Stephen Dyer: State Budget Robs Poor Kids to Overfund Rich Adults

Stephen Dyer is an education policy expert who keeps an eye on Ohio. Here he takes a look at how Ohio’s recent budget is bad news for education.

Now that the dust has settled, let’s look at how the state’s school funding budget ended up, shall we?

First of all, it’s important to recognize a few things:

1. Ohio’s Fair School Funding Plan fails to be fully funded. The state added some arbitrary funding amounts to help out wealthier, mostly suburban school districts, but that money isn’t tied to anything rational. It’s just some number they came up with out of mid-air.
2. The total shorted funding for kids in school districts in the 2026-2027 school year that will receive less than what the Fair School Funding Plan says they need will be about $950 million less, if the state actually included simple inflationary increases to the plan from 2022 — as the original plan promised to do so it would keep pace with the actual costs of educating kids.
3. You’ll never guess how much EdChoice will cost in the 2026-2027 school year. Just about $950 million — the nearly perfect 1:1 transfer of funding that led Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page to rule June 24 that EdChoice was unconstitutional.
4. The Ohio General Assembly did exactly what Congress did recently — create a massive wealth transfer from poorer school districts to wealthier ones.

So let’s look at this in more detail.

Overall, state aid in the 2025-2026 school year will go from $8.4 billion to $8.5 billion, then from $8.5 billion to a little more than $8.6 billion. A fully funded Fair School Funding Plan based on 2022 costs would cost $8.75 billion. A fully funded Fair School Funding Plan based on inflation adjusted 2022 costs would run $9.4 billion.

For more details, read here.