Stephen Dyer has taken a closer look at the Ohio budget for education and finds that it shafts public school students.
I hate to be a broken record here, but just as the Governor and Ohio House did earlier this year, it’s the Ohio Senate’s turn to put lipstick on their hideous budget pig.
While I appreciate them returning the Fair School Funding Plan to the budget (which the Ohio House killed in its version), but of course they don’t fund it fully. And they play around with some of the funding elements. Why? Not because of policy, but because it nets them more money to give to unaccountable private schools through taxpayer funded tuition subsidies.
But what really pisses me off is they claim there’s a $633 million increase to education. But that’s all education — public schools, charter schools and vouchers are included in that number. How much is going to local public school kids through the Fair School Funding plan? $192 million of that. That’s barely 30 percent of the additional education funding.
That’s right. The Ohio Senate is crowing about its record education funding, but hiding the fact that public school kids are only getting 30 percent of it, despite public school kids making up 85 percent of all school kids in the state.
You remember all those “money follows the kid” claims pro-privatization advocates always demanded education funding systems do? Well, how the hell does giving 30 percent of a new funding stream to 85 percent of the students and 70 percent of the funding increase to 15 percent, especially when the vast majority of that 70 percent increase would go to adults who never sent their kids to public school in the first place, meet that definition?
Oh yeah. And we still can’t audit a single damn penny of this voucher money. So we have no idea how it’s being spent.