohio taxpayers now subsidizing more than 80% of the cost of educating students at this private school — where we have no idea how that money’s being spent and that no public school student receives that much of their educational cost from the state — that I missed a couple other very important points.

Point One: Ohio Taxpayers Fully Subsidize the Private School Tuitions of families making $172,575 or less at Immaculate Heart of Mary School

The unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy is only a part of the story. See, each student at the school also gets a so-called “Angel Scholarship”. What is an Angel Scholarship? It’s an official Scholarship Granting Organization. What’s that, you ask? It’s an organization that allows you to contribute to it and get a full tax credit on your state income tax return. Which, once again, denies tax dollars for public school students. The “Angel Scholarship” is the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland’s official SGO. And it most recently raised about $8.1 million — all of which was paid for by reduced income taxes that would have otherwise gone to local public school students.

For a good rundown of this scheme, I recommend this post from Policy Matters’ Madelaine Matej MacQueen.

So the private school tuitions of students whose parents make $172,575 a year or less (that’s 450% of poverty for a family of 5, which is the example the school used in its presentation to parents about EdChoice) at Immaculate Heart of Mary are now fully taxpayer subsidized.

So the state fully pays for private school educations, but won’t even pay for 1/2 the cost of a public school student’s education while committing less of its budget to public school students than it ever has?

Fucking outrageous.

Onward.

Point Two: Immaculate Heart of Mary uses Parish and Diocese money to subsidize only the tuitions adults making $290,100 or more pay

Again, I was so incensed that EdChoice was allowing the school to turn a profit that I overlooked something in the school’s breakdown of how EdChoice and the Angel Scholarship would operate for the millionaires going to the school.

See that? The Parish and Diocese chip in a little more than $4,000 to help the adults who make more than $290,100 a year “afford” their then-$6,300 tuition.

And give them a $1,254 tuition CUT to boot!

How much is the Parish and Diocese helping its “poorest” adults?

Try $0. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

It’s in the school’s own presentation!

This seems at, shall we say … odds(?) with this webpage from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Now, to be fair, families of 5 making $172,450 a year aren’t exactly the kind of poor folks the Church are talking about here.

But it is incredibly telling that this Catholic school is using $4,000 of its and the Diocese’s money to subsidize the tuitions for millionaires while providing nothing for the poorer members of the flock.

Why are they able to do this?

You, Dear Ohio taxpayer. It’s because of you they’re able to redirect their commitment from the poorest of their students to their wealthiest.

It is your charity — unconstitutionally forced upon you by legislative ideologues — that permit this Catholic school to ignore their own call to charity.

I don’t care if you’re pro-tuition subsidy, or believe, as I (and the courts) do, that they’re unconstitutional.

Can we all agree that’s just sick?

Leave it to Rev. James Singler and Principal Barbara Seislove of Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Cuyahoga Falls, though, to gloat just a little bit too much.

See, the Immaculate Heart of Mary mascot is a mustang. So these two thought it’d be really cute to do a vertical video of them playing with their newer Ford Mustangs (one is a red convertible even!).

Let’s get past the idea of a Catholic priest and Catholic school administrator showing off their Ford Mustangs and whether that’s what Jesus would have done.

Let’s, instead, look at their finances, such as we can.

Here’s how much money and how many of their students are now being subsidized by Ohio taxpayers through the unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidy:

That’s right.

Those two 18-23 model Mustangs1 were likely purchased right around the time the Immaculate Heart of Mary started collecting $1.5 million a year of your tax dollars to unconstitutionally subsidize the tuitions of effectively all their students — all of whom who were already in the school.

Wanna know something else? I started pulling on this loose thread, and wowza did it unwind an EdChoice smoking gun. See, their tuition also went up dramatically. Because they don’t have to report these things publicly, I had to do a little Googling to find these data. But here they are2:

So that’s confirmation of what those of us fighting these unconstitutional subsidies have said: Subsidies lead to higher tuition.

However, what I’ve discovered at Immaculate Heart of Mary School is that the tuition hike does not mean the parents have to pay the school more, or even pay the same as they always have.

Nope.

In fact, the school, when it did its presentation to parents about EdChoice in 2023 explained it this way: “No matter what your family’s scholarship package will look like, each family will NOT pay more than their current tuition rate as charged through FACTS at re-enrollment (February 2023).”

So if parents aren’t covering the now 26-40 percent additional tuition hike, “Who is then,” you ask?

Well …

YOU ARE!

Helpfully, the school explained how this would work for those receiving the full tuition subsidy and those receiving the minimum (families making more than 750% of poverty … millionnaires, for all intents and purposes).

Here are the actual slides from their presentation:

So taxpayers are now allowing this private school to, um, TURN A PROFIT!

That’s right.

Turn.

A.

Fucking.

Profit.

WWJD, amirite?

But don’t worry. Rich people make out too, as the school gleefully declares.

So millionaires get a $1,254 tuition cut, even with a 26% tuition hike and the school, once again, gets to turn a fucking $4,629 profit!

Want some more outrage?

The reason the school increased tuition above the $5,020 prior to EdChoice was to game the system. So they could turn a profit!

Sorry, “reinvest” the money.

The full tuition reimbursement amount would have been more than the school’s posted tuition. So they simply increased it, allowing their parents to get the full per pupil funding from the state, and cleaned up.

But they didn’t think to do this scheme on their own. You know who asked them to update their tuition rate to a higher one?

THE FUCKING STATE!

IT’S THERE IN BLACK AND WHITE!

STATE OFFICIALS KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN AND THEY WANTED IT TO HAPPEN! SO THEY TOLD PRIVATE SCHOOLS TO INCREASE THEIR TUITION SO YOU WOULD PAY THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE AMOUNT!

Helpfully, once again, as if to rub salt in the wound of our overburdened taxpayers, the school actually posted what percentage of their students’ funding would now come from you, the taxpayer.

Before:

After:

Look at that shit! Can you believe it?

Look at how little the Parish investment is in their kids now versus prior to lawmakers deciding to send $1.5 million a year of our money to the school?

Look at that!

I mean.

Look at that!

I remind you that this is just one private school. There are now more private schools receiving unconstitutional EdChoice tuition subsidies than there are public school districts. So this is definitely happening all around the state.

Final outrage (I promise): We have no right to know how that money is being spent, which means we have no idea whether that excess taxpayer money is going to pay for Mustangs or new learning tools for the kids. Because not a single penny of any tuition subsidy since they started shoveling it out in 1997 has ever been audited.

What’s the bottom line here?

I think it’s best put this way:

The state is now subsidizing about 80 percent of an Immaculate Heart of Mary School student’s education.

Wanna take a gander at how many kids attending Ohio public school districts have 80 percent of their educational cost picked up by the state?

Not one.

Not a single Ohio public school student has 80 percent of their funding picked up by the state. The closest are students in Scioto County’s Washington-Nile Local School District at 77 percent. Kids in only 13 of 612 school districts receive more than 70 percent of their funding from state sources.

And it’s not like the parents at Immaculate Heart couldn’t pay the freight before EdChoice came around. The school demonstrated in its own pie chart that even its poorest parents could pick up 61 percent of the cost!

You know how else I know that?

Because their enrollment was the same before and after EdChoice!

Yet here we are with taxpayers subsidizing this school to such a degree that they are making between $430,000 to $840,000 a year3 in taxpayer-funded profit to “reinvest.”

SIDEBAR: Can you imagine if state leaders took this approach to public school students? And how much it would reduce our property taxes if they did?

I digress.

Can I prove that any of that “reinvestment” paid for a couple of sick Mustangs for the Principal and Parish priest?

No.

Would it shock me if it did?

Um.

No.

I guess one more.

In a recent post from Northeast Ohio Advocates for Catholic School, posted on the Diocese’s official website, Frank O’Linn — the Superintendent of Schools for the Diocese — claims that taxpayers get a better deal by subsidizing the private school tuitions of millionaires than they do paying for public schools.

Why?

Because we’re paying more now for the educations of kids in public, private and charters schools than ever before.

I shit you not.

Here’s his argument in a nutshell:

“There is no mention that for the most recent fiscal year, “the state of Ohio spent more on primary and secondary education than at any other time in state history. And state education spending will continue to increase” per the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Nary a word can be heard about the 24.9% increase in state appropriations over the 6 years of phasing in the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding plan, from $12.2 Billion in FY2021 to $15.3 Billion in FY2027 according to LSC Greenbooks. Mind you, that is merely the state portion, on top of the soaring property tax revenues funding traditional public schools, which combined amounted to $32.8 Billion in total K-12 spending in FY2024, the most recent year for which combined data is available.”

See? He got us. We’ve got money hand over fist. And the only reason a record number of schools are now forecasting funding shortfalls is too much spending. Or something like that.

Here’s the problem. Apparently the Superintendent of Catholic Schools in Cleveland doesn’t understand that when he’s looking at the “24.9% increase in state appropriations” since FY2021, those include increases to ALL K-12 education funding, including Charter Schools and Private Schools through tuition subsidies.

Do y’all want to hazard a guess as to how much of the $3.1 billion increase between FY21 and FY27 was due to the funding increases given to Charter Schools and Private School tuition subsidies?

Try 47% of the increase. That’s right. A cool $1.33 billion more is being spent on EdChoice tuition subsidies and largely failing Charter Schools.

Wanna see what the percentage increase is for each sector?

That’s right. Kids in public schools are getting 14.4 percent more state aid in 2026-2027 than they did in 2020-2021. But private schools are getting 224% more and Charter Schools are getting almost 50 percent more.

Just in terms of overall share of the state aid, kids in public schools will get about 72 percent of the state aid.

In 2020-2021, they got about 80 percent.

Just for shits and gigs, I took a look at the inflation rate since 2020-2021. Wanna guess what that number is? If you guessed 28%, you’d be correct, kids!

That means that the state of Ohio has kept up with about half the inflation rate for kids in public school districts.

Meanwhile, they’re giving Charter Schools (which are far less efficient than public schools because spend more than double the amount of per pupil revenue on administratuive costs that public schools) nearly double the inflationary increase and private schools about 10 times the inflation rate.

Must be nice, right?

Oh yeah. One more thing. According to O’Linn’s own source, the Ohio Legislative Service Commission Greenbook from last budget, FY2027 will be a $900 million cut in overall K-12 spending from the 2023-2024 school year. So even his bullshit comparison is bullshit.

Like I said, guys. I can’t make it up.

Let’s look at his complete misunderstanding of the Cupp Report as well1.

In his analysis, O’Linn is trying to tell us that public schools get plenty of money because the amount of state and local aid they’re getting has gone up so much.

What he fails to mention is that the percentage of local funding2 has jumped from 51 percent in FY2015 to 55 percent in FY2025. So while state aid for Charter Schools and EdChoice has exploded, so has local revenue to make up for their siphoning off all that state funding.

Need I remind anyone here that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4 times that relying too much on property taxes is unconstitutional? Forcing districts to go for more levies by shoveling billions to unaccountable private schools and less accountable Charter Schools seems to run contrary to that principle.

Apparently, O’Linn also ignored in his original LSC source the statement explaining how this works. I’ve posted it below for you to peruse at your leisure.

See, O’Linn makes a big deal (in BOLD, so it’s a big deal!) about how:

“The district’s complaints are meritless because state scholarships are funded separately from the recently enhanced district formula, a truth that even the most overzealous scholarship opponents have begun to acknowledge following last month’s circuit court hearing.”

But that’s not what the LSC document you quoted from says, Frank! (see, BOLD=important point!)

Because that’s how this works — charters, tutition subsidies and traditional school aid all come out of the same state funding line item. And is a major reason why Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page ruled EdChoice unconstitutional last year. Because if you move money to Charters and private schools, there is less for kids in public schools.

That’s just math.

Notice the other thing O’Linn didn’t mention: performance. I kind of miss batting back the original argument for these things — giving poor, underprivileged kids the opportunity to escape “failing schools” to go to private schools (hint: private schools didn’t actually do any of that).

But not even O’Linn can make that argument anymore. It’s all about choice for choice’s sake. In other words, it’s all about the adults. Kids? Not so much.

Another thing he doesn’t mention? His schools’ spending and revenue patterns.

But he doesn’t have to do that. Why? Because Ohio legislators have never in 30 years required a single penny of taxpayer funded tuition subsidy be accounted for publicly.

So that $1.3 billion many of his schools will gobble up next school year? We have no idea how much of it is being spent on administrators, teachers, support staff, busing, buildings, anything, the way we know how public school money is spent.

All this guy does is try to play into the same tired trope of ungrateful public schools grossly misspending public dollars. Meanwhile, we have no idea how his schools are spending, or misspending public dollars. Or performing, for that matter.

But I guess we can just take his word for it.

I mean his organization has a solid history of telling the truth about important stuff, right?

Um, yeah.

Because suddenly his party has made fraud a central theme of their national effort to retain power.

Why is Husted sweating over that?

Let me explain.

First, a little history.

When I won my House seat in 2006, I came to Columbus for an oreintation session. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission puts it on every year for new State Reps and Senators to go over how things work in the legislature.

Every year the House Speaker and Senate President comes to speak, welcoming in the new class. So the year I was elected, then-House Speaker Jon Husted came and spoke. And since I was a fresh-eyed, newly elected state Rep whose primary focus was school funding, I asked him about why the state hadn’t fixed the school funding system, despite 4 court rulings ordering them to do so.

He blathered about how much more money we’re spending on education overall. Like that was some consolation given that I knew that all the increase was clearly going to fund Charter Schools (the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy program was back then a very tiny portion of the state budget).

So I explained that other states had figured it out. I mentioned Iowa, Indiana and New Mexico. I asked why we couldn’t figure out systems like these other states. His response? “That’s what you’re here to do.”

“Great! Just don’t table my amendments,” I replied.

He, of course, always did that when he was in charge.

Interestingly, after this exchange another freshman State Rep named Matt Huffman (yes, that Matt Huffman) came up to me and asked several questions about school funding and the other states’ solutions. He was absolutely sincere then about learnig about those other states’ solutions.

Not so much anymore.

Fast forward a couple years. Now Democrats hold the gavel in the House. Husted is in the Senate. And he became the point man to undermine Gov. Ted Strickland’s Evidence Based Model of school funding. I was the point man who fixed it in the House.

During the course of the development of that model, Husted would frequently take potshots at the plan. Finally, one day, I popped off and said something to the effect of (couldn’t find the actual story, but I know it’s out there somewhere) “I think it’s rich that Sen. Husted, who spent the last decade perpetuating an unconstitutional school funding system would try to block the only serious effort to address the Ohio Supreme Court’s rulings.”

I remember colleagues who told me that language was too strong. Times have changed haven’t they?

Anyway, what I didn’t know then, but I do know now is that the reason Jon Husted was so opposed to the Evidence Based Model had nothing to do with the model itself. It was all about Charter Schools. And the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) — who spent 18 years collecting more than a billion dollars to “educate” children it could never prove it was actually educating.

State Auditor Keith Faber eventually hit ECOT with a claim that it illegally took $117 million in taxpayer money to “educate” kids it never had — just for 3 of its 18 school years. Make no mistake; ECOT did this every year it was in existence. In fact, the state caught them doing it in its first year of existence. Then-Auditor Jim Petro hit them with about a $2 million fine, along with this little chestnut:

““ECOT’s significant operating loss of $3,280,160 and net loss of $3,806,248 cause substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. ECOT has an accumulated deficit of $3,806,248 and a net working capital deficit of $4,217,999. Note 17 describes management’s plans regarding these losses.”

Why did they continue to exist, then?

Jon Husted.

See, Jon Husted is the one person most responsbile for the exponential growth of Ohio Charter Schools — a group that even national charter school advocates call the Wild, Wild West — and ECOT’s survival. Don’t get me wrong. He had lots of help from his Republican colleagues over the last 3 decades.

But Husted is Patient Zero.

He remains the only person to have received an honorary ECOT diploma .

He is one of two Ohio politicians (all ECOT graduation speakers were Republicans — the last was Tucker Carlson, of all people) to speak at 2 ECOT graduations. And he was the person ECOT founder Bill Lager credited during these ceremonies for saving ECOT. In addition, he did the following:

• Husted introduced the bill allowing for-profit charters in Ohio, exempting them from Public Records Law: http://lsc.state.oh.us/analyses/anh124.nsf/All%20House%20Bills%20and%20Resolutions/AE715CF0B91BA7F385256ACB00480285

• The final version of bill turned into the Wild, Wild West bill opening the doors to all kinds of new charters and sponsors: http://lsc.state.oh.us/analyses/fnla124.nsf/All%20Bills%20and%20Resolutions/1FA59868B44C0C0385256CEC00555822

• Husted was the chief sponsor of the original legislation vastly expanding Ohio’s Charter Schools.

• Husted also only limited charter school growth for charters sponsored by Public School Districts, allowing privately run charters to grow unabated.

• When I was in the House working on the Evidence Based Model during the Great Recession, I suggested we cut online school funding, like ECOT, by 70 percent because they don’t have buildings, buses, etc. that regular schools had. Husted insisted that we keep paying ECOT as much as paid brick and mortar schools.

Why did he do all this? Because his two biggest political patrons at the time were 1) David Brennan, who ran White Hat Management and was the state’s Charter School and Voucher Godfather as well as its biggest Republican political donor at the time and 2) Bill Lager, who ran ECOT.

Husted spent his Ohio legislative career creating carve outs for these guys’ schools, protecting them from oversight, and reaping the political benefits for him and his legislative colleagues. All while Ohio Charter Schools repeatedly failed kids. I mean, here’s a list of ECOT’s “accomplishments”:

• According to state data from the 2016-2017 school year, every penny sent from a school district to ECOT — more than $100 million — came from a district that outperformed the online school by at least 4 of 13 state report card categories.

• An astonishing 1 out of every 4 dollars sent to ECOT came from a district that outperformed ECOT on every comparable measure.

• While ECOT did graduate large numbers of students, they failed to graduate about twice as many as they actually graduated.

• The New York Times found that it produced more high school dropouts than any school in the nation.

• Less than 3 percent of their graduates ever received a college degree.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Husted also created the unconstitutional EdChoice private school tuition subsidy program when he was House Speaker in 2005? Yeah.

He actually bragged about it last year … after it was ruled unconsitutional!

So the reason we have no idea how more than $5 billion of our tax dollars have been spent in private schools?

Jon Husted.

The reason ECOT was able to make off with upwards of $200-300 million over 18 years, despite failing kids and creating more dropouts than any other school in the country?

Jon Husted.

The reason we haven’t been able to sufficiently fund the educations of millions of Ohio children for 30 years?

Jon Husted.

The reason you’ve watched you property taxes skyrocket to make up for that failure?

Jon Husted.

And this isn’t even accounting the fact that he appeared as a witness in the state’s largest ever political bribery trial.

So when Ka$h and the Trump Gang showed up yesterday to brag about how they’ve allegedly rolled up $50 million in Medicaid fraud, and allowed Dave Yost — the other two-time ECOT speaker who famously gave them an excellence in auditing award during an ECOT graduation ceremony while they were ripping off millions from taxpayers — I rolled my eyes.

For if these clowns really wanted to uncover Ohio taxpayer fraud, all they have to do is look at the guy who’s sitting at J.D. Vance’s old Senate desk.

Ohioans aren’t stupid, though. We know what Jon Husted did to allow his buddies to get rich by defrauding taxpayers while hurting our school children and raising our property taxes.

Ka$h’s press conference ain’t covering up that shit.

So when national Republicans try to use fraud as a way to pivot off their horrible affordability messaging, running a guy in Ohio who created, perpetuated and protected the greatest taxpayer fraud in the state’s history, along with being knee-deep in the state’s largest bribery scandal is, um, a problem.

See why dude’s sweating bullets?

All I can say is, “Good. It’s about goddamn time.”

But the problem is that the program simply cannot exist in this state under the current Ohio Constitution. And capping income at $500,000 to keep Jeffrey Epstein buddy Les Wexner from getting the unconstitutional subsidy is not even close to what needs done (though I admit, it may help give cover to the robed politicians on Ohio’s Supreme Court).

As I’ve pointed out previously:

The only way to really address Judge Page’s decision is to do the following: kill EdChoice, transfer that money instead to fully fund the Fair School Funding Plan, require any voucher recipient to have spent at least 180 days attending a public school prior to receiving a voucher, give the same amount of state aid to the student as they would have received in their public school, require any voucher recipient school to accept anyone who applies, require the schools to not charge any tuition above the voucher amount (which was the case in the beginning), require the voucher money to be publicly audited and limit the vouchers to non-religious schools.

And there is still the one-system constitutional question that I don’t think even this solution would address. As I’ve mentioned before, more private schools get taxpayer funded tuition subsidies than there are public school districts — an insane, but true fact.

So while I am enjoying watching legislators recognize EdChoice is in real danger of being killed — as well as encouraged to see their panic, their nibbling around the edges ain’t cutting it.

Frankly the only way to meet constitutional muster is to kill the current program.

Ultimately, the chart above is the unconstitutional tuition subsidy proponents’ biggest issue. The overvaluation of these unconstitutional subsidies and funding them out of the same state budget line item that funds public school students has meant that Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students don’t receive what the state’s own funding formula says they need.

One more thing I wanted to mention today is Honesty for Ohio Education put out a really interesting website and spreadsheet that does a couple things: breaks down the cost of and investment in unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies in every school district and then, importantly, further breaks it down by state House and Senate seats.

The site reminds me of the Know Your Charter site I developed a decade ago while at Innovation Ohio. Same idea, only with charter schools. Put out the information so the public can see how these so-called educational options are funded compared with your kids’ public school educations and pressure the politicians to fix the issue.

Here’s an example of what the Honesty site provides:

Very clean, clear and useful information for anyone who wants to use it1.

On their master spreadsheet, they also include lots of additional demographic and other information, which will help those who want to find out, for example, whether the funding disparities are greater in districts with higher rates of economically disadvantaged students.

Again. Another useful tool in the fight for Ohio’s public education students.

So use it!

1

I understand why they chose the $8,408 number because that’s the maximum a private school gets for a high school student. And it’s greater than what public school kids get in 85 percent of Ohio’s public school districts. However, wealthier and K-8 students don’t receive that much, so I would have created a district-level per pupil amount.

But while I nerdishly quibble with that data, using the $8,408 amount is absolutely defensible (as you can see in the chart below) and the overall net effect would show the same thing regardless — on a per pupil basis, more state taxpayer revenue subsidizes private school tuitions for mostly religious schools than goes to kids in public schools

.

Credit where credit is due. I’ve said for years that the No. 1 reason Ohio Republicans have been able to run roughshod over both public K-12 and higher education systems is because the folks running those systems have let them.

As my mentor at the Beacon Journal used to tell me: If they’re getting away with it, it’s your fault.

These folks too afraid of being cut worse, just let Ohio Republicans cut them bad and offer mostly tepid resistance.

Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised that Kent State University President Ted Diacon took on Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s call to close his and other public universities. And you know what? He sounded awfully 10th period-y doing it.

Point of personal privilege: As a Kent State grad, the husband of a triple KSU grad and the son of two KSU grads who met at KSU, I have to say I was pretty damn proud that it was my alma mater — and home — who stood fast and stood first.

“At Kent State, state appropriations now account for roughly 22% of our operating budget. In the (Gov. James A. Rhodes) era, that figure was closer to 75%. The universities didn’t drift into this moment. Even though public investment was quietly withdrawn over decades, our institutions have continued to deliver ever-improving results.”

Sounds a lot like this chart I posted a few weeks back, doesn’t it?

Again, state support for tuition (state share of instruction is the official, lifeless bureaucratic name) has dropped to its smallest share of the state budget ever — less than 1/2 what it was in the 1970s — the Rhodes Era Diacon mentioned.

Enrollment has been a challenge at public universities serving first-generation students because those students typically come from working class families who can’t afford to pay $20-25,000 a year for college. If the state simply committed the same percentage o the state budget to tuition support as it did 30 years ago, we’d essentially have free 2-year and all-but-free 4-year tuition for Ohio families.

This doesn’t even contemplate higher taxes or anything. Just a similar commitment to our kids’ futures that our parents made for us. It’s no more complicated than that.

See, I bet that if you made college affordable, schools whose enrollment comes from working-class families would have far less of an enrollment problem.

But Vivek doesn’t think so. He wants to shut down those schools. In the middle of the Innovation Age.

Because he’s an asshole billionnaire.

Which brings me back to Diacon. He invited Vivek to show up at Kent State and see all the great work it’s able to do, despite state neglect. I hope he tells Vivek, “imagine what we could do if you cared about pubic higher education as much as Republican Gov. James Rhodes did?”

I don’t know if he will. But man, am I glad that he called bullshit on Vivek. Because what the billionaire who shipped his company to Texas from Ohio is talking about is that: Bullshit.

I hope more education leaders follow Diacon in calling out the bullshit. I hope they recognize their own power (imagine if every school district brought 1 school bus full of kids to the capital during budget season? Think those assholes would think twice about cutting education if 612 busloads of kids showed up?).

I hope more education leaders dare the state to follow through with its threats to eliminate funding if those schools dare tell the truth on history, sociology, etc.

I hope more education leaders use their voices to advocate for their students, institutions and state.

I hope this is the beginning.

For this is the way.

I mean, look at this clown Brian Massie sitting behind a Resolute Desk replica, thinking he’s some kind of alternate-universe President cosplaying as a shades-wearing trucker. Once again proving that money can’t buy you brains.

When asked to explain how services like parks, police, fire, developmental disabilities, zoos, schools, roads, bridges, etc. were supposed to replace $24.7 billion in revenue, these numbskulls actually think it’s all public education’s fault.

Because of course it is.

See, these geniuses think that that all Ohio’s public school districts need to do to continue educating Ohio’s 1.6 million school children competently is “cutting costs and reducing unneeded spending, particularly with public schools. Massie [King of the Morons] said he thinks the consolidation of school districts should be considered to decrease administrative costs.”

Look, I know these numbers are really, really big. And they may scare someone who thinks wearing a trucker hat with shades behind a fake Resolute Desk makes him look, I dunno, awesome? But that is just fucking stupid.

You know how I know that? Because the state tracks actual spending in public school districts. You wanna know how much school districts spent on administration with all revenue included — local property and income taxes, along with federal and state funding combined?

That number is $3.3 billion.

Which leaves a $21 billion hole.

So even if you got rid of all spending on administration in public school districts, you’d still leave a $21 billion budget hole!

See?

Morons.

Which means either you create the largest income and/or sales tax increases in state history (creating the largest income and/or sales taxes in the country) to make up that difference, or schools, police, fire, EMS, developmental disabilities, zoos … um … close.

They don’t consolidate, like these morons think.

They fucking close!

Because removing that amount of money isn’t some stupid Declaration of Independence cosplay, like these idiots think.

Did you also notice, by the way, that the amount that would be lost if you eliminate property taxes is just about the total amount of money that Ohio public school districts spend in a year?

I mean, these idiots don’t know the scale of their folly. I guess that’s why they’re idiots, though, right?

All this stupid measure does is declare us independent from good roads, bridges, schools, zoos, fire, police, EMS, etc.

I was encouraged to see that they felt the need to pull the little stunt they did yesterday to claim they’re halfway to the needed signatures to get on the November ballot. See, you need at least double the number of signatures you really need to guarantee you’re on the ballot.

Again. Morons.

So in order to get to 413,000 valid signatures, they need 826,000, not the 600,000 or so they’re targeting. So they are actually only 37 percent of the way to getting what they need to get on the ballot.

I’m also glad to see an anti-moron group has sprung up to fight this absurdly stupid effort. Don’t take anything for granted, even Titanic stupidity.

And look, I agree that property taxes are too high.

But the reasons for that are pretty straight forward, starting with the General Assembly and Governor’s decision to stand up a second, private school system in this state, which has robbed state revenue for public schools and forced them to go the ballot more often and for bigger money than they used to. Also, the state not long ago required a crazy property tax revaluation that drove up the charges. Finally, Ohio has consistently cut taxes for rich people and businesses while foisting the responsibility onto homeowners.

What happened? Well, lots of things actually. There’s been an explosion of tax abatements, as well eliminating wholesale taxes on businesses like the Tangible Personal Property tax.

You also may notice that the shift to homeowners has happened under nearly exclusive Republican control of the Governor’s mansion and General Assembly starting in 1992.

Wanna guess the political affiliation of these anti-property tax people?

Despite Massie ( the dude trying to act like a Trucker President) claiming he’s “non-partisan” on this issue, here’s his actual voter registration:

You guessed it. Republican.

So this is the guy who’s bitching about property taxes being too high when it’s been Ohio Republicans like him that have forced homeowners to constantly raise their property taxes over the last 30 years.

Now you understand why instead of fighting the Ohio General Assembly’s failure to properly fund public education for the last 30 years while they divert taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools, cut taxes for rich people (like Massie and his buddies) and foist the formerly shared property tax responsibility from businesses and homeowners to mainly homeowners, Massie and his clown carnival say, “Fuck it. Burn it all!”

Because they’re morons.

Ohio now directly funds more private schools than it does public schools1.

And not by a small amount.

There are 656 private schools getting at least some taxpayer-funded voucher money from the EdChoice, EdChoice Expansion or Cleveland voucher programs.

This year, there are 611 school districts getting taxpayer-funded state aid.

In fact, the state provides taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies for 70 percent or more students in a stunning 613 private schools, which is still more than the number of Ohio public school districts!

Not only that, but nearly 85 percent of all Ohio private school students get a taxpayer-funded tuition subsidy now, up from 14 percent 12 years ago.

And these are just in the three programs I mentioned above. It doesn’t include the John Peterson Special Ed voucher or the Autism voucher. So these numbers are probably even higher.

Not for nothing, but this 12-year increase in taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies has cost taxpayers and public school students (because, again, the money all comes out of the same line item) another at least $770 million2.

There are very few private schools in this state that don’t take any vouchers. Here’s the breakdown of private schools by percentage of students getting taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies:

• 100 percent — 153 schools

• 90 percent or more — 437 schools

• 80 percent or more — 578 schools

• 70 percent or more — 613 schools

So 77 percent of all private schools in this state get paid directly by taxpayers to subsidize 80 percent or more of their students; and over half get 90 percent!

Just stunning stuff. And very likely unique among American states.

Did I mention, by the way, that none — and by none, I mean zero — of this money has ever been audited to make sure it’s being spent on kids rather than sweet cars for administrators or something?

One more thing. Here’s what the Ohio Constitution says about the General Assembly’s education role, in case you’re curious:

“The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as … will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.”

Emphasis on the word “a” there. “A” = singular.

Directly funding more private schools than public schools when those private schools literally have none of the same accountability, student acceptance standards or quality controls as publics sure seems like the state is funding (at least) two school systems in this state. Not A system, as the Constitution requires.

Do you understand now why I’m more bullish on the efforts to overturn Ohio’s voucher programs than some? These guys in the General Assembly were so arrogant they thought they could do whatever they want and ignore the Constitution.

But what judges can’t ignore is the Constitution and the numbers.

One system.

Not two.

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

They’re hoping you don’t notice.

Notice that for 30 years, Ohio Republicans have slowly starved higher education funding, which has made the $1 million promise of a college education less attainable for middle-class families.

They’re hoping you fall for the anti-college mythology — they waste money, are giving kids diplomas for basket weaving, are full of hippies. Whatever. They don’t care. Just buy it, already!

They want you to blame anyone but them, even though it’s all their fault.

A personal note. I’m a tuition-paying parent for a public university student.

It’s now more expensive to send my son to Ohio State as an in-state resident than it was for my parents to send me to Tufts University in the 1990s.

Yeah. That’s crazy.

But that cost hike wasn’t because Ohio State is so inefficient or concerned with basket weaving majors that I’m paying through the nose for my son’s education1.

Nope.

Ohio Republicans made this happen. They’ve steadily made the unattainably expensive college degree a reality since they started dominating the statehouse and Governor’s mansion in 1994. In fact, it seems the two things they’ve consistently done from a public policy perspective is de-fund both public K-12 education and higher education.

The numbers don’t lie.

So, for example, in 1979, 11.6% of the state budget went to pay for the State Share of Instruction (SSI) — the direct funding portion of the state’s higher education budget that essentially subsidizes in-state tuition (it does more than that, but trying to keep it simple). That was the highest proportion on record.

Next year, it will be 4.7% — the lowest on record.

If the state committed as much of the state budget to SSI next year as it did in 1979, the state would be providing $3.2 billion more just to SSI.

How much is that, you ask?

In the 2024-2025 school year, the total tuition collected by all 2-year and 4-year public higher education institutions by all students, in-state and out-of-state, was $3.6 billion.

That’s right.

If Ohio had maintained the same commitment to its college students that it did in 1979, we could have tuition free — or essentially free — 2- and 4-year public universities for every Ohio resident … and then some.

But we don’t even have to go back to 1979. If you went back to the last time the percentage of SSI funding went up under Gov. Ted Strickland in the 2009-2010 school year, you’d have another $1.6 billion. Or if you went back to the first year Republicans had complete governmental control — 1994-1995, you’d have $1.8 billion.

Wanna bet whether Ohio’s public 4-year institutions would be facing an “enrollment crisis” if tuition were reduced this much, Vivek?

Yet for some reason, Ramaswamy seems to want to make closing University of Akron and Kent State University — and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs — a tentpole of his gubernatorial bid.

As a former stat legislator who used to represent parts of Summit and Portage counties — where those two universities reside — I’m gonna say that’s certainly a strategy.

A fucking stupid one.

But it’s a strategy.

This is not rocket science. As state commitment drops, the burden placed on college students and their families increases. The correlation is strong, as my buddy Claude pointed out here2:

Notice there’s a little blip in the percentage during the FY10 and FY11 years. Just as a reminder, those were the only two years of a politically divided legislature and Democratic Governor.

As an aside, you’ll recognize a similar blip on the state share of public K-12 education funding during this same period — the only year on record that more state than local property tax funding paid for Ohio’s public schools.

By the way, did I mention this all good stuff happened in a budget I helped negotiate during the height of the Great Recession? Please excuse my shameless public policy prowess plug (and alliteration).

Every other year on that chart, Ohio Republicans controlled every lever of power. And the pattern is clear:

1. Defund the state funding stream that makes college affordable for working families

2. Make that option far less affordable for those same families

3. Then when fewer students attend the universities that rely on first-generation students (Kent State and University of Akron come to mind, don’t they Vivek?), blame the universities

4. Count on everyone both not noticing the steady drain of resources while tehy get hooked by the “out-of-touch” higher education narrative

5. Call on the schools to stop focusing on educating our students and instead become corporations’ training arms

6. Or, in the case of the Ohio GOP’s billionaire gubernatorial candidate, shut them down

This is all Republicans’ fault. They didn’t have to do this. There wasn’t some crisis that forced them to divest from SSI since they took power.

In fact, according to the most recent Grapevine report, while student share of higher education cost has gone up since 1980, it’s been by 18 percentage points nationally.

In Ohio, that increase has jumped 24 points.

The average Ohio student has to come up with 57 percent of their higher education cost. The national average is 39 percent — still way too high for a country that has to rely on innovation to dominate the world economy.

But Ohio is 46 percent worse than that.

In only 10 states do families have to pay a higher share of the higher education freight than Ohioans.

Since 1980, Ohio has cut its appropriations for higher ed overall by 14.8 percent. The national average over that period was a 13 percent increase.

Look. I know Vivek wants to shutter two of the state’s main economic and intellectual engines because they struggle with enrollment. But that struggle isn’t because of what he says — inefficiency, lack of excellence (whatever that is), etc.

I think that spending 30 years dropping the share of the state budget going to subsidize tuition below 5 percent for the first time ever might explain why fewer kids go to college in Ohio than they used to and why enrollment at first-generation universities — whose students typically come from working-class backgrounds — has struggled to grow.

Yeah.

That sure as hell seems more likely than whatever the fuck Vivek is imagining under his Jimmy Neutron hair.

According to the state law about this federal grant, Charters that have a 4 or 5 star rating on Academic Progress and a 3, 4 or 5 star rating on overall test scores, or a meaningful increase in test scores over the last 3 years are eligible.

All but a couple of the qualifying Charters met this first of 4 criteria.

Great, right? I mean, these are supposed to be the kinds of Charter Schools we want to grow — high performing Charters.

Here’s the deal, though.

There are 7 graded metrics on the state report card. So while these Charter Schools — less than 1/4 of all Ohio Charter Schools — do have good grades in these two categories, they still really struggle in the other 5.

And Ohio School districts — 1/3 of whom would qualify for these federal funds if they were Charter Schools — do far, far better on those other metrics. How much better?

A sampling:

• Ohio’s qualifying Charter Schools still have 30% of their grades as 2 stars or 1 star — Ds or Fs in regular grading parlance. Meanwhile, 30% of Ohio’s qualifying School Districts’ grades are 5 stars — A’s for you and me.

• Only 12 of the 59 qualifying Charter Schools received grades in college, career and military readiness. All but 3 of those 12 schools scored 1 star for that component. Meanwhile, 72% of Ohio’s qualifying Public School Districts received a grade of 3 stars or more on that component.

• Only 1 in 5 Ohio Charter School students attend a “high-performing” Charter School under this definition. Meanwhile, every other Ohio Public School District student does (including every child attending the Cleveland Municipal School District1).

As you can see, Ohio’s Charter Schools — even the so-called “high-performing” ones don’t perform nearly as well overall as similarly rated Public School Districts.

This is a tactic Charter School proponents have tried for years — let’s only base “high-quality” Charter School designations on 1 or (maybe) 2 of the 7 graded metrics. Why? Because they know if “high-quality” designations were based on all 7 metrics, they’d be screwed. Only 6 of 258 graded Charter Schools received the 5-star overall designation, for example. Another 32 received 4 or 4.5-star ratings. So less than 15% received overall grades of A or B.

Meanwhile, 48% of Ohio’s Public School Districts received overall A or B grades.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t honest-to-God, high-performing Charter Schools out there. There are. But, man, it’s just a handful of them. Maybe a couple dozen or so, tops.

So, I guess, let’s giving $49.2 million to schools that produce failing grades on 3 of every 10 measures rather than the schools that produce the highest grades on 3 of 10.

Makes sense.

Oh yeah. And let’s give them 214% more state funding per pupil too.

Because more money doesn’t matter.

At least that’s what the school choice advocates always used to claim (but may be changing? We’ll see.).

That’s because these schools were never meant to help kids. They were designed to make the state’s largest Republican donor rich.

For years, these schools were dominated by David Brennan’s Life Skills Academies — schools that would graduate maybe a couple kids a year, but roll in the cash, which Brennan would then return to legislators and governors in the form of political campaign contributions.

Accountability was so lax at these schools that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which closed amid the largest taxpayer ripoff in state history, tried to be designated a “Dropout Recovery” Charter School to avoid scrutiny — even though the school created more dropouts than any school in the country.

Brennan’s been dead about 10 years. But, if anything, these schools have become even more scandalous.

Here’s something to noodle over: So-called “Dropout Recovery” schools don’t have to include a single “dropout” in the way we think of dropouts — kids who stopped going to school and need to come back.

Here’s how the state defines who may attend “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools:

“(1) Any community school that operates a drug recovery program in cooperation with a court; or

(2) Any community school in which the majority of students are enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program operated by the school that meets the following criteria:

(a) The program serves only students not younger than sixteen years of age and not older than twenty-one years of age;

(b) The program enrolls students who, at the time of their initial enrollment, either, or both, are at least one grade level behind their cohort age groups or experience crises that significantly interfere with their academic progress such that they are prevented from continuing their traditional programs.”

That, my friends, is it.

You’ll notice the definition doesn’t include those students you and I would consider a “dropout” student — “… individuals who do not complete the necessary requirements to graduate from secondary school.”

Nope.

Here’s how the state explains it in their 2-page (!!) “guidance” to prospective “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools:

“The academic impacts of such crises are, at times, difficult to measure. Students may experience a drop in grades, a loss of interest in schoolwork, and higher rates of absenteeism. They might also struggle with completing assignments, participating in class, and keeping up with their peers. These symptoms may lead the student to explore enrollment in one of Ohio’s dropout prevention and recovery schools.”

So the kids at “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools can be — and this is important — still in school!

Not dropped out at all.

And, according to state law, if only a majority of kids in your Charter School meet this definition, then you get to, for example, graduate 8 in 100 kids in four years.

Just look at the graduation “standards” for these schools — the only standard that should apply since they are literally called “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools.

Wait. It gets worse. Here are the standards for these schools when it comes to graduating kids in anywhere from 4 to 8 years!

I don’t know what’s sadder. The standards themselves, or the fact that the Ohio Department of Education put these slides in a PowerPoint actually created by its “Office of Accountability.”

I mean, Holy Shit.

Remember: Only a majority of students in these schools need to be in “crisis”, NOT FULL-ON DROPOUTS! So nearly 1/2 of all the kids in these schools can, um, … NEITHER BE IN CRISIS NOR DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL!

Yet despite that, the state says you can graduate 8 out of 100 kids in 4 years at a “Dropout Recovery” Charter School and keep chugging along. Or you can graduate less than 4 in 10 and be designated “exceeds standards.”

What.

The.

Actual.

Fuck????

Just so you know, the lowest 4-year graduation rate of any Ohio Public School District is 68.6 percent. The average rate is 95.2 percent.

And here’s the even more maddening thing. We taxpayers are paying these “schools” $293 million this year. For 22,461 students — only 11,231 of whom need to be “in crisis” with none actually dropped out, mind you.

That means we taxpayers are spending $13,041 per student at schools who only have to graduate 8 in 100 students in 4 years because a majority of their students may be a year behind in reading1. Only 7 of the state’s 80 “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools receive less state revenue per pupil than the district in which they’re located — about $1,620 less on average. Meanwhile, the 73 “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools that receive more than the district in which they’re located receive $6,306 more on average.

The state is spending $5,724 per pupil in Ohio’s public school districts, which are graduating more than 9 in 10 students in 4 years.

But, hey, at least these “Dropout” schools are grossly inefficient.

They spend about 30 percent of their money on administrators — more than double the rate of what school districts spend.

They also only spend 3.4 percent of their money on pupil support — the wraparound services crucial to rescuing kids from their crises, which I thought what the whole point of these schools’ existence. Yet Canton Harbor High School, for example, spends just $38 of its $8,943 per pupil expenditure on pupil support.

The average school district (including many districts with few if any students in “crisis”) spends 5 percent — nearly double the rate of “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools. Only about 17 percent of Ohio school districts spend a smaller percentage of their funding on Pupil Support than the average “Dropout Recovery” Charter School.

Instructional spending is the same result. The average “Dropout Recovery” Charter School spends 53 percent on instruction while the average school district spends 59 percent, despite the fact that some of the “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools are online and don’t have to worry about paying for buses.

Look, I think dropout rates are a problem. I think we need to do all we can to help these kids succeed.

But, folks, Ohio’s Dropout Recovery Charter Schools?

Ain’t it.

Just as kind of an experiment, I decided to apply the state’s “Dropout Recovery” student definition to Ohio’s public school districts. And since the state doesn’t report publicly what percentage of each “Dropout Recovery” Charter School’s enrollment are students in crisis vs. those who are not, I decided to look at Ohio’s public school districts whose chronic absentee rates are greater than 50 percent. Under the state’s guidance, chronic absenteeism is considered a sign of crisis.

Here are the nine districts that would qualify, along with their per pupil state funding and their 4-year graduation rates:

Only 2 districts — East Cleveland and Youngstown — receive more state funding per pupil than the average “Dropout Recovery” Charter School (about 1/2 of all “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools receive more than Youngstown, by the way). And all of these districts far exceed the so-called 36 percent 4-year graduation “exceeds standard” rating.

Here’s an idea: These nine school districts should petition the state to be designated as a “Dropout Recovery” school, get significantly more state money, be classified as exceeding state standards on their graduation rates and not have to worry about the myriad other standards regular schools need to follow.

Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

I kid.

Here’s another, serious idea: Let’s close down these so-called “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools, take the $293 million we currently send them and instead create programs that actually address High School dropouts.

Yeah.

That sounds better.

The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.

And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.

They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:

“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.

Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).

Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.

This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.

Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.

All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2

But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.

Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.

And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”.

Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.

This is why I call them the new White Hat.

For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.

CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.

All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!

Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done.

What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.

But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.

According to their 2024 990 form (the latest publicly available), here’s how much their staff is making:

If the name Robert Kilo sounds familiar, it’s because he was one of the strongest proponents for the Breakthrough Charter School group in Cleveland about 15 years ago when those schools were advocating for differentiated Charter School funding based on quality rather than enrollment. Breakthrough has had issues since then. Specifically, its founder John Zitzner was picked up for human trafficking in 2023 and their number of schools has contracted rather than expanded over the years.

However, in the interest of transparency, I worked with Kilo on a lot of stuff around House Bill 2 in 2013 and other initiatives during my time at Innovation Ohio. He was a good-faith actor at the time and I actually supported his independent run for Cleveland City Council in 2017. I knew he was quite religious. But he never really played it up in my interactions with him.

What he’s doing working for the organization whose goal is to destroy even the Charter Schools for whom Kilo so effectively advocated is a question only he can answer. He must know that the money CCV is advocating be transferred to private schools comes out of the same pot as money for Breakthrough Schools3.

Kilo hated White Hat in 2013. Now he’s joined its offspring.

Onward.

Remember that Scholarship Granting Organization CCV started?

While they had $3.2 million to give students to attend Christian schools in 2024, they only gave out $1.2 million — a $1.6 million drop from 2023. What changed?

Universal vouchers started in 2023.

Yet another piece of evidence demonstrating how the unconstitutional, taxpayer funded private school tuition subsidy program has dramatically reduced the need for more traditional scholarship programs at Ohio’s private schools.

Instead of those who use the private school system paying for it, CCV thinks we all should pay for it.

Just like how taxpayers are now funding every student at CCV’s “school plants” — at amounts that are more than what the state provides to kids in nearly 1/2 of Ohio public school districts. These “school plants” are designed, in CCV’s own words, as “leveraging existing facilities to keep startup and operating costs as low as possible.”

So if these are meant to be low-cost operations, why is the state paying them more per pupil than upwards of 280 Ohio public school districts4?

Because the state values those 9 students who tested proficient in both reading and math on school-selected tests at CCV-run schools about 5 times as much as the 5,357 Upper Arlington students (out of 6,397) who tested proficient or better on state-designated tests. UA kids only get $1,151 in state money.

Here’s what’s really caught my eye, though. It appears that CCV’s education policy offshoot — the Ohio Christian Education Network — is running something like a Charter Management Organization — a Charter School Operator in Ohio’s parlance.

Charter School operators in Ohio can be non-profit or for-profit entities that essentially run the school — they recruit and hire staff, run the backroom operation, buy the curriculum, etc. All those contracts are public and all the schools are audited.

If CCV were running a Charter School, for example, we’d know how much that school is paying OCEN for consulting, advocacy and curriculum help. However, in the voucher program, we have no idea. All we have are clues from OCEN’s website, like this one, which essentially describes what a Charter School operator does:

“OCEN provides guidance and advice through the entire process, from start to finish, at no cost to your school. Our team has the expertise to help you navigate the legal and bureaucratic landscape, develop school operations, build a faculty, and market it. We want to help you establish a locally run school that is unique to the needs of your community. Simply complete the information form at the bottom of the page for a no-obligation consultation on the process of starting a Christian school.”

I’d like to see the contract these schools sign with OCEN5 (I would agree that assuming there is a contract is a big assumption). Because that statement seems awfully lawyered to me. Especially the “at no cost to your school” bit.

While they may not be directly charging the schools they start up, what do you want to bet that under their contract with the school, they’re getting a cut of that school’s voucher money once they do start up?

This is exactly what White Hat would have done — claim they were riding in wearing a White Hat (it’s in the name!) to save a school, only to gobble up more than 90 percent of the state revenue a school received.

While the public was able to get those operator contracts with Charter Schools, Ohio’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy program has never been audited and we certainly can’t see any contract a private school signs with anyone (unless it’s with a public entity).

I don’t know.

But I should.

We all should.

Because we’re all paying for it.

At an astounding pricetag of a 313 percent increase — at least — in taxpayer subsidies1.

Yes, Ohio’s private schools have seen an enrollment increase. However, that 22,000 student increase represents barely 1 percent of the 1.9 million students enrolled in all Ohio schools this year.

And the funding has vastly outstripped the rate of unconstitutional voucher growth — resulting in a nearly 20 percent per pupil funding increase for private schools.

So get this.

State leaders have spent the last 5 years increasing unconstitutional voucher spending by $600 million, demonizing public education, putting on a full-court press to convince people to take unconstitutional vouchers and that’s netted them … barely a 1 percent increase in the private school share of Ohio’s school enrollment?

Pretty awful ROI, don’t you think?

Especially when you consider that by unconstitutionally subsidizing the private school tuitions of mostly wealthy people like Les Wexner, the state is literally funding a separate, second educational system in direct contravention of the state constitution.

And it has meant they have been unable (unwilling?) to fully pay for the state’s school funding formula for the 85 percent of students attending Ohio’s public schools. The state’s public school funding comes out of the same budget pot as its voucher money.

So the only way for voucher proponents to convince any good-faith judge or group of judges that they are not funding a second, unconstitutional and unaccountable2 school system is to actually shrink the number of vouchers.

Which they’ll never do.

This fact, as much as any, helps explain state Rep. Jamie Callender’s recent attempt to bully the suing school districts into dropping the case — a threat from which he has (kinda) weakly backed down.

For if these suing school districts continue to stand strong, Callender and his overlord, Speaker Matt Huffman — lawyers, both — know they are screwed.

Legally speaking.

Look. I appreciate business leaders getting involved in their communities. Their insights are important and valuable. However, too many simply don’t understand that their ability to make money in the private sector doesn’t automatically translate to being an effective public policy analyst. This is especially true in public education.

Public education isn’t a business.

It’s a civic good. No. A civic right.

So applying the principles of money making to a civic right may help in some aspects of the operation, like risk pooling, purchasing, etc. But it’s really misguided in others, like limiting what it takes to provide students what they need to succeed in school and life.

When CEOs insist on applying money making principles be applied to everything in public education, it can be ruinous.

Take Philip Derrow.

What makes his staggeringly ignorant proposal to crack Columbus City Schools into “four or five” separate districts especially galling is that Derrow — a former School Board member in New Albany-Plain Local — should know better.

By the way, the fact he hasn’t thought about this idea enough to settle on whether Columbus and its 41,000 students should be split into 4 or 5 (or more or fewer) districts should tell you a lot.

I was surprised he didn’t choose 6 or 7. Yes. That’s a joke.

I digress.

Here’s Derrow’s argument in a nutshell: Columbus’ academic struggles, outrageous demands for more property tax revenue and gross overspending on administrators means they are a disaster and should be split into smaller districts.

Why?

Because district consolidation and fragmentation has a sterling track record of success?

Not really. Take West Virginia. Between 1990 and 2002, West Virginia closed 300 districts. The result of that ambitious consolidation effort made education more expensive, created the most expensive busing program in the country and led to no meaningful academic improvements — instead making the education experience worse for many students.

Even the Fordham Institute agreed that consolidating districts has “ null or very small positive impacts in both math and English language arts.”

But what about this so-called district fragmentation Derrow is presenting? Well, we know that it leads to greater community and racial segregation, which we also know (and have known ever since Brown v. Board of Education) leads to worse achievement outcomes and widening achievement gaps. (A good roundup of the research on this stuff is located here and here.)

See, Derrow is a Master of the Universe (a movie I am eagerly awaiting, by the way), so he, by extension, knows stuff, I guess?

The appeal to authority he makes, which does lot of heavy lifting for him, is that he served on the local school board of New Albany, the state’s 3rd richest school district ($270,000 average income).

So this qualifies him to definitely know what’s best for the 41,000 kids living in Ohio’s largest district where their parents make, on average, 78 percent less than the parents living in Derrow’s district.

But here’s the kicker: Derrow’s premise — that Columbus is spending too much money on administrators and asking too much of property owners — is based on comparing his district’s experience to that of Columbus.

Need I tell you, Dear Reader, why comparing a district whose students come from among the state’s wealthiest families with a district whose students come from among the state’s poorest families is spectacularly unfair? Families of more than 1 in 5 Columbus students don’t speak English as their primary language, which is the state’s 4th highest rate and nearly double the rate of Columbus’ peer districts. New Albany only has 4.8 percent of their students in a similar situation.

See? Not really similar district profiles.

So what we need to do is compare Columbus with districts most similar to Columbus, which the state actually does do in its annual District Profile Report.

What you’ll see there is that Columbus’ property tax burden is about 10 percent less than similar districts to Columbus.

But yes, Mr. Derrow, you got ‘em. Columbus does spend a higher percentage of their operating revenue on administrators than their peer districts.

Peer districts to Columbus spend 14.6 percent of their operational costs on administrators.

Columbus spends 14.7 percent. New Albany’s? 12.8 percent.

What’s Derrow’s response to a 0.1 percent greater relative expenditure on administrators than its peer districts and not even 2 percent difference from his own district’s rate?

“Admit it. Columbus City Schools is bloated and broken beyond repair,” screams his column’s headline.

By the way, the average administrator salary in Columbus is $122,923. Anyone else find it jarring to hear someone from New Albany bitching about Columbus administrators’ bloat when those same administrators don’t even make 1/2 of what the average New Albany family makes?

I digress.

Does Derrow say similar things about virtual Charter Schools, whose average administrative expense is a staggering 40 percent? No.

What about brick and mortar Charter Schools, whose average administrative expense is a whopping 27.2 percent? Nope.

There are 150 Ohio public school districts that spend a higher percentage of their operational costs on administrators than Columbus. So do they need a radical realignment too? Not according to Derrow.

Importantly, Derrow claims that

“Small, rural districts can benefit from the type of consolidation that eliminates redundant administrative expenses. But Columbus schools’ overstuffed officialdom shows that large bureaucracies can too easily become self-replicating parasites that feed off of and slowly kill the organization that sustains them.”

Ugh.

Let’s set aside Derrow’s overstuffed prose for now.

Ripley-Union-Lewis-Huntington Local — the exact type of small, rural consolidated district (four times; it’s in the name!) that Derrow claims to be the paragon of streamlined expenditure making — spends nearly 50 percent more on administrators (23.7 percent) than the “overstuffed officialdom” (whatever the hell that is) of Columbus (14.7 percent).

Look, does Columbus have academic challenges? Absolutely.

Do they need to do better? Absolutely.

They’re one of the few districts in the state rated as 2 stars — the lowest any district received on the state report card (importantly, they have the same performance rating as the state’s largest virtual charter school and a similar or higher rating than more than 1/2 of all charters, but I digress).

These state performance measures Derrow and others cite, though, are all based on standardized tests, which are notoriously better at measuring a school district’s poverty level than they are at measuring student success.

Let’s look beyond those numbers.

Wanna know something? On many student opportunity measures, Columbus mostly outperforms their peer districts and straight up outperforms New Albany.

Meanwhile, New Albany mostly underperforms their peer districts on these measures.

For example, even though New Albany boasts the state’s 3rd richest community, on their overall test-score ratings (again, largely determined by community wealth), they only rank as the 4th-highest performing school district … in Franklin County!

So let’s look at some of these student opportunity measures.

• 50.3 percent of Columbus’ high school students participate in a physical education or wellness course. Only 27 percent of New Albany high school students do.

• 56 percent of Columbus high school students are enrolled in a career-tech course — higher than its peer districts. Only 5 percent of New Albany high school students are enrolled in career-tech options — a far smaller percentage than the 18.9 percent average among New Albany’s peer districts.

• 88 percent of Columbus middle school aged students and 78.2 percent of their high school students are taking co-curricular activities — well above their peer districts’ rate. Only 65.3 percent of New Albany middle school students and 55.3 percent of their high school students participate in co-curricular activities — far below New Albany’s peer districts, lower even than Columbus’ peer districts.

• When New Albany outperforms Columbus, they mostly do not outperform their peer districts. For example, New Albany has a lower percentage of its students participating in AP, CCP and IB courses and middle school world languages. Columbus outperforms its peer districts in the same categories.

• And while 77.4 percent of New Albany’s graduates are considered college, career or militarily prepared, Columbus’ rate of 64.7 percent ain’t far behind and is pretty damn impressive given its far more challenging student profile.

Let me ask you a question, Dear Reader: Do you think granting students these opportunities gives them a better overall educational experience? If you answered, “yes” to that question, then I think it’s fair to suggest that kids in Columbus are more likely to have these better overall educational experiences than kids in New Albany, despite New Albany’s overwhelming demographic and funding advantages.

Quite a different description of public education in Columbus than what Derrow suggests, don’t you think?

This is not to say that New Albany is failing or needs broken back into two districts or anything. But the data suggest they could do more, especially as the state’s third-richest district.

For example, New Albany’s local tax effort is about 1/3 that of Columbus’ residents’ and (importantly) less than 1/2 of their peer districts’1.

One the fiscal side, let’s not discount the fact that the state sends privately run schools in Columbus nearly twice the amount of state aid they send kids in Columbus’ public schools (much of it going to private schools whose kids were never in the Columbus City Schools to begin with).

The state provides privately run schools taking New Albany kids about 22.4 percent of the money New Albany kids receive in their public schools. Still way too much. But the economic impact isn’t even in the same ballpark as the impact on Columbus.

In addition, while the state last year funded privately run schools for 144 New Albany students — 3.1 percent of its public school enrollment, privately run schools for more than 30,000 Columbus resident students were funded — 72 percent of the total public school students in Columbus.

I’ll finish with Mr. Derrow on this point he made about the most recent teachers’ contract in Columbus: “They’re focused on maximum job, wage and benefits protection for existing employees, even as customers — parents — flee to better choices”. He then calls Columbus a “failed industry.” He is essentially implying that Columbus’ contract is designed to keep old, curmudgeonly teachers around at the expense of newer, fresher teaching blood joining the fray2.

Columbus teachers make $75,219 a year. New Albany’s make $78,299. Meanwhile, here are the relative years of experience for each district:

So Derrow is saying that despite the fact that Columbus teachers are cheaper and less experienced (and probably much younger) than New Albany, it is Columbus’ contract that retains the old, curmudgeonly hangers on like other “failed industry”3?

Got it.

In conclusion, I wanted to spend some time here to explain that public education is a difficult, complex, noble endeavor. It is not a balance sheet. It is not a business. It is not a test score.

It is a civic right.

Costs certainly matter and should be pared down where they can be, but only for meeting the goal of investing more in kids’ educational experiences, not so you can claim some nebulous “fiscal responsibility” mantle or hold onto it to spend on a so-called “rainy day”, which of course never comes, even during pandemics or recessions.

For it is our kids’ educational experiences that matter, even more than what they cost. There is simply zero reason to consider cracking up Columbus City Schools for the reasons Derrow claim exist because doing so will fundamentally harm Columbus kids’ educational experiences.

And those reasons don’t really exist anyway.

My bottom line for Derrow and other Masters of the Universe is this: The path to economic and social prosperity begins in the classroom. If you aren’t willing to invest whatever it takes to enrich that path for our kids, what the hell are you doing?

Ohio lawmakers and governors have so overvalued failing Charter Schools and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies that in some communities state taxpayers are paying more to educate students in privately run schools than local public schools1.

Columbus — Ohio’s largest school district — is the poster child for this phenomenon. Last school year, Ohio sent Columbus City Schools $166 million to educate the district’s 41,587 students. Meanwhile, the state sent $328 million to pay for the 30,085 students enrolled in Charter Schools and private schools.

That’s right.

The state paid these privately run schools in Columbus (and online) nearly double what they paid kids in the state’s largest public school district.

That’s obscene.

But it’s not unique.

There are 26 Ohio school districts where the state’s sending 75 percent or more of the amount of funding to privately run schools than students in the public schools. On avergae, the state is sending 20 percent of the funding it sends to students in public schools to failing charter schools or to subsidize the unconstitutional private school voucher program.

What else do you notice? It’s not just big urban districts like Columbus and Cleveland where you’re seeing this phenomenon. Rich districts like Westlake, Revere and Rocky River are witnessing this too. Even little Put-in-Bay has more money going to privately run schools2 than the local public school district. In fact, the phenomenon is most pronounced in wealthier suburban districts3.

Look at the state’s wealthiest districts. Even though barely 10 percent of the students in those districts on average attend failing Charter Schools or have parents who receive unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies, the state is sending about 40 percent of the revenue it sends to the district to those privately run schools.

But, of course, the districts hurt most emphatically by this phenomenon are the state’s eight major urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. On average, those districts see the state send 80 percent of the money they receive for their own students to largely unaccountable, privately run schools.

Once again, this overvaluation of privately run schools in Ohio helps explain why the state now spends about half the share of the state’s budget on the state’s 1.5 million public school students as it did in 1975.

Truly alarming.

Perhaps politicians in this election year should be asked how they’re going to fix this?

Seems like a fair question to me.