Governor's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Financing Student Success in the State of Ohio
February 2005
No matter that "government by commission" hasn't served Ohio well in the past (though it's gotten plenty of issues off Governor Taft's desk). No matter that Ohio is now one of the highest-taxed states in the land, that its economy is a wreck, and that it's pauperizing itself via excessive public spending. Never mind that a Noah's Ark style panel of "stakeholders" can never agree on anything except more, more, more. No matter. In 2003, the Governor empanelled a "Blue Ribbon Task Force on Financing Student Success" and charged it with devising a new school finance system for the Buckeye State, which the Supreme Court had mandated but the executive branch and legislature have never been able to agree on. Now that group has reported and, with a couple of exceptions, its report is as awful as you might expect. Though the Task Force correctly diagnosed a host of ills in Ohio's current public education system, and though it uses fine rhetoric about boosting student success and pupil achievement, this report is not about the education system's effectiveness, efficiency, or productivity. It's about adding to the system's inputs, i.e. revenues, and doing so according to the Marxist principle that "state resources be distributed to the districts whose students are most in need." Indeed, the Task Force explicitly calls for school funding to be based on "inputs" - a calculus of what's supposedly needed to fund salaries, buildings, etc. - and rejects the view that the average spending of high-performing districts ought to be sufficient for all districts to succeed. Needless to say, it addresses only the finances of "school districts" and is stone silent on the state's severe underfunding of the charter schools that now enroll tens of thousands of the state's neediest kids precisely because many of those cherished districts are serving them so poorly. A dismal, dismal performance, but expect the Governor, in his budget message today, to embrace nearly all of the Task Force's ill-founded analyses and recommendations. (He is expected to distance himself from the most contentious of them, a complex provision to amend the state constitution to "entitle" school districts to increasing revenues as property values rise. As noted above, he's also expected to break some new ground with a voucher proposal.) It's hard to believe you will want to read this ill-conceived report, but you can find it at http://www.blueribbontaskforce.ohio.gov/.
