Legislators stall out in dealing with inequities in Ohio schools

Seventeen years after the Ohio Supreme Court, in its landmark DeRolph v. State ruling, proclaimed that the Buckeye State “fails to provide for a thorough and efficient system” of educating its students, evidence continues to mount to support the premise that all public schools in Ohio are not created equal.

New illuminating data substantiates the court’s conclusion that Ohio’s system of funding schools largely through local property taxes is unconstitutional. It comes from an analysis of school curriculum data of all public districts by the state Department of Education.

The analysis concluded that rural districts average fewer than 6.5 high-level courses such as advanced math, specialized language-arts courses and nontraditional foreign languages. In contrast, suburban districts average 26 high-level courses, based on ODE curriculum data.

DISPARITIES IN VALLEY SCHOOLS

Such disparities in course offerings are painfully evident in public school systems in the Mahoning Valley. Austintown, the largest public school district in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties with a relatively strong tax base, boasts 259 high-school class offerings, ranging from advanced placement language arts to trigonometry to sports medicine. Contrast that with the 98 courses offered to students in the Crestview Local School District in Columbiana County, a district with a small student enrollment and weaker tax base.

In between those two extremes are such districts as Jackson-Milton schools with 124 course offerings, West Branch with 172 offerings, Girard with 208 courses and Youngstown City Schools with 227 offerings.

Of course, the researchers’ conclusions merely document with empirical evidence what most already clearly knew: Where a child attends school will in some ways determine the quantity and quality of his or her education.

That data, released last month, complements other studies that highlight inequities in Ohio’s public school systems. For example, a study released in September by Howard Fleeter and The Education Tax Policy Institute found a direct negative correlation between academic success and poverty rates in Ohio schools.

That study found that on the performance index, a weighted average on state report cards that measures how well students do on state tests in grades 3 through 10, districts scoring below 90 have an average 83 percent poverty rate, compared with districts scoring above 105 with poverty rates that average only 14 percent. No school district with more than 50 percent poverty scored an A on the performance index.

THOROUGH AND EFFICIENT?

As this evidence collectively reinforces, students from middle- and upper-income families living in communities with strong local tax support will have greater built-in opportunities at achieving academic success. Such inequity is clearly not the picture of the “thorough and efficient” education system for all students envisioned by the framers of the state Constitution.

State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, recognizes as much. “If we are going to address poverty in the state of Ohio, the first thing we need to do is figure out how to start educating these kids. ... There is just no way around it that we’re going to need to invest money in different ways than what we’ve been doing, because what we’ve been doing isn’t working.”

Lehner’s laments ring true as the crisis in Ohio school funding has not eased much since the DeRolph decision of March 1997. State legislators in the new General Assembly next month should commit themselves once and for all to serious structural school-funding reforms. Until they do, the ghost of DeRolph will continue to haunt the halls of public schools, and the quality and fairness of educational opportunities for all students in the state will continue to be compromised.