School Funding Lessons from New Jersey
The Ohio Supreme Court has placed itself squarely in the middle of the public policy debate over education in Ohio through the on-going school funding case. A majority of the court has attempted to force the General Assembly and Governor to raise taxes and create a “Robin Hood” school funding system whereby additional sums of money are taken from taxpayers through sales or income taxes and redistributed to parents and school personnel living in property-poor school districts.
The Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, which initiated the funding lawsuit, has suggested in its brief a new method of enacting this plan for higher taxes and redistribution: a court-appointed master commissioner. The coalition would expect this master commissioner to direct the General Assembly to a school funding “solution” that would satisfy the activist majority of the Ohio Supreme Court.
The appointment of a master commissioner would raise serious constitutional issues. Nothing in the Ohio Constitution provides authority for a court appointee to dictate public policy to the General Assembly. It is the exclusive jurisdiction of the legislature and governor to create law. The court’s responsibility is to apply that law in a neutral fashion, not rewrite it.
This is not the first time the coalition has suggested that the court appoint a master commissioner. In May, the coalition conducted a Statehouse rally where the coalition renewed its belief that the proposed $1.4 billion dollar increase in primary and secondary spending was inadequate. An invited speaker at the rally was David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center in New Jersey, who represented a coalition of urban districts in New Jersey that sued that state over its method of funding schools.
Sciarra spent his time at the rally comparing the New Jersey and Ohio situations. He stated that he believes that the Ohio Supreme Court will again find the state’s system unconstitutional. When that happened in New Jersey their Supreme Court became more involved and, according to Sciarra, eventually “[t]he court appointed a special judge and directed the state legislature to come in with a needs assessment and new plans.” Sciarra advocated a similar approach for Ohio.
Setting aside the constitutionality of appointing a special commissioner, a question begs to be asked – is New Jersey a state Ohio should emulate? Absent from Sciarra’s remarks regarding the implications of the New Jersey experience for Ohio was any discussion of the impact of New Jersey’s school-funding reform on student achievement. This is not surprising, however, given the evidence brought to the fore by a recent study.
Douglas Coate and James VanderHoff, economics professors at Rutgers University in New Jersey, recently analyzed the effect of New Jersey’s school-funding legislation on student achievement. Their research found no evidence that per-pupil spending had any affect on student achievement in New Jersey. Even when they specifically looked at urban districts with small per capital tax bases that received huge infusions of state cash, they found no evidence of school spending having a positive effect on student achievement.[1]
Their study is not surprising. Economist Thomas Downes studied the effect of the school-funding plan in California enacted following its court decision mandating equalization. While finding evidence that California had equalized per-pupil expenditures following the decision, Downes noted, “…there is no sign that relative increases in funding in poorer districts translated into improved relative performance.”[2]
It is these results that led Coate and VanderHoff to write in the conclusion of their study: “The equalization battles have diverted attention from the central issues of whether our public school systems, which are sheltered from competition, use resources efficiently. The evidence in New Jersey and elsewhere is that they do not.”[3]
All fifty states in the union have experienced some challenge to the constitutionality of their method of funding primary and secondary education.[4] These fifty state “laboratories” have given us enough information to predict some likely outcomes of Ohio’s school-funding lawsuit if it continues down its current path.
Scarce resources will have been taken from the productive economy and spent on educational “investment.” Judicial usurpation of policy-making by the Ohio Supreme Court will open the door for additional lawsuits. And finally, with mountains of cash spent on new buildings and higher teacher salaries, student learning won’t have been improved one iota.
Notes
[1] Douglas Coate and James VanderHoff, “Public School Spending and Student Achievement: The Case of New Jersey,” Cato Journal 19, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1999): 85-99.
[2] Thomas A. Downes, “Evaluating the Impact of School Finance Reform on the Provision of Public Education: The California Case,” National Tax Journal 45, no. 4 (December 1992): 405-419. The quote is from p. 416.
[3] Coate and VanderHoff, “Public School Spending and Student Achievement: The Case of New Jersey,” 98.
Joshua C. Hall is the director of the Buckeye Institute Center for Education Excellence and a lecturer in economics at Capital University.
