7/23/09

 

The Columbus Dispatch, Editorial Page

 

Along with much else that’s questionable in the state budget signed by Gov. Ted Strickland Friday is its implicit support for the idea that school funding takes precedence over all other state responsibilities — that whatever schools say they need, Ohio’s taxpayers ought to pony up.

In service to this idea, the budget creates an unelected panel, packed with people who have a vested interest in raising education spending, to decide what that list of school needs should look like.

To protect the interests of all Ohioans, this panel bears close public scrutiny.

The newly created Ohio School Funding Advisory Council is charged with recommending changes every two years to the “adequacy amount calculation,” the magic formula on which school funding is to be based.

The shopping-list concept and the educator-heavy panel to shape it come uncomfortably close to the vision long cherished by William L. Phillis, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding.

Phillis complains of “residual budgeting” — that school funding is based on what’s left after every other state need is paid for. But, barring unlimited revenue, that’s the case for every state program: All areas must compete in a give-and-take for available resources. Education is just one of many crucial programs the state provides, including prisons, health care, help for seniors and those with mental-health and child-care needs, roads and bridges, public safety and many more.

How much effect the new budget language on school funding will have is uncertain, because the budget says nothing about where the money would come from to pay for it or, for that matter, how much it would cost.

But it builds in the assumption that schools will need additional programs and employees to be successful, without considering how to offset new costs by getting rid of programs that haven’t worked.

That’s a recipe for excess, made worse by the fact that most of the seats on the commission will, by law, be held by entrenched education professionals, with little room made for anyone who doesn’t have a financial interest in a bigger education budget.

The 28-member panel is to include no fewer than 13 people directly involved in preschool-through-12{+t}{+h}-grade education, two from the higher-education establishment and four representing charter schools. Only one is to represent the public, and only one seat each is saved for the business community, philanthropic organizations and the Ohio Academy of Science. The remaining seats go to the governor or his designee and four people to be named by politicians.

A balanced discussion of education funding should include people with the bigger picture in mind, such as the state auditor, the director of taxation — who could supply the helpful detail of how much money the state has to spend — and objective experts in public finance, such as someone from the Ohio Public Expenditure Council.

As it is, the commission is likely to be a cheerleader for ever-more school spending, not providing sober analysis of how best to use limited resources.

Fortunately, its recommendations won’t be binding, unlike the vision Phillis unveiled in 2007, when he sought to put on the ballot a constitutional amendment that would have empowered the State Board of Education and a committee to dictate to the legislature how much to spend on education.

But it’s a step in that direction, and Ohioans should take heed.