At the February 28th meeting of Blue Ohio, David Pepper identified school funding as a key issue in the 2026 elections. Primary and secondary school funding receives the largest share of state-generated dollars in the Ohio budget. To share the current situation, Pepper invited guest speaker Steve Dyer, a former representative in the Ohio House and author of Tenth Period, a Substack newsletter rich with information and data on Ohio school funding.
Dyer began by stating that Ohio school funding has been a continuous problem for the last thirty years. The 1997 DeRolph case highlighted two key aspects of this dysfunction: 1) Ohio school funding is not governed by a rationale formula and therefore needs to be completely overhauled, and 2) it places too much pressure on local property taxes. Notably, Republicans have controlled the governorship, the Ohio House, and the Senate in 26 of the past 32 years.
Although state support for schools rose to a high of just over 50% in 2010-11, it has now declined to about 45.86%, roughly comparable to the level of support existing just prior to the DeRolph decision (45.4%). When adjusted for inflation, public schools are receiving fewer actual dollars in state support than they did in 1997, the year of the first DeRolph case. Since 2010-11, Ohioans paid 4.5 billion more in property taxes than in 2023, income taxes have jumped 130% to 680 million, and the number of school districts that collect income taxes has increased to one-third of all Ohio districts. Although DeWine’s recent budget proposal includes fully funding the Fair School Funding Plan, it does so by placing a heavier burden on local taxpayers. State support would be lowered to 32%, according to Dani Isaacsohn, democratic whip and representative from the 24th district. He characterized the proposed school funding budget as a “massive under investment.” He also affirmed that many of these inadequate proposals are the result of intensive lobbying efforts.
One reason for the decline in state support is the increased funding for charter schools and vouchers. In 2010-11, $750 million was allocated for charter schools and $75 million for vouchers. In the current budget proposal, the state will allocate over a billion dollars for each. Although public schools receive more money than ever before, they are allotted only 79.4% of the funding to serve 84% of Ohio’s children. Charter school funding will be increased by $222 million and vouchers by 265 million at the same time public school formula funding is cut by $103 million,
Despite the state’s substantial investment in them, charter schools and vouchers have little to no accountability. Charter schools are not held to the same student performance standards as their neighboring public schools, their performance index is lower. and the Cincinnati Inquirer reported that 88% of the time students attend private schools with lower proficiency scores than their home district. Dropout recovery schools are not able to graduate students in 8 years at the same rate that public schools graduate them in 4. Similarly, the evidence on vouchers suggests no difference in performance and even lower scores for voucher students. Further, evidence suggests that vouchers increase segregation. Most vouchers are used for white wealthy students, 70% of whom were already attending private school. Since their inception, 5 billion dollars have been spent on vouchers without a single audit. Thus, there has been no real accounting for how the money is spent and who it benefits.
An especial concern for taxpayers in Southeast Ohio is the lack of charter and private school options. The Private School Review lists one private school in Athens County. Three immediately adjacent counties – Meigs, Morgan, and Vincent – have no private schools. So Southeast Ohioans are supporting choices for children in other parts of the state at the cost of their local public schools. Most of the state’s 720 private schools are in Cuyahoga (125), Hamilton (94), Franklin (88), Summit (40), Montgomery (33) and Lucas (32). This lack of access is true for other Ohioans as well: there are ten counties without private schools in Ohio.
It has been thirty years since Ohio’s school funding was initially declared inequitable. It is time for a change.