Last week, House lawmakers passed their version of Ohio’s biennial budget. As usual, the measure contains billions of dollars in appropriations and nearly as many policy changes. In K–12 education, the chamber’s headline proposal dealt with the school funding formula—for our take on that issue, see Fordham’s analysis and testimony—but the House budget also touches on many other areas of education policy. Here’s our analysis of seven key provisions that run the gamut of good, bad, and ugly. Some have attracted little attention but deserve scrutiny as lawmakers put finishing touches on the budget.
The good
1. The House slimmed down the State Board of Education from nineteen members to five, all of whom would be gubernatorial appointees (currently, eleven are elected and eight are appointed). The last General Assembly reduced the powers of the board and transferred authority over policy implementation to the governor and the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW). Yet the board still handles educator licensing, evaluation, and misconduct policy—all areas that matter for Ohio schools and students. Even when it had greater responsibility, the state board was much too large to function well. Especially now with lighter duties, reducing the number of cooks in the kitchen makes sense. Fewer members, particularly with better-aligned views, could also reverse years of bureaucratic ineptitude and strengthen board oversight of key educator policies.
2. The House also put forward an intriguing proposal—drawing almost no attention—that could improve education research in Ohio. It calls on the chancellor of higher education to collaborate with DEW and other entities to create a consortium that would develop a statewide research agenda to tackle “real-world issues of direct relevance to the state’s social, economic, and civic well-being.” Based on this agenda, the chancellor would award competitive research grants, up to $10,000 per project, to college faculty and doctoral students. It further requires the chancellor to disseminate research findings via multiple media, including policy briefs and presentations to the General Assembly. The lack of quality research in these vital areas hobbles policymaking in Ohio, and this initiative could be a step forward.
The bad
3. The House’s major new initiative on educational choice is a headscratcher. Instead of bolstering interdistrict open enrollment, public charter and STEM schools, and existing private-school scholarship programs, House members opted to create an educational savings account (ESA) program for students attending nonchartered, nonpublic schools. For those unaware, this refers to lightly regulated private schools that—because they choose not to be “chartered” by the state—cannot participate in the EdChoice scholarship program. The initiative is highly detailed, but its bottom line is spending a lot of money—the ESA is worth 75 percent of the EdChoice amounts—to cover students who attend such schools. It’s one thing for nonchartered, nonpublic schools to be free to operate and serve students, but spending taxpayer funds in their support is questionable, as they have elected not to accept state oversight and accountability. The House would have been wiser to increase the existing tax credit for families choosing this option—while boosting the choice programs that incorporate reasonable oversight and quality control—rather than creating a new, complicated, and potentially expensive ESA program.
4. Also dubious—and maybe impossible—is a new House proposal requiring DEW to create a system to compare private-school scholarship students’ performance with public school students. While such data are worth having, actual comparisons will be extremely difficult, given that scholarship students are not required to take state exams. Because private schools are presently allowed to administer alternative tests, their pupils’ results won’t be comparable to public school students taking state exams.
The ugly
5. The House scrapped Governor DeWine’s proposal that schools use a standard, universal screener to identify reading and math deficiencies in grades K–3. The governor’s plan is a big step forward in catching learning struggles early, rather than letting them fester and go unaddressed. In reading, the hodgepodge of assessments that schools are currently allowed to use leads to misidentifying students as being “on track.” As for math, Ohio currently has no early-grade screening requirement, meaning parents have no assurance that schools do anything even to identify children struggling with the math basics, much less to rectify that condition. The governor’s budget would bring greater rigor and uniformity to the reading screener while filling a huge void in math. Unfortunately, the House dumped this proposal.
6. The House also removed the governor’s proposal to overhaul the industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) framework used for high school graduation. Likely in response to data indicating that schools are inappropriately pushing students to collect low-quality IRCs to meet graduation requirements, Governor DeWine proposed a thoughtful revamp. This would do much to boost rigor in the career-technical pathway and curtail the “gaming” of graduation requirements. But again, the House shot down this proposal.
7. House lawmakers ditched provisions that would give charter schools more access to vacant or underutilized district buildings. The governor’s budget wisely rewrote existing laws that—due to weak language—have allowed districts such as Columbus to avoid selling or leasing underused buildings to charters. But the House, appearing to bow to anti-charter pressure from the public-school establishment, removed these changes. If they aren’t restored, districts will continue to play keep-away games with their underused (and taxpayer-funded) facilities, leaving students and families with fewer high-quality school options.
Despite some bright spots, the House education plan is mostly a letdown. Lawmakers picked apart constructive proposals put forward by Governor DeWine while doing little themselves to advance student-centered policies that help boost achievement in Ohio. The budget still has a long way to go, and with any luck, the final product will look much different than the disappointing House plan.
