Columbus Dispatch

12/3/2006

Joe Hallett

To avoid hard-to-keep promises, Gov.-elect Ted Strickland should remember a little ditty from 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson: A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. Strickland’s words Nov. 2 in the Prout Chapel at Bowling Green State University now live in the memories of opponents poised to use them in four years to render him politically dead.

“Let me tell you this,” Strickland said that day to 150 supporters. “I am so committed to solving this school-funding issue that if I become governor, and I do a lot of wonderful things, but I fail to address this school-funding issue, I will have been a failed governor.”

Strickland repeated that noble self-challenge along the campaign trail, causing anybody with even scant knowledge about school funding to wonder whether he was still living in a Duck Run reality.

Politicians treat promises like piñatas. But staking the success of his governorship on solving school funding is a potentially haunting promise for Strickland. By his own definition, breaking it will make him a failed governor. Contrarily, keeping it could make him an unpopular and one-term governor.

Successive Republican governors George V. Voinovich and Bob Taft tried to solve school funding. Despite some progress, they failed. Republicans now are lying in wait for Strickland.

“He’ll now have to produce a schoolfunding magic wand that will solve this problem to every Ohioan’s content,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Columbus-based GOP campaign consultant. “It’s not that there’s a lack of interest in a solution; it’s that there are major constituency groups opposed to every possible solution.”

Even the GOP-controlled Ohio Supreme Court - hardly tone-deaf to politics - tacitly acknowledged that on Dec. 11, 2002, when it ruled for the fourth time that Ohio’s formula for funding public schools is unconstitutional because its reliance on local property taxes nurtures a system of rich and poor schools. But in a nod to political realities, the court gave up jurisdiction in the case - a green light for the governor and legislature to do nothing.

Complying with the court order to reduce property taxes by billions of dollars would require replacement funding, and the logical means are increasing the state income and/or sales taxes. That wouldn’t guarantee more money for schools, and raising either the income or sales tax hinders job-development.

Voinovich and Taft learned how Ohioans feel about tax increases. In May 1998, Voinovich asked voters for a one-cent sales-tax increase as part of a school-funding solution. It was crushed, 80-20. And one reason Taft will leave office in January as one of Ohio’s most unpopular governors is because in 2003 he championed a $3 billion tax increase that included a penny sales-tax increase.

Voinovich and Taft took action to equalize school funding. In 1997, funding in poor school districts was $600 per-pupil less than in wealthier districts. By 2003, the gap was closed. But as their share of state dollars dwindled due to reallocation to poor districts, dozens of districts in between the poor and wealthy have been forced to continually ask local voters for more.

Although a task force appointed by Taft failed to find politically palatable funding solutions, schools have fared well under Taft. Since 1999, $4.8 billion has been spent on 469 new buildings in 112 districts, and state funding during Taft’s tenure increased by $2.2 billion, or 56 percent.

R. Gregory Browning, Voinovich’s former budget director and a member of Taft’s task force, said that before tackling school funding, Strickland “needs to understand how far we’ve come. We’ve kind of bottomed out,” he said, in terms of options available without a voter-approved solution.

One of his first priorities, Strickland promised, will be to convene a meeting of education “stakeholders” to embark on a solution. Presumably, they will include representatives of the “never enough” crowd - teachers’ unions, school boards and superintendents. While they often fight about how the state’s finite resources should be divvied up, they are in lockstep on one point: No matter how much money they get, it’s never enough.

Strickland acknowledged Tuesday that solving school funding won’t be easy or popular, but he is standing by his campaign promise.

“I expect you to hold me accountable on it,” he said.

Those words began to live that day.

Joe Hallett is senior editor at The Dispatch.

jhallett@dispatch.com