Next Speaker Could Be Author of New School Funding Plan. Phoenix Rising?

State Rep. Robert Cupp

State Rep. Rick Carfagna

Apparently, one of the leading names to come out of the Larry Householder collapse amid the state's largest ever, $60 million public bribery scandal is Robert Cupp. Yes THAT Robert Cupp -- the Cupp in the Cupp-Patterson school funding plan.

While I had some reservations about the plan -- namely its equity and some basic calculations -- it is undoubtedly the best school funding plan to come around in over a decade and would put us in a much better school funding place than we are today.

The plan had significant legislative support, but never from Householder, who was (correctly) concerned about the plan's equity.

So does this mean the Cupp-Patterson could soon rise from the ashes if Cupp is sitting in the Lincoln Chair?

Before you get too excited, Cupp isn't the only rumored name out there. Another is State Rep. Rick Carfagna. I don't know what he knows about K-12 funding, but I worked with him on the state's higher education budget last cycle, and I came away impressed.

He listens.

He learns.

He spent several meetings trying to educate the higher education subcommittee on finance (which he chairs) about how higher education funding works -- not an easy task.

While he wouldn't have the instant, deep knowledge of school funding that Cupp does (the state's district profile report that outlines data for every school district in the state bears his name), I'm sure Carfagna would be willing to listen to the school funding needs of this state.

Just not sure it would happen this year.

As for Cupp, his choice would be very interesting. If he's picked, one way the House could begin to  put the Householder mess behind them is to pass the Cupp-Patterson education reform plan. Do something Householder was opposed to (for the right reasons, I might add, but still...) while doing something big and bold for kids and families.

It would certainly change the topic.

The plan's fate in the Senate is less certain.

But passing the Cupp Patterson plan through the House (it's already had tons of hearings) would be a major step forward for education funding in this state. And who better to push it through than one of the plan's namesakes?

Oh yeah. There's one final complication.

Cupp took $24,000 from First Energy.

Carfagna?

$0.

Too Much Peanut Butter: How the Cupp Patterson School Funding Plan's Base Formula Bakes in Inequity

What has become abundantly clear during these initial hearings of HB 305 -- the standalone version of the so-called "Cupp-Patterson" school funding plan -- is that the authors seem pretty convinced that the one aspect of the plan that should be edited the least is the base cost portion of the formula.

Proponent testimony on the plan's base cost is scheduled to be heard before the House Finance Committee Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. in Room 313 of the Ohio Statehouse.

What is the base cost anyway? It's how much the state figures educating the state's 1.7 million students should cost. So it takes into account several factors, including teachers, administrators, busing, mental health professionals, athletics, etc.

The ultimate cost of the base funding portion of the formula is $11.22 billion in Fiscal Year 2020.

That's a lot of money.

However, what's clear from the formula itself is that money is spread pretty evenly across all district types. In other words, the poorest districts get about the same base cost per pupil as the richest ones.

That's a problem because even base costs are decidedly not the same across districts.

It's much harder, for example, to find teachers willing to instruct students in small, poor, rural districts like Crooksville than it is in wealthy suburban ones like Bexley. However, under the current iteration of the Cupp Patterson formula, Crooksville receives $3561 per pupil for teachers and Bexley receives $3565 per pupil.

Likewise, Orange City Schools -- Cleveland's wealthiest suburb -- will receive $3,553 per pupil for teachers and Cleveland Municipal Schools will receive $3,570 per pupil -- a 0.5% difference in cost.

Because it's only 0.5% more difficult to teach in Cleveland than Orange? I don't think that's an accurate assessment.

These results mirror the overall result: there is almost no difference in teacher per pupil costs regardless of district type.

School Type	Average PP Teacher Funding FY20
Rich Suburban	$                                        3,536
Suburban	$                                         3,561
Small Town	$                                         3,571
Rural	$                                         3,581
Poor Small Town	$                                        3,584
Poor Rural	$                                         3,587
Urban	$                                        3,596
Major Urban	$                                         3,610

This teacher equity issue spreads throughout the current version of the formula. Looking at the total cost, the spread is quite narrow between each school type, meaning the formula sees almost no difference in the base needs at wealthy suburban districts and poor rural and urban districts.

In fact, the lowest per pupil base cost is at Ohio's largest urban districts like Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, etc. Because their needs are so much less? Again, it seems a bit unfair to have these results on the $11.22 billion bulk price calculation for the school funding formula.

This result forces plan designers to rely on the weighted funding (Poverty, English Language Learners, etc.) or dream up exotic distribution fixes to a base cost formula that seems like it's piling on globs of peanut butter without much thought as to whether some districts' bread slices need more or less of it.

School Type	Average PP Base Cost
Poor Rural	$                       7,873
Rural	$                      7,998
Small Town	$                       7,520
Poor Small Town	$                      7,420
Suburban	$                       7,282
Rich Suburban	$                       7,278
Urban	$                       7,333
Major Urban	$                       7,263

The authors and proponents of the Cupp Patterson plan have suggested they are open to distribution fixes, meaning adjusting how much of these costs have to be picked up by the state vs. the local taxpayer.

And they should be commended for recognizing that the way these funds get distributed should vary more greatly between the haves and have nots than the formula's initial version.

However, if $11.22 billion of the formula are calculated inequitably, how much of a difference could moving around even $1 billion (as an example) through various additional weights or distribution changes make?

There is a solution: building more equity into the $11.22 billion base cost formula. Doing things like acknowledging that smaller classes in poorer schools helps students succeed, or recognizing the difficulty in attracting talented teachers to the most difficult to staff districts would go a long way toward helping the formula work better at its initial calculation. An added benefit of working more equity into the base funding cost is you would have to be less exotic at the distribution or weighted funding end.

As Chairman of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee, I did this 10 years ago using an index based on poverty, property wealth and education attainment levels that was then applied to these costs, which helped to ensure districts with more needs and challenges were recognized as such by the funding formula from the very beginning.

I'm not saying that using an index is the only way to address the inherent inequity the current base funding formula employs, but it is a place to start, for we must work to improve this thing.

This funding formula is the best shot we'll have for a generation of getting this right, and its authors and working group should be lauded for their Herculean efforts. But it will require mutability of those who have put so much blood, sweat and tears into its drafting, not unlike what those who drafted House Bill 1 10 years ago did.

I know it's not easy. Having gone through exactly what these brave souls have gone through, I can assure them that working on all aspects of their formula, with no sacred cows, can make it work better for all our kids, regardless of where they live.

And that should be all of our goal.

No Han Solo: What’s missing in Ohio’s newest school funding attempt

When the long-awaited school funding simulations were released Friday by state Reps. John Patterson, D-Ashtabula, and Robert Cupp, R-Lima, for their Fair education funding plan, people didn’t really know how to respond. Yes, it called for an annual spending increase of $718 million statewide for schools.

That’s good.

But did Ohio’s suburban districts need to swallow up more than 1/3 of that increase while the state’s biggest urban districts only got 5 percent of the increase? And flat funding Northern Local in Perry County – the district that originally sued the state over its failure to properly fund education? How is that “fair”, as the plan’s authors claimed?

Something didn’t seem right. The formula Cupp and Patterson talked about made sense. Figure out what students need. Then fund it. The elements they picked (teachers, mental health, etc.) all made sense.

So why were wealthy, suburban districts getting more than 1/3 of the increase?

One explanation is that Ohio has held down increases in suburban districts through so-called “gain caps” for years.  This allowed the state to continue investing in districts that couldn’t raise local revenue – not enough state investment there, by the way, but this Robin-Hooding has happened for decades.

So if you’re eliminating gain caps – one of the hallmarks of the Cupp Patterson plan – you’re going to see large increases in districts that have been capped for years. In many ways, you are essentially making up for 30-40 years of Robin Hooding.

But the issue is more complicated than that.

Ten years ago, I was in the exact same position as Cup and Patterson. I was the chair (they are co-chairs) of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee when then-Gov. Ted Strickland introduced the Evidence Based Model of school funding – the state’s first real attempt to cost out education and pay for it since the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the state to do so in 1997.

In much the same way as Cupp-Patterson, the original EBM initially poured millions into wealthy, suburban districts while doing much less, relatively speaking, in poorer districts.

Yet by the time the formula left the House and eventually became law for a couple years, the plan did the best job of distributing revenue to the most needy districts the state had ever seen. And it won the prestigious Frank Newman Award from the bipartisan Education Commission of the States.

What happened?

We found Han Solo.

Let me explain.

I have always contended that the reason the Star Wars prequels failed to garner the widespread love of the original three was because the second prequel didn’t have Han Solo (or a character like him) – a wisecracking, street smart character who didn’t quite buy all this Jedi/Force/Destiny stuff. He was grounded in the real world. He was the guy audience members who weren’t buying the magical part of the movies could relate to.

You didn’t need to believe in the Force to believe in Han Solo. Because Han Solo was us.

Back to school funding.

The EBM’s Han Solo was the Education Challenge Factor – an index that calculated a school district’s extra-curricular challenges (and I don’t mean football teams). It took into account a district’s relative poverty and its parents’ educational attainment level – what we’ve known for years is the single most important determinant of a student’s success. Those were merged into a number that we applied to many of the formula elements.

 Why did we decide to apply the ECF to the formula elements? Because it’s hard to find, for example, teachers who want to teach in districts where the parents don’t value education that much and will more likely impede than support  learning. Likewise, it’s easier to find those teachers in wealthier districts with more supportive parents. We applied it to many of the other formula elements, but that's the reason why. It's generally harder to overcome poverty and other barriers in districts with more of it.

The ECF did a lot of the heavy lifting for the EBM – leveling out a lot of the original inequities in the formula.

The Cupp Patterson formula doesn’t have a similar mechanism to account for the more difficult challenges districts that are poor and whose students don’t have much support from parents face in finding talent and overcoming those barriers, especially in districts that are the most challenged.

So, for example, the Cupp Patterson plan assumes it will be just as easy to find the mental health professionals the formula envisions in Olentangy, Cleveland and New Boston. And those professionals will be equally successful in all those places.

That’s probably not an accurate assessment.

What effect would the ECF have on the Cupp Patterson plan? I’m not going to use dollar figures here because I don’t know which elements of the formula the authors would want to apply it to. And I’m using ECF figures from 10 years ago. I don’t want to suggest that Cupp and Patterson have to figure out how to find even more money than they currently have. 

However, what I can do is show how the distributions work under the current Cupp Patterson plan and how it would work if you applied the 10-year-old ECF to all of a district’s funding (which is not how it would work, but this is just an exercise). Here’s the result:

What you’ll see is that instead of only receiving 5 percent of the formula’s benefit, the state’s Big 8 Urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) would see about ¼ of the benefit with an ECF. Likewise, poor, rural and small town districts would see about 1/3 of the benefit.

Meanwhile, the state’s wealthiest suburban districts would see a small bump, or even a slight cut, depending on the category.

I want to be extremely clear: I am not saying this is how the distribution should look.

What I am saying is that this is a lot closer to what a fair distribution resembles. And since this is being dubbed the “Fair” education funding plan, it would appear that an ECF-like mechanism could significantly improve its fairness.

As this formula works its way through the legislature, it is important to realize that the funding simulations released Friday will change. That’s a given. And there are major challenges to find the additional revenue the plan calls for.

The only way to ensure that the most benefit goes to the most in need of those resources is to do what the Cupp Patterson plan states as a goal – develop a fair education funding formula.

The current plan does the best job since EBM of calculating the elements of student need. 

What the plan is missing is Han Solo -- something to bring everyone around to it. But there’s still time to release him from the carbonite.

You just have to march into Jabba’s Palace and do it.