The reporters at the Ohio Capital Journal have been all over this story. I'm here to give you the broad outlines of this latest adventure in trying to eclipse Florida and Arizona as the nation's leader in hostility to public education.
The background: Ohio is yet another state that was ordered by the courts to fix its public education funding system (three decades ago). They've been trying to fix it with the Cupp-Patterson plan which shifts the burden from real estate taxes to the state government.
As every state that has been through this (or has avoided going through this) knows, getting from inadequate funding to fully funding public education can cost a lot. In Ohio's case, that's about $2 billion over six years.
This makes some members of the Ohio GOP sad, especially House Speaker Matt Huffman, and the word "unsustainable" was thrown around. Huffman says that if they're spending that kind of money, why aren't public schools more accountable for how it is spent. Huffman told reporters that he thinks the final push of Cupp-Patterson just isn't going to happen, because of all that money.
As Morgan Trau reported for the Ohio Capital-Journal:
“That’s often how a lot of projects go — early on it doesn’t cost very [much] money — but some other governor or General Assembly will have to figure out how to pay for it,” [Huffman] continued. “As it turns out, I am the other General Assembly years in the future, or possibly am, and I don’t think the spending is sustainable.”
Just because some previous elected officials made a government commitment, that doesn't mean other elected officials have to honor it. Let's just cut those school funds.
The kicker here is that Huffman is also a huge supporter of Ohio's voucher program EdChoice, a program that has sucked up $1 billion taxpayer dollars and which involves no accountability.
So if the funding of public education is "unsustainable," how can the public funding of unaccountable private schools be sustainable?
Susan Tebben reported for the Capital-Journal:
” If the speaker thinks there isn’t enough education funding to go around, Ohio law is very clear,” Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told the Capital Journal. “The legislature must fund public schools and make cuts to the costly and ineffective universal private school vouchers that were put in place by Speaker Huffman (as an Ohio senator) and other legislators,” said Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.
Those who support the funding model pointed to the $1 billion that went to scholarship funds including the EdChoice private school voucher program in 2023, which the legislature approved to give Ohio students near-universal eligibility to move to private schools of their choosing if they live in public school districts considered under-performing.
“If the speaker wants to talk about sustainability, you have to start with those numbers,” [Ohio Education Association President Scott] DiMauro said.
Apparently plenty of legislators' phones have been ringing, because the Capital-Journal has heard from some of them. Reports Trau last Saturday:
Following our reporting on a proposal by Republican leadership in Ohio to cut public school spending, which resulted in the lawmakers facing backlash, half a dozen GOP legislators personally reached out, vowing to protect K-12 education.
Those six, and at least 15 others we have spoken to in recent weeks, say that one of their main priorities is supporting public schools.
Ohio has recently taken their vouchers universal, meaning that taxpayers now help pay off the tuition of wealthy families who were attending private schools already. Ohio is also a levy state where any tax increases by local schools have to go to a public vote, which means everyone gets to feel public school financial struggles immediately and acutely.
As we learned this week from reporting by Alec MacGillis at ProPublica and the New Yorker, Ohio's school choice program have their roots in a desire to get taxpayer dollars to fund Catholic schools. The level of sneakiness and political gamesmanship that went into those maneuvers is kind of astonishing. It almost makes one appreciate Huffman's straightforward statement of his intention to throw public education under the bus while supporting the forced taxpayer support of unaccountable private schools. Here's hoping the actual taxpayers in Ohio don't let him get away with it.
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