Upside-down and backward

Senate gives a billion-dollar tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfunds schools by $2.74 billion, and leaves behind students with the most need

The Ohio Senate’s budget proposal underfunds public schools by $2.74 billion over the next two years while stripping $1.1 billion from the state budget annually. It does so with a tax proposal that will exclusively benefit Ohioans with income over $100,000.

Policy Matters Ohio has released a new brief and accompanying fact sheets for the 447 school districts that would lose money under the Senate plan compared to the bipartisan Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP).

“This bill reverses course on the FSFP,” said Policy Matters Executive Director Hannah Halbert. “The Senators took a cafeteria approach to the existing formula, taking some of the elements and leaving the ones they decided were too expensive. What they propose here is a husk of the bi-partisan plan that Ohioans have successfully advocated for and implemented over the past four years.”

The brief includes a five-point summary of the Senate plan:

1. It low-balls the state’s funding responsibility by using outdated cost estimates that are mismatched to contemporary property tax valuations.
2. It eliminates supplemental targeted assistance, designed to increase funding for districts with low wealth and a high share of students attending school outside their home districts.
3. It restores elements of the FSFP that ensure no district receives less funding than in 2020 or 2021. This is a crucial element of the original plan — one that protects wealthier districts and those that have had big increases in property valuations.
4. It will reduce funding for students from households with low incomes over time, though specific details of this element of the plan have not yet been released.
5. It adds supplemental payments for enrollment growth and “performance.” The latter is entirely backward, directing funds away from schools with the highest levels of student poverty and to those in areas that are by comparison well-off.

Of the performance supplement, Halbert said, “It presupposes two things that are grossly incorrect: that all schools already have what they need to meet the costs of an adequate education; and that schools alone can off-set the trauma, harm and educational consequences of chronic generational disinvestment in Ohio’s most underserved communities, and do so while chronically underfunded.”

Halbert also noted that about 1 in 5 Ohio schools would receive more funding under the Senate plan than with the FSFP. “Of those 129 districts, 71.3% have low or very low levels of student poverty. We suspect this increase is driven by the “performance” supplement. Should legislators want to reward high-performing schools, they should close more tax breaks for special interests and do so — but not until they have met the basic funding requirements of the constitution. It’s their duty to provide all schools with a predictable, cost-based, and adequate level of funding. Instead, the Senate chose to pit district against district over making common sense improvements in the tax code and fully implementing the Fair School Funding Plan.”