Proposed Education Amendment Lets the Fox Guard Ohio's Henhouse
For decades, Ohio governors and legislators have handed billions of tax dollars over to a sluggish and underperforming education bureaucracy, and in return received sluggish and underperforming schools. Now that same education bureaucracy has a solution to fix our failing schools: give them more money, take away homeowner approval of mill increases and remove legislative budget oversight. Oh, and please enshrine this new unchecked authority in Ohio’s Constitution.
Anyone concerned with either fiscal responsibility or educational results may wince. But such people seem to be a minority among Ohio's spendthrift and misguided education lobby.
Last week, the lobby proposed a constitutional amendment that takes away the legislature's education budget oversight and gives it to the State Board of Education. The board would decide for itself what a good education costs, spend the money and send the legislature the bill. The people’s elected representatives would retain only the authority to decide where the increased funding would come from.
The amendment states that the legislature could only take back control of the education budget with a super-majority vote. Since that's a practical impossibility, the real effect of the amendment is to strip the legislature of any serious budgetary authority.
Homeowners would also lose their existing authority over tax levels. The amendment increases local school taxes at the rate of inflation without a local vote.
The amendment effectively lets the State Board of Education decide for itself how much money it gets to spend. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. Imagine what people would say if we took away Congress’ authority to spend on defense and gave it to the Pentagon.
The real irony is that Ohio education spending is already growing fast enough to bust the budget. In 2003, the latest year for which we have data that allow for valid comparisons, Ohio spent $10,409 per student on education. In 1988, the earliest year for which we have such data, total education spending was $6,994 per student in inflation-adjusted 2003 dollars.
That means Ohio is spending 50 percent more per student than it did in 1988. Over the same period, national per student spending only grew by less than 30 percent. And in 2003, the national average was $9,489 per student, so Ohio's school spending is significantly higher than the national average as well as growing significantly faster.
If more money were solution, Ohio's school problems would be solved by now. We need to look elsewhere for real reform - especially to school choice, which has a track record of success.
The available research is conclusive that pouring more money into the same broken system doesn’t produce improvements. As far back as 1996, Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek collected every available empirical study that measured the relationship between spending levels and academic outcomes. The studies overwhelmingly found no such relationship existed. Hanushek concluded that "the evidence from the combined studies of resource usage" shows that "any evidence of effective resource usage is balanced by evidence of other, naturally occurring, situations in which resources are squandered." In other words, more money doesn't work. Since then, no new research has appeared that gives us any reason to doubt this conclusion.
The evidence on school choice, by contrast, is all in the other direction. Seven studies using "random assignment," the gold standard for social science, have found that students using vouchers had better academic outcomes than similar students who applied for vouchers but lost a random lottery and stayed in public schools. And a large body of studies finds that school choice improves outcomes at public schools, too, due to healthy incentives from increased competition. Conversely, no empirical study has ever found that school choice hurt outcomes at public schools.
Ohio voters are being asked to make a choice. They can surrender democratic control of education budgets in return for the opportunity to pour millions more dollars into the education bureaucracy, even though the evidence shows that this approach doesn’t improve schools. Or they can stick with democracy and look to other strategies, like school choice, that are proven to work.
Greg Forster is director of research at the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation.
