Stephen Dyer breaks down some numbers for Ohio’s education spending, and finds that public school students are getting the shortest end of the stick in decades.
I wanted to answer this simple question: What year since 1975 has the state spent the closest to last year’s amount on its public school children, adjusted for inflation?
Would it surprise you to learn that last year’s amount is the lowest spending amount since 1997 — the year the state started using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school tuition?
Would it also shock you to learn that the amount spent on K-12 public school students has dropped a whopping 16% since Ohio broke open the unconstitutional EdChoice voucher program to make it universal in 2019?
Yeah. Didn’t think so.
What the data show clearly is that almost every additional dollar going to the state’s K-12 funding since the state started the voucher program in 1997 has gone to fund kids who don’t attend the state’s public schools1.
The money has instead funded notoriously poor performing, privately run charter schools or unconstitutionally subsidize private school tuitions of students who, in the overwhelming number of cases, never stepped foot in the public schools.
This is one of the reasons why Ohio’s EdChoice program has been ruled unconstitutional — because it has meant that the state has essentially flat funded public school students over the last 28 years while providing billions of dollars to subsidize private school tuitions — not a penny of which has ever been publicly audited.