True “accountability” is fast vanishing from K–12 education in the U.S., whether we’re talking about results-driven accountability for schools or performance-based accountability for students. It’s definitely exited from the priorities of today’s reform leaders and policymakers. We are replacing academic achievement, gains, and gap-closings with whole-childism, “multiple measures,” holidays from testing and certainly from consequences, and we’re engaged in a myopic emphasis on “supporting” schools and “building their capacity” without also holding them to account for their performance or lack thereof.
Like a golfer who over-corrects his swing, we’re now missing the green, and likely to keep doing so.
I say over-corrected because, as I’ve acknowledged before, our original conception of school (and student) accountability—a tripod of standards, assessments and consequences—didn’t pay enough attention to “capacity.” We assumed that the skill needed to make things better—to turn things around—already existed within a school, a district, a CMO, even a state agency, and what was lacking was the will to change. So early accountability focused almost entirely on revving the will, the motivation to change, via an elaborate set of rewards for success and interventions (and embarrassment) when goals were not met. Very behaviorist.
We now know that that was partly wrong. A lot of places didn’t just lack the incentives to do things better, but also lacked the capacity to make that happen. “Capacity” is a loose term that spans many elements from knowledge to money, from time to energy, from organizational structure to leadership and “running room,” i.e., the freedom or autonomy to make big changes. Some places understood what they should do differently but were hemmed in by regulations, union contracts, politics, or plain old inertia. (Which begins to get us back to “will.”)
All those issues arose long before the pandemic, as did backlashes against testing and top-down efforts to change familiar institutions. Thus the easing of NCLB accountability for schools via waivers, then via ESSA, even as states backed off from end-of-course exams for students, colleges grew skittish about SATs, and grades inflated. The resurgence of “whole child” concerns such as social and emotional learning further drained whatever energy there was for an incentive system keyed to reading and math scores.
Recall that those scores had improved during the early NCLB years. I can’t prove that the easing of consequential accountability for schools and kids caused the leveling-off that followed, but they did coincide.
Then came the pandemic. Testing and accountability “holidays” became the norm. Nobody failed. We were pleased when schooling occurred. We were grateful when teachers and students showed up in school. But much learning time was lost forever and scores have plummeted. And the backslidingcontinues, long after the Covid emergency has passed, thanks to chronic absenteeism and other problems that pre-dated the pandemic.
All of which, you might think, adds up to the clearest possible sign that it’s time to revive old-fashioned results-driven accountability and put the tough back into tough-love. That’s where I am.
But that’s not what’s happening most places. Instead, we’re continuing to soften.
Consider two live examples.
First in New England, where a big contributor to the impressive if incomplete “Massachusetts miracle” over three decades has been the Bay State’s commitment to student-level accountability by requiring high schoolers to “pass the MCAS” in order to graduate. (You can read about it in an excellent account by former state education commissioner and Fordham board member David Driscoll.) Yes, accountability via students, combined with a lot of transparency for school performance, some school and district “takeovers” for non-performance, a soupçon of school choice, and a bunch more money.
Today, however, the MCAS graduation requirement is under assault from multiple directions, and there’s a fair chance that lawmakers will do away with it.
The argument won’t surprise you. As stated by Northampton legislator Joanne Comerford, “a single test shouldn’t determine if a student graduates from high school…. This is a test that disproportionately fails our most vulnerable and at-risk students…. We need to bring an end to punitive high-stakes testing.”
“Punitive high-stakes testing.” Now shift to the Midwest where the same argument caused Ohio legislators the other day to put a stake through the heart of the Buckeye State’s “third grade reading guarantee,” the requirement that kids pass a reading test before being promoted to fourth grade. Going forward, they won’t be “held back” unless their parents consent, which it’s fair to predict won’t happen very often. (I should add that the multifaceted state budget bill containing that setback also did great stuff on other K–12 fronts.)
Understand that neither the MCAS graduation requirement nor the third-grade “reading guarantee” (found in several states, including Mississippi with its own recent “reading miracle”) is cruel, insensitive, or rigid. Tough, OK, but accompanied by work-arounds, exceptions, second chances, and remedial arrangements for kids who for various reasons just can’t pass the standardized test on schedule. The point isn’t to punish. It’s to ensure that youngsters moving on to the next stage of their education—or their life—have learned the essentials that they will need to succeed there. Be tough about that now or they’ll run into tough problems later.
The same principle holds for school-level accountability, which was the essential element of NCLB—and earlier efforts by a handful of states to focus on the results achieved (and gains made) within individual schools and sometimes classrooms. Praise and reward success—but also intervene in ways that force changes in event of failure.
The interventions and turnaround efforts took many forms, often not too threatening or disruptive—and therefore often not too successful. Takeovers of districts by states seldom led to academic gains, while districts were loath to intervene in schools in drastic ways: replacing the staff, replacing the education plan, outsourcing the school, even closing it entirely and moving its pupils to better schools. Instead, interventions often took the form of plans and promises, of meetings and “technical assistance” and paper shuffling. Which is to say, not really tough.
Are we at a point in time when a renaissance is possible, when the woes of student achievement and pandemic learning loss could relaunch a regime that’s both tough and loving—well, let’s say skill-developing and capacity-building—for schools that aren’t cutting it? Can we get that balance right? Or are we totally gun-shy when it comes to “tough”?
A worrying sign is a brand-new report on “The Path Forward for School Accountability” from the generally-estimable National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. Its sixteen pages are long on helping, stakeholder engagement, “principled design processes,” “support systems,” “improvement planning,” and “comprehensive” approaches. Nothing in it is objectionable, and much is worth taking seriously. But you will search in vain for consequences, for interventions, for what to do to or about a school that may lack the will even when it possesses the skill.
As I said up top, we’ve overcompensated. Perhaps, as in so many other realms of modern American life, we’ve also gone soft, forfeiting the will to deal with “will” by compelling changes that people don’t much want to make?
It’s not easy in a free society. Make too many people do things they don’t want to do and you’ll probably get voted out of office.
But it’s not impossible. Restaurants get shut by the health department if they have vermin. Pilots and bus drivers get grounded if they can’t pass the licensing test. Swimming pools and water systems are supposed to get shut if contaminated. You can’t cross bridges that fail safety inspections or inhabit a house that doesn’t meet the fire code.
It’s not impossible. We can be tough when health and safety are at stake. Why would we keep a school open when its students aren’t learning? Why would we “license” a kid for fourth grade or graduation who cannot pass the test?
We need a rebirth of accountability in American K–12 education—while also still taking “capacity” seriously. Skills for sure. But when the will isn’t there, consequences must follow.
You may have heard that conservative parent groups are banning books. From the Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel Maus, to seemingly anything that addresses LGBT themes, such groups are challenging their inclusion in libraries and on curricula. In fact, the American Library Association (ALA) lamented a record number of book “bans” in 2022.
Well, I spent years as an English teacher, spending my days reading books with kids. These aren’t book bans. This isn’t a “culture war” debate over censorship, but an inevitable, even healthy argument that boils down to which books, for which reason, at what age, and in what venue.
Calling each of these decisions a “ban” blurs categorical distinctions that deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a difference between a school switching one book out for another in its curriculum, a librarian removing a book because it’s outdated or age-inappropriate, a major company like Target or Amazon de-platforming a book, and the federal government black-bagging dissidents found with samizdat materials. The latter two may in fact be bans—they limit everyone’s access to a text—but anyone who wants to can easily go down the street and buy for themselves plenty of books not in school libraries.
In reality, politicians and activists on both left and right engage in restricting access to books. If anything, the left engages in broader censorship. The pressure on Target to pull Irreversible Damage from its shelves and Amazon to remove of When Harry Became Sally came from the left, and such actions restricted more people’s access to these books than the decision to pull Gender Queer from a handful of school libraries. But even in these cases, it’s neither illegal to own a copy nor impossible to obtain one. Neither were “banned.”
In reality, even free societies are constantly engaged in little acts of censorship. Barnes and Noble places certain genres in the back and covers certain glossy magazines with opaque boards. Theaters restrict access to violent movies. Local ordinances determine what shops can go where.
Consider a far smaller venue: my own former classroom, where I regularly included Frederick Douglass’s autobiography in the course of the year. However, its brutal descriptions of beatings, rapes, and murders proved too visceral for twelve-year-olds to handle. I replaced it with A Raisin in the Sun, allowing my class to both cover America’s history of oppression and read a play. Did I ban Douglass’s autobiography? No one would reasonably suggest so.
And yet that is precisely what a district in Tennessee did with Maus; it merely took it off the curriculum. Perhaps the most controversial and even unjustifiable book “ban” from last year, it is really the quintessential example. A handful of major media outlets compared its removal from a curriculum to Nazi book burnings and holocaust denial. But the problem isn’t that they “banned” the book. They didn’t. Rather, they took it off for a questionable reason—vulgarity—with no recommended replacement such as The Diary of Anne Frank.
There are countless reasons to include or exclude a book in a library and on a curriculum: difficulty, genre, age appropriateness, thematic variety, aesthetic value, and historical significance, among others. Tastes change. Societal values change. And so curricula will change. The books our students read in school shape their character, form their worldview, and more broadly inculcates our national values. What our students read is no flippant affair.
Calling such changes “bans” stymies this essential discussion. A choice between The Diary of Anne Frank or Maus raises interesting questions. Are graphic novels equal in literary merit to traditional texts? What effect on literacy development would each genre have? How and when do we expose our children to the horrors in human history? Can we have these arguments civilly still?
It’s a debate that goes back millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates and his interlocutors argued over what passages of Homer to include and avoid in the education of children. They knew that what children read forms their minds and characters. The heroes they lionize or villains they condemn will shape the kind of individuals they themselves will strive to be. Valorize Achilles and we may find our students rash and blindly ambitious.
The average high school English curriculum covers anywhere from six to twelve books in a year, and the typical school library houses 10–15 thousand books. The inclusion and exclusion of this or that book is unavoidable. It’s basic curation and curricular construction. And we must have some limiting principles. No one would want a school shooter’s manifesto to provide the anchor text of a ninth grade English unit nor copies of Maxim to furnish the library in a kindergarten classroom.
Perhaps the more controversial question is “who decides?” The ALA doesn’t decry teachers or school boards banning books, but rather parental “censorship groups.” No one questions a librarian chucking an antiquated board book from the ‘60s. They bristle at parents dictating that the librarian do so.
Surely, some of these parent groups’ demands have been outlandish. Most recently, several organizations criticized a manga series, Assassination Classroom. The book is sophomoric—think Captain Underpants for high schoolers—but hardly nefarious or vulgar. Conversely, many complaints are understandable. An NBC article claimed that LGBT themes outraged parents but made no mention of what actually caused offense: graphic depictions of oral sex and masturbation.
But again, this is arguing over a book’s merit, not who decides. In short, parents should have some say in their child’s education. Most schools are public institutions, after all. If parents want to protest a book with sexually explicit images at a school board, I welcome it. That’s what a democratic, representative political process looks like. The school board and teachers are then welcome to acquiesce to or reject their demands. Were parents protesting over insufficient funding or school safety, I think the press would treat these parental groups differently.
How well do our public high schools prepare students—especially low-income students—for future success? A working paper from analysts at Brown and Harvard addresses that question, focusing on a number of consequential middle- and longer-term outcomes.
The analysts use student-level data from the Massachusetts Department of Education, including rich information on demographics, enrollment, test scores, and student intentions (via surveys). Their dataset allows them to control for factors that prior value-added studies have not been able to, such as parents’ level of education and students’ plans after high school. They focus on students who entered ninth grade for the first time during the 2002–03 and 2003–04 school years, which gives them enough time to look at longer-term outcomes, such as college attendance, graduation from two- or four-year colleges, and earnings at roughly age thirty. They also look at short-term outcomes, including test scores, attendance, and whether a student is on track to graduate.
Because of interest in how schooling impacts low-income students, the public high schools in the sample (all 106 of them, including nine charter schools and twenty-seven vocational/technical schools), have enrollments consisting of at least 25 percent low-income students, determined through eligibility for free and reduced-priced lunch in eighth grade. The analysis uses the first public high school a student attended to measure impacts; thus the results include treatment and intent-to-treat outcomes (in light of students who may switch schools after initial identification). Their school value-added model calculates a school’s effect on a given long-term outcome controlling for student prior achievement, demographic characteristics, and the survey data, including parents’ education. Analysts are comparing results from the low-income schools to those of the average school in the total sample.
Similar students who attend schools at the 80th percentile of the value-added distribution (that is, schools good at boosting student achievement) are 6 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college and earn 13 percent, or $3,600, more annually at age thirty compared to peers who attend schools performing at the 20th percentile. Given the many factors that influence students’ later-life outcomes, these school effects are considered quite large.
Next, the analysts look at whether a school’s impact on short-term measures—including tenth grade test scores, attendance, and the advancement of academic progress and college aspirations—predicts its impact on longer-term measures. The answer, mostly, is yes. For instance, schools that advance four-year college graduation rates more tend to be those that improve students’ test scores and college aspirations. And schools that improve two- and four-year college-going also boost students’ earnings. But since short-term measures, like attendance and tenth grade test scores, remain significant predictors of earnings, this suggests that high schools influence earnings above and beyond their impacts on postsecondary educational attainment. They also find that the impact of peers—quantified via a composite measure based on previous research—largely operates through the short-term measures.
What’s more, the schools that improve outcomes the most are not simply those that serve relatively few economically disadvantaged students. When they plot each school’s effect on longer-run outcomes against the share of students from low-income families in the school, they find that some schools that serve high proportions of economically disadvantaged students have substantial positive impacts on their later life outcomes.
Finally, since nearly a quarter of students in the study attend vocational/technical schools, analysts break out their outcomes separately. Compared to non-CTE high schools, they find a unique advantage stemming from some CTE schools; specifically, they significantly raise long-term earnings, even as they have below-average effects on four-year graduation rates. Put another way, the report says the “impact of CTE schools on later earnings does not run through educational attainments.” That bodes well for students in more effective CTE schools who choose to head directly into the workforce and/or delay college enrollment.
All of this is good news. Poverty is not destiny for our young people, as high schools can help make a meaningful difference. Those that improve students’ test scores and college aspirations more than we’d expect also improve longer-run outcomes more than we’d expected, so yes, test scores really do matter. High schools can also offer different pathways for improving different life outcomes for different types of students, but one thing must be the same: a high level of quality.
Affirmative action focused on the wrong end of the pipeline, ushering students into elite colleges without fixing the system that creates academic achievement gaps. —Jonathan Chait
Houston Independent School District will cut 500 positions, largely from the central office, which the state-appointed superintendent calls “bloated” and “amorphous.” —The Texas Tribune
Jeers
Students made less progress in reading and math last school year than their counterparts did in 2019, meaning learning loss is getting worse, not better.—The 74
California’s move to de-track its math classes and make them more inclusive has only worsened the achievement gap. —Noahpinion
Holdover policies from the pandemic that eased grading and passing standards are inflating New York City’s graduation rate. —Chalkbeat New York
Ivy League colleges remain the domain of an elite, privileged few and so the strike-down of affirmative action will have little effect on the other 99.8 percent of the populace. —FT
After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, the next legal battle will occur over race-neutral policies like screening for poverty that could act as proxies for race. —New York Times
With crime spiking, teen mental health declining, and learning loss persisting, here’s how local governments and school districts can make the best of summer school. —Washington Post
Jane Coaston interviews Utah Governor Spencer Cox about recent legislation in his state to limit and regulate the use of social media by teenagers. —New York Times
Historically, many American students from poor families have been trapped in sorely underfunded public schools. The conventional wisdom suggests that school funding remains unequal across low- and high-income schools and that equal funding equates to equitable resources for students. This brief challenges the notion that economically disadvantaged students receive less funding than other students, with implications for equalizing classroom resources and optimizing other social policies.
Not anymore. School funding has risen dramatically over the last few decades, especially in schools serving more students from low-income families.
CW: “Better school funding makes a difference to students from low-income families.”
Generally true. Over the last two decades, the evidence that “money matters” to school performance has become much stronger and shows that school funding is even more important for students from poor families.
CW: “School funding remains unequal across low- and high-income schools.”
Wrong. School-finance reforms and, to a lesser extent, increases in federal education funding have eliminated the gaps between schools serving more- and less-affluent students, at least when those schools are within the same state.
CW: “Eliminating the SES gaps means racial/ethnic funding gaps disappear, too.”
Mostly true, but there are exceptions. A few states that have eliminated gaps in funding for students of different socioeconomic status (SES) still have funding gaps by race.
CW: “Equal funding means equitable resources for students.”
Not necessarily. Ensuring access to some resources, such as high-quality teachers, costs more in schools that serve more disadvantaged student populations.
CW: “Even if school funding is equal, it’s not adequate to meet students’ needs.”
“Adequacy” is an inherently subjective, unscientific concept. Consequently, what constitutes “adequate” funding will inevitably be contested and variable across communities.
The Bottom Line
For decades, many American students from poor families were trapped in sorely underfunded public schools while more affluent families had access to better-funded ones. But times have changed. School-finance reforms and, to a lesser extent, increases in federal funding have largely equalized school funding over the past few decades. Although not all fiscal gaps have been closed in every state, school funding within states is now generally progressive, meaning that students from poor families generally attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families, and disparities in outcomes between student groups can no longer be attributed to funding gaps. In response to this shift, equity-minded school-finance reformers now advocate for “adequacy” funding, but because adequacy is a subjective concept, that goal is likely to be elusive.
Policy Implications
Because funding is already progressive, improving the outcomes of lower-performing students requires reforms to make schools more efficient using the funds they already have and/or allocating funding even more progressively.
Gaps in funding by race continue in a few states and should prompt continued action to provide equalized funding.
Focusing on equalizing classroom resources, such as access to high-quality teachers, is an objective with a more commonsense rationale—likely making it more politically tenable—than providing “adequate” resources, which is more subjective.
The effectiveness of increased education funding faces diminishing returns in some places, and other policy improvements, from better health care to offering child tax credits, may improve the lives of students overcoming disadvantages more than additional funds for schools.
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This brief analyzes the extent to which public K–12 schools are funded unequally and discusses continued challenges related to equitably funding schools. It evaluates six statements that have become the conventional wisdom among some in the public or policymaking community, including the following:
“Students from traditionally-disadvantaged backgrounds attend poorly-funded schools.” Not anymore.
Some of the earliest analyses of school funding disparities were conducted by the NAACP. In his history of that organization’s legal work, law scholar Mark Tushent recounts a series of school-spending analyses that the civil rights group produced in the 1920s. Back then, segregated Black schools in Georgia and Mississippi received just one-eighth and one-fifth, respectively, of what segregated White schools in the same states received. Although North Carolina was “without a doubt the best” of the Southern states, the funding ratio was merely “less than two to one,” and Black teachers had a minimum salary substantially lower than the White minimum. Schools were separate and unequal.
The period of school integration following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the successes of the civil rights movement brought welcome changes but did not come close to ensuring that schools were appropriately funded. Schools attended by poor, Black, and Hispanic students remained poorly funded because of both family choices and misguided public policies. White and middle-class families leaving urban cores in previous decades devastated local tax bases, leaving many schools chronically underfunded. Because American schools have traditionally been funded largely through local property taxes, high-poverty districts often received paltry resources. When writer and educator Jonathan Kozol toured American schools in the 1980s, he encountered urban schools that were “overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning—including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students.” What Kozol deemed “savage inequalities” between the wealthiest and poorest communities in the 1970s and 1980s were no myth.
Yet beginning in the era when Kozol was first documenting those stark differences in school resources, civil rights activists, litigants, and voters pushed for more equitable funding for schools. In 1968, John Serrano, a Mexican-American parent of students in an east Los Angeles county school district, Baldwin Park Unified, sued the state based on the drastic differences in funding between his zoned district and the more affluent school districts in L.A. In the 1971 California Supreme Court case Serrano v. Priest, the Court ruled that California’s “funding scheme invidiously discriminates against the poor because it makes the quality of a child’s education a function of the wealth of his parents and neighbors.”
Since the Serrano decision, state supreme courts have forced school finance reforms in 26 other states, and those reforms have generally led to more spending for the schools serving the lowest-income students. Many states have also passed laws increasing funding for these schools, including as recently as 2022, when Tennessee switched to a student-based funding model that allocates additional resources to students from poorer families. Federal education funding, which is largely dedicated to schools with many students facing poverty, has also increased modestly over time (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Per-pupil, inflation-adjusted school spending has soared over time.
Note: Author’s calculations from Digest of Education Statistics tables 203.10, 236.55, and 401.10. All spending amounts are inflation adjusted in constant 2021 dollars.
As shown, per-pupil school funding increased 81 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1985 to 2019. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, schools have been showered with hundreds of billions in federal relief funds. Although a fiscal cliff looms when those funds expire, as of this writing students in virtually all American public schools—but especially those attending schools with many students from low-income homes—are experiencing unprecedented spending.
“Better school funding makes a difference to students from low-income families.” Generally true.
For decades, going back to the landmark Coleman Report in the mid 1960s, some have questioned whether “money matters” for schools, pointing to weak correlations between school spending and student outcomes as evidence that lack of spending wasn’t the problem. Yet araftofrigorousstudiesoverthepasttwodecades has made it clear that school funding does indeed make a difference to school performance.
Many of the more recent studies of school-finance reforms—Northwestern University economist Kirabo Jackson reviews 35 of them in a recent working paper—leverage the fact that they were implemented abruptly as a result of court mandates or close ballot initiatives. And the studies tell a remarkably consistent story: school spending makes a difference for all students, especially for students from low-income families. For example, one study of multiple states found no overall effect of increased spending as a result of tax increases that boosted school spending. However, that paper’s analysis of subgroups found that the increased funding led students from lower-income families to earn higher scores on end-of-year tests and to graduate at higher rates.
Of course, fundingskeptics have a point when they say that education leaders should use their funds wisely and focus resources in ways that maximize results for students. Many expensive interventions, from reducing class sizes to hiring teachers with more advanced degrees, often do little to increase student learning. Yet the activists and educators who sounded the alarm about insufficient and unequal school funding weren’t wrong: properly funding schools is an important issue, and for too long the students attending those dilapidated, underfunded schools were denied opportunities by America’s longstanding and systemic inequalities.
“School funding remains unequal across low- and high-income schools.” Wrong.
State-level school finance reforms and, to a lesser extent, increases in federal funding for schools have had a predictable but little-discussed effect: America’s shamefully persistent inequities in school funding are finally a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, many education advocates and scholars have generally not acknowledged this progress. Influential educationist Linda Darling-Hammond wrote as recently as 2013 that “in most states, there is at least a three-to-one ratio between per-pupil spending in the richest and poorest districts.” A 2019 article from Vox puts the conventional wisdom succinctly, arguing that because some school funding comes from local property taxes, public “schools in wealthier areas get better funding.”
Research shows such claims are wildly out-of-date. In fact, school funding is now generally progressive, meaning that students from poor families generally attend better-funded schools than students from wealthier families. Studies show that the era of savage inequalities has been over for decades.
Looking at school districts with the wealthiest and poorest populations within each state, a 2018 study by a team of Berkeley economists found yawning funding gaps in 1990 (Figure 2). Yet over the span of fifteen years, these gaps completely disappeared. Funding for students in wealthier and poorer districts had, by 2005, been equalized, and the gap remained closed through 2013, when their data set ended.
Figure 2. Yawning gaps in district-level spending were closed by the mid-2000s.
Note: Income quintiles are defined within states by the mean household income in the district in 1990, and revenues are expressed in 2013 dollars. The figure has been reproduced from Lafortune et al. (2018), who also note that districts are averaged within states and weighted by district enrollment (excluding Hawaii and the District of Columbia).
Several studies by the Urban Institute have also shown funding gaps disappearing. Their 2017 study used a series of stunning data visualizations to show that progressively allocated state and federal funding now outweighs the regressive effect of local funding sources, and only three states (Illinois, Nevada, and Wyoming) continued to have slightly regressive funding at the district level. A 2017 Brookings Institution study conducted by Urban Institute’s Matt Chingos shows that progressive funding for schools goes back to at least the mid-1990s. When the Urban Institute itself used a somewhat different methodology to study school finance in 2022, they still found that funding was slightly progressive: “1 percent more funding is allocated to students from households in poverty nationwide than toward students from households not in poverty.”
School-level data on these questions have only been available at scale for a few years, but the new analyses using that more granular data find that school-level spending is even more progressive than at the district level. This is not only because federal and state funding often targets low-income students but also because district funding itself is often allocated progressively. The most comprehensive study of school-level spending is from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware (hereafter, “Lee et al.”), and it shows that it is actually much more common for schools with poorer students to spend more than other schools in the same state—on average $529 more per student per year (that study uses free and reduced-price lunch qualification and census-based poverty metrics to operationalize student socioeconomic status (SES), with similar results using both measures). The only state where spending in schools serving poorer students is still markedly lower than in those serving wealthier ones is Illinois, which enacted school funding reforms in 2017, after the time period that Lee et al. analyzed. In New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut, funding for schools serving more low-income students is very slightly lower, but in the rest of the states, school funding is either equal or higher for the schools serving more low-income students.
“Eliminating the SES gaps means racial/ethnic funding gaps disappear, too.” Mostly true, but there are exceptions.
Similar to SES, the conventional wisdom is that Black and Hispanic students are more likely than White students to attend poorly funded schools. For example, a 2019 report from former fiscal advocacy group EdBuild said that students in “non-White” districts—those in which non-White students were at least 75 percent of the population—received $23 billion a year less in funding than mostly White districts received, evoking the deep institutional racism of the era in which those first NAACP studies were conducted. But that eye-popping figure excluded federal funding, which is allocated quite progressively. Since Black and Hispanic students are more likely than White students to live in poverty, those additional monies were not captured in the EdBuild data.
Studies that include federal, state, and local funding and look within states generally find equal funding for students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, but there are some exceptions. Using somewhat different methodologies, both Lee et al. and a 2022 Urban Institute report use school-level data to show that funding for Black students is generally greater than that for White students in the same state, while funding for Hispanic students is at least as much as that for White students in the same state. Specifically, Lee et al. find that, “On average, Black and Hispanic students receive $514 and $115 more per pupil than White students, respectively.”
It is true, however, that funding gaps based on race/ethnicity are more common than those based on SES. Whereas Lee et al. find only a handful of states where total school-level funding is even slightly regressive, they identify more than twenty states where Black or Hispanic students are funded at lower levels than their White counterparts, although only a few of those differences are statistically significant. Texas is a place where the racial school funding gap remains; although that state provides equal funding for more and less affluent students according to Lee et al., each Black student is, on average, funded at about $1,000 less per year than his or her White counterpart.
Although equity advocates shouldn’t exaggerate the problem, the persistence of racial disparities should prompt action in the places where they still exist.
“Equal funding means equitable resources for students.” Not necessarily.
Although funding gaps have mostly been eliminated, financial resources are not necessarily equivalent to classroom resources. The clearest example of this disconnect is continuing disparities in teacher quality. As Lee et al. put it, “The teacher-quality gap is not being remedied by progressivity in” spending. A number of other studies have likewise shown that it costs more to recruit and retain high-quality teachers in schools serving more disadvantaged students. Policies that reward educators who choose to teach in higher-needs environments, such as Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment, are meant to lessen such resource inequality but aren’t typically enough to eliminate the disparities. Lee et al. report that economically disadvantaged, Black, and Hispanic students tend to have smaller class sizes. Because such a policy tends to drive up staffing costs while offering minimal benefit to student learning, it is a good example of how different types of resource inequities can become so disconnected from overall spending patterns.
Because economic disadvantage also correlates with additional student needs (Figure 3), it makes sense to account for the share of students needing special education and English learning services, as well. Although many school-funding formulas allocate more to schools serving these student populations, the very slight progressivity in school spending suggests that schools serving less-affluent communities might often need more funds than they are currently receiving to fund such programs.
Figure 3. Higher-poverty schools have more English learners and slightly more students with special needs.
Note: Author’s calculations based on weighted averages of 59,045 schools with complete data on students with special needs (SPED), limited English proficiency (EL), and economic disadvantage in the 2021–22 EdFacts reports. Schools in three states are excluded because of lack of data (Delaware) or reporting nearly all students as economically disadvantaged, SPED, and/or EL (Illinois and Oregon).
Other resource inequities persist, as well. Special programs, such as Advanced Placement and extracurricular activities, are less likely to exist in schools serving students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Although some resources, such as whether a school has a program for “gifted” students, are not correlated with the SES of schools, it’s true that offering the same kinds of resources to all student groups means that higher-needs schools often require significantly more funding than those serving more affluent populations. Thus, some state funding systems should be even more progressive than they already are.
“Even if school funding is equal, it’s not adequate to meet students’ needs.” “Adequacy” is an inherently subjective, unscientific concept.
The equalization of school funding in the United States is a major achievement, however belated. The severe school-funding inequalities of the past made a mockery of equality of opportunity in America. Greater school funding has been shown to make a difference, especially to disadvantaged students, and it is sensible policy to fund the schools that these students attend at least as well as we fund the schools that advantaged students attend. It is also sensible for policymakers to attempt to equalize resources, such as access to high-quality teachers, meaning that progressive—or even steeply progressive—funding is likely to be necessary in many communities.
An ambitious approach, sometimes called “adequacy funding,” demands that school funding be based on what is necessary to help equalize outcomes between student groups, with some claiming that the precise amount of adequate funding can be calculated using available data. Unfortunately, equalizing outcomes does not lend itself to a technocratic solution that enables policymakers to calculate the “right” amount of funding. Thus, the “adequacy” framework contributes little to our understanding of how best to allocate education funding.
Consider a 2018 paper by Rutgers professor Bruce Baker and his coauthors, which defines adequacy as enough funding to meet the “costs associated with achieving national average student achievement outcomes” for all groups of students. Such an approach would still cost far more than is currently spent, even after large increases in education funding in recent years (see Figure 1). Even accepting all of their (arguably questionable) assumptions, Baker and his coauthors suggest that adequate funding would be in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 per high-poverty student per year, an amount that equates to the huge temporary infusions meant to help schools overcome the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. A recent report entitled Equal Is Not Good Enough by the Education Trust cites Baker and his colleagues and likewise suggests spending two to three times more on low-income students than what is spent on more affluent students.
Yet journalist Matt Barnum has pointed out that even in some of the localities where school spending meets these stratospheric targets, such as the state of New York, students “don’t actually achieve the average outcomes that [Bruce Baker’s study] would predict.”* This underscores the importance of broader education reforms that focus not only on school funding but also on how to make schools more efficient with the resources they have.
More fundamentally, the adequacy approach puts too much of the onus on schools to solve society’s broader inequities, as if greater school funding were the only way to improve the life chances of young people. Children do not start school at the same levels, and myriad social conditions are baked into the gaps observed between groups’ average test scores, grades, and other measures of academic achievement. Expecting schools to compensate for all these discrepancies inevitably crowds out other approaches. Many other social policies—such as food stamps, housing policy, health care access, better policing, or family tax credits—have discernible effects on education outcomes. And since school funding surely has diminishing returns, increasing it alone will fall short of the goal to improve vastly the opportunities of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Equalizing school funding and resources helps underserved students and provides basic fairness within our public education system. But as economist Eric Hanushek explains, the adequacy framework “ignores the simple fact that determining the level of public spending on schools is a political decision, vested with legislatures and governors.” Beyond more limited goals, such as equalizing student access to good teachers, there is simply no technocratic answer to the question of how much extra funding higher-needs schools deserve, and it is appropriate that different communities will adopt different funding priorities.
Policy Implications
Because funding is already progressive, improving the outcomes of lower-performing students requires reforms to make schools more efficient using the funds they already have and/or allocating funding even more progressively.
Gaps in funding by race continue in a few states and should prompt continued action to provide equalized funding.
Focusing on equalizing classroom resources, such as access to high-quality teachers, is an objective with a more common-sense rationale—likely making it more politically tenable—than providing “adequate” resources, which is more subjective.
The effectiveness of increased education funding faces diminishing returns in some places, and other policy improvements, from better health care to offering child tax credits, may improve the lives of students overcoming disadvantages more than additional funds for schools.
*Errata: An earlier version of the report referenced "the few localities" versus "some localities." The latter is more accurate. We apologize for the error.
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This brief was made possible through the generous support of The Anschutz Foundation and our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. We are grateful to Chad Aldeman for his insightful feedback on various drafts of the brief. We also extend our gratitude to Pamela Tatz for copyediting. At Fordham, we would like to thank Adam Tyner for authoring the report; Chester E. Finn, Jr., Michael J. Petrilli, Amber Northern, and David Griffith for reviewing drafts; Victoria McDougald for her role in dissemination; Stephanie Distler for developing the report’s cover art and coordinating production; and Christian Eggers, Jeanette Luna, and Jamya Davis for research assistance.
Enacted in 2012 under the leadership of Governor John Kasich, Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee included a retention requirement aimed at ending “social promotion,” the misguided practice of passing students along even though they are academically unprepared for their next step. Yet after much debate in recent years, state lawmakers chose to weaken Ohio’s retention policy via the recently passed state budget bill. House lawmakers led the charge, voting to outright ditch the requirement. The Senate reversed that repeal in its version of the budget. But the final legislation backs off mandatory retention by creating a significant loophole that allows schools to avoid retaining struggling readers as long as their parents request promotion to fourth grade.
A quick refresher: Ohio schools have been required to retain third graders who do not meet promotional standards on state reading exams or an alternative assessment. Schools have also been required to provide intensive interventions to help retained students catch up. Between 2013–14 and 2018–19, roughly 3 to 5 percent of third graders were retained under this policy.[1] A recent study from the Ohio Education Research Center at Ohio State University found that retention worked as intended. Retained students made significant academic gains compared to similar students who just narrowly passed the promotional bar. This positive finding is consistent with results from Florida, Indiana, and Mississippi, states that also have third-grade retention laws on the books.
Despite the strong evidence that it benefits children, and despite massive learning loss stemming from the pandemic, Ohio legislators still chose to gut this policy. Why so? The driving force was district administrators and teachers unions that pushed to remove retention, a policy that—while benefitting children—holds them more accountable for literacy outcomes. With a retention requirement, schools are pushed to improve literacy instruction in the early grades and “guarantee” that every child reads proficiently by the end of third grade. Without it, there isn’t much accountability for reading outcomes at this critical checkpoint in a student’s education. That allows adults to breathe easier, but does little good for students.
During the policy debates, detractors didn’t just say they wanted less accountability. They also trotted out several other reasons for pulling the plug, one of which was parent involvement. Representative Gayle Manning, co-sponsor of standalone House legislation eliminating retention, said, “I guess my problem is why we allow the government to make the decision [to retain a child] instead of the parent.” Whether parental agency was a genuine concern—especially from the education establishment—is highly questionable, given their opposition to school choice policies that empower families. Nevertheless, the argument resonated with some lawmakers and clearly shaped the final version of the budget bill.
As noted at the top, lawmakers ended strict mandatory retention through a parental override provision. Specifically, schools are excused from holding back a third grader if:
“A student’s parent or guardian, in consultation with the student’s reading teacher and building principal, requests that the student, regardless of if the student is reading at grade level, be promoted to the fourth grade.”
In practice, the new process is likely to look something like this: (1) parents are notified that their child did not meet the state’s third grade reading standards; (2) parents and school officials meet (or maybe even just trade emails) to discuss next steps; (3) parents, likely following advice from educators, make a request for promotion.
The legislation further stipulates:
“A student who is promoted [via parental request] shall continue to receive intensive reading instruction in the same manner as a student retained under this section until the student is able to read at grade level.”
This provision—a wise addition—provides some hope that students who move to fourth grade via parental request will still receive some form of “intensive reading instruction.” It also requires schools to provide these extra supports into middle or high school if a student remains below grade level in reading.
An affirmative parental request for promotion is better than an outright elimination of the requirement, but only barely so. It could easily become an avenue for schools to avoid retention and intervention. Given their well-known aversion to holding students back, schools are apt to pressure parents into making a request. A few schools might even disregard these requirements and promote children anyway. How many schools followed temporary lawin 2021–22 that required consultation with parents regarding third grade retention? In many districts—Akron, Cincinnati, and Youngstown among them—100 percent of students were promoted that year. Did not one parent have concerns about promoting their child? Finally, whether schools continue to provide continuing “intensive reading instruction” remains uncertain.
To safeguard against abuse or neglect, the newly restructured—and one hopes more muscular—Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) needs to ensure these laws are being followed by schools. At a basic level, the agency should check whether schools are indeed consulting with parents and that a parental request for promotion is on file. It should release an annual public report regarding compliance with these provisions. It should also ensure that students promoted via parent override do in fact receive intensive reading instruction. DEW should also support parents by making available information about the importance of literacy and how to navigate a consultation with their school. Finally, if schools are not complying with these laws, it should consider penalties or corrective action.
Making sure that all children read fluently remains a critical goal for Ohio. Softening retention does nothing to achieve that objective or solve the underlying problem of reading failure. It also directly counters many of the other bold literacyreforms in this year’s budget. What it does do, however, is ease up on schools, while putting students at-risk of further academic struggle in middle and high school. Backing off mandatory third grade retention was a policy blunder. Now it’ll be up to parents and state officials at DEW to make sure that Ohio schools are helping all children read proficiently.
[1] The retention law was suspended in 2019–20, 2020–21, and 2021–22 via Covid-related legislation. While the law was in effect for 2022–23, the budget bill—for this year only—allows schools to promote students who would otherwise be retained (unless a parent requests retention).
The value of incorporating technology into secondary education courses is a matter of debate, but if there’s anywhere that it might be beneficial, it is most likely within STEM-related subjects—meaning that high schoolers might better see themselves pursuing science in the future if they are able to work with the same tools as professionals do in the field. Theorizing that any successful application of technology in teaching comes via the buy-in of teachers, a trio of researchers surveyed chemistry instructors to determine their views on the relevance, potential value, and ease of use of classroom technology. The findings and their implications are limited, but interesting.
The research team, led by Olivia Wohlfart, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, interviewed ten chemistry teachers at the secondary level (students age twelve to eighteen) in Baden-Württemberg state, in the country’s southwest. They were of varying ages and had varying degrees of professional experience—both with chemistry education specifically and teaching generally. The interviewees were whittled down from an initial group who responded to an open call for participants, aimed at best representing the demographics of the state.
Baden-Württemberg was chosen because its chemistry education curriculum covers a diverse range of topics and activities spanning multiple grade levels. In secondary schools, chemistry is first introduced as a two-hour course in eighth grade, building upon the competencies acquired in earlier biology, natural sciences, and technology classes. In eleventh grade, chemistry becomes a core subject with three hours of instruction per week, and students may also opt to take it as a five-hour-long advanced subject. Chemistry curricula prioritize an experimental culture, the analysts write, placing a strong emphasis on hands-on learning and student research. Digital tools are incorporated into the curriculum to aid teaching and learning.
While the researchers clearly proceed from the view that students can benefit from the types of technology and instrumentation that lab chemists use in their daily work, it is the teachers’ attitudes toward that tech which forms the focus of the interview and analysis. Interviews took place in mid-2022.
While all ten teachers reported using technology in their classes, the most commonly cited digital tools in use were general applications for communication and organization purposes (think Microsoft Teams and spreadsheet software). Only four reported using chemistry-specific technology, such as digital data acquisition programs and molecule drawing programs like ChemSketch.
A majority of teachers reported positive feelings toward chemistry-specific technology, especially for illustrating complex or abstract concepts. Videos and “augmented reality” tools were cited as potentially helpful for visualizing the three-dimensional nature of atoms and the steps involved in chemical processes. Additionally, students could experience dangerous phenomena, such as nuclear chain reactions safely or time-compress slow chemical processes to better observe the outcomes using technology. Despite this positivity, however, teachers who felt that a given technology was difficult to use reported limiting its use in the curriculum. General tools, such as integrating videos (YouTube, Prezi, etc.), learning apps (like Kahoot), and digital displays (such as Apple TV or smart boards), were largely thought to be simple, quick, and intuitive—and were, thus, widely used. Beyond that, specific reported barriers—such as a perceived lack of tech support, unavailability of training, and/or a lack of student facility with a given technology—were strong factors in teachers’ decisions to avoid using a given application or software. Teachers who experienced problems with lower-level technology (Apple TV won’t work properly) were similarly deterred from regular use of higher-level technology, despite understanding the potential value of it. Responses did not vary with either teacher age or years of teaching experience.
Overall, Wohlfart and her team felt the interviewees indicated a “pragmatic, functional, and minimalistic attitude towards digital tools” in chemistry education. Technology could have a part to play, but even at its best, it was largely seen as a supplement to traditional teaching and experimental pedagogy. And once issues of unreliability came into play, even supplemental use could easily be halted by a given teacher.
Since the analysts are fully sold on the value of technology in secondary classrooms, rattling off a list of instruments and software both old and new that research shows add value to the study of chemistry at that level, their recommendations predictably focus on breaking down the barriers identified by German teachers: more training, more time in the day, more support from vendors and school administration. These are not the worst possible goals for German education leaders to pursue; however, it is interesting to note that other research into technology integration has called into question the value of technology usage as an end unto itself. Is removing barriers to having a working spectrometer in a high school chemistry course really where things should stop? Or would it be better to perhaps start with student outcomes—surveying those who pursued STEM education in college and attained employment in the research sciences—and work backward to make sure that courses and classrooms are equipped with everything they need to produce more of the same?
On June 30, the Ohio House and Senate passed the state’s biennial budget bill for FYs 2024–25, and Governor DeWine signed the bill into law on July 3. The legislation makes historic strides in K–12 education, most notably through strengthened educational choice programs, an overhaul of the state’s school governance framework, and requirements that schools adopt scientifically based reading practices. The bill also includes significant steps forward in career-technical education, teacher licensing, and transportation. The one blemish: Gutting the state’s third-grade retention policy, an issue that I’ll cover in a follow-up post. That aside, the budget bill is packed with reforms that promise a better future for Ohio students. Let’s take a look.
Significantly increases overall K–12 education funding: The budget increases core foundation funding for all public schools, including both traditional district and public charter schools. The decision to update the “inputs” to the school funding formula drove the increase—e.g., using 2022 teacher salary data to calculate base amounts, rather than 2018 salary data as in the prior biennium. The table below indicates that both districts and charters receive a 12 percent boost in state foundation aid between FY23 and FY25.
Narrows longstanding charter funding gaps: Ohio charter schools have historically been underfunded, receiving just 70 to 75 percent of local districts’ overall taxpayer funding. This year’s budget helps to close this large and persistent funding gap in the following ways:[1]
High-quality funding. Led by Governor DeWine, charters that register strong performance on key report card indicators will now receive an additional $3,000 per economically disadvantaged student and $2,250 per non-disadvantaged student annually. In FY23, the supplemental funding amounts provided to high quality charter schools were $1,416 and $809 respectively.
Facilities funding. All brick-and-mortar charters will receive $1,000 per pupil for facilities—up from $500 per pupil in FY23.
Equity supplement. In a brand-new funding component, all brick-and-mortar charters will now receive an additional $650 per pupil.
The average Ohio brick-and-mortar charter school is projected to receive 86 percent of district funding in the next biennium; high-quality charters will receive 92 percent. In terms of actual amounts—including the increased foundation aid—the average high-quality charter will receive approximately $4,000 per pupil in additional monies (or roughly 40 percent more aid) in FY 25 compared to FY 23. Though still less than the total taxpayer support received by similar district schools, these dollars will help Ohio’s best charters recruit and retain talented teachers, cover more of their facilities costs, expand their capacity so they can reach more students, and make Ohio an attractive destination for top national charter networks.
Expands private school scholarship eligibility to all families: Under former policy, students whose incomes were under 250 percent of the federal poverty level ($75,000 for a family of four), or those of any income level attending specific low-performing schools, were eligible for EdChoice scholarships. Led by Senate President Matt Huffman, the budget moves Ohio to universal eligibility, as any student—regardless of family income or school attended—is now eligible for EdChoice. Students whose family income is above 450 percent of federal poverty ($135,000 for a family of four) will receive reduced scholarship awards—the exact amounts will be based on a “sliding scale”—while lower-income students will receive the full amount. Ohio can now proudly join seven other states with universal private school choice programs.
Consistent with public school increases, the budget raises the scholarship amounts (including for special-needs scholarships). The full EdChoice scholarship is estimated to be $6,165 for students in grades K–8 and $8,407 in grades 9–12. These funding levels, while above prior scholarship amounts, still remain modest in comparison to total average public school funding of roughly $14,500 per pupil. Considering all programs—including EdChoice,[2] Cleveland’s, and two special-needs programs—Ohio is expected to increase scholarship funding from $595 million in FY 23 to $1.05 billion by FY 25.
The legislature also wisely added a requirement that the state education agency calculate and report student-growth results of scholarship students attending private schools. This new provision will offer parents a more complete picture of school quality relative to the current system that only considers proficiency rates on standardized assessments.
Overhauls K–12 education governance: Due in part to an incoherent governance structure at the state level, Ohio has struggled to rigorously implement education initiatives. One of the most obvious stumbling blocks has been its nineteen-member State Board of Education. Its structure currently consists of eleven members elected from broad regional districts and eight appointees of the governor. Unfortunately, the body has often failed to provide clear direction for and oversight of the state education agency. To address these problems, the budget bill puts the agency—and its chief—under the direct oversight of the governor, rather than the state board. The renamed Department of Education and Workforce will be responsible for implementing most education laws, with the state board largely relegated to handling matters of licensure. With a clearer chain-of-command and fewer cooks in the kitchen, the new governance model should promote stronger, steadier state leadership.
Aligns literacy instruction to the science of reading: The governor made literacy the centerpiece of his education budget this year. He proposed requiring all schools to follow the science of reading—an approach that emphasizes phonics and other key elements of effective reading instruction—and prohibiting discredited reading curricula from Ohio classrooms. His budget also set aside roughly $170 million over the biennium to provide high-quality curricula that align with the reading science and to support professional development for teachers. The governor’s proposals were approved, and the General Assembly even built on them by requiring teacher preparation programsto train prospective educators in the science of reading.
Invests in high-quality career-technical education: Another major priority of the governor was career-technical education (CTE). He proposed $300 million over the biennium in additional state spending that would support the expansion of CTE programming in in-demand career fields, with a particular focus on covering facility and equipment costs unique to advanced CTE fields. These investments will allow Ohio’s schools and career-technical centers to upgrade their programs to meet the demands of high-tech industries, while expanding access to quality CTE to more high school students. The funding was approved in the final budget bill.
Strengthens teacher pipelines: With many schools (including charters) expressing concerns about teacher shortages, the legislature pared down some of the licensing requirements that make it harder to recruit and retain teachers. The budget eliminates burdensome coursework requirements for out-of-state teachers to become licensed in Ohio, as well as for current teachers who entered the profession via alternative pathways to renew their license. Lawmakers also created a “grow-your-own” teacher initiative that provides scholarships for individuals who aspire to teach in high-need schools ($15 million allocation over the biennium).
Improves pupil transportation: Ohio law requires districts to provide transportation to eligible district, charter, and private school students. Unfortunately, some districts have struggled to fulfill this responsibility, often citing issues with busing non-district students. As a result, transportation has become a major headache for charter and private school families. The legislation should improve transportation by allowing greater flexibility in the use of vans, strengthening the state’s noncompliance provisions, and creating a pilot program in which regional educational service centers take responsibility for busing non-district students.
Shines a light on intradistrict open enrollment: Thousands of students likely attend non-residentially-assigned schools within their home district—to access a magnet school, for instance—but there are currently no numbers on how many do this. The budget requires districts to report how many students participate in intradistrict open enrollment, allowing for a more comprehensive picture of school choice in the Buckeye State. Policymakers, however, didn’t mandate that all Ohio districts participate in interdistrict open enrollment. The decision to open their doors will continue to be up to districts and many suburban ones will refuse to accept non-resident students who might benefit from attending their schools.
Holds the line on charter school accountability: As discussed in this piece, Senate lawmakers included provisions that would have softened accountability for charter school sponsors (or authorizers)—and would have weakened accountability for the schools they oversee. To their credit, these provisions were stripped from the final budget during conference committee, reiterating Ohio’s commitment to strong, academic-focused charter accountability which has helped drive improved performance in recent years.
Ensures that parents receive test scores in a timely manner: The budget adds a requirement that schools provide parents with their child’s state exam results by June 30 annually. Without a deadline, many parents have received this information too late to take steps on behalf of their child.
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A landmark budget is now on the books, exciting things are ahead for Ohio schools, families, and students. Schools—from all sectors—will have more resources they can use to provide students with a quality education. Parents can look forward to having a larger set of quality public and private school options at their fingertips. With the promise of more effective instruction and personalized opportunities, more Ohio students will be well prepared for life after high school. Kudos to state lawmakers for making K–12 education a top priority.
[1] Ohio has 7 independent STEM schools that are funded in a similar manner to charter schools. The budget includes them (for the first time) in the high-quality fund, and for the equity supplement. STEM schools have always received the facilities allotment in the same way as charters.
[2] The longstanding “performance-based” EdChoice scholarship remains in place, which allows (as under current policy) higher-income families to receive full scholarship amounts provided their children would otherwise attend a low-performing public school.
“Students from traditionally-disadvantaged backgrounds attend poorly-funded schools.”
