Ron Packard: The New David Brennan

Not many people paid much attention to the passing of the torch, but when Ron Packard -- the infamous former owner of the oft-maligned K12, Inc. (whose diplomas aren't accepted by the NCAA) -- started buying up David Brennan's former White Hat Management empire in 2015, it didn't mark the end of an era.

It marked its continuation. (Except for the massive political contributions -- for now.)

A little background. Packard founded K12, Inc. and was paid millions to run the only school operation ever sold on the New York Stock Exchange -- a notoriously poor-performing online charter school operation that at the time of his departure was the nation's largest. Now he runs the Accel Schools chain in Ohio, which according to the latest data from the Ohio Department of Education operates 37 Ohio charter schools.

Tellingly, Accel started barely a handful of these schools. Nearly all were snatched up from mostly White Hat Management, including OHDELA -- long the cash cow of the White Hat operation, along with the dropout recovery Life Skills operation. And while Packard portrays himself as a turnaround guy, what he really seems to be is the education sector's Gordon Gecko -- an education corporate raider.

Accel recently took another page out of White Hat (which has dissolved into several small operations that run one or two Life Skills schools) and started splitting off some of its schools. Instead of operating all 37 under the single Accel Schools umbrella, now Accel schools in Akron, Canton, Columbus and Cleveland are run by splinter Accel Schools operators. 

Why would Packard do this?

Perhaps to boost the academic rating of the Accel Schools umbrella brand? 

See, prior to the splintering, Accel rated a D as a charter school operator, according to the state. This year, with those schools now run by "different" operators, the ones remaining under the umbrella Accel Schools operation got a C.

That's a higher grade than the D received each of the last three years by the revered Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland (a result I will examine more closely in a future post).

But see, here's the thing. In a recent story about how Ohio Charter Schools want a 22% raise from the state, Packard is quoted as saying, 

"Brick and mortar schools are a very low margin business."

This is what happens when you say you want to run schools like a business. You get guys talking about profit margins in education like they're restaurants or something.

But aside from that, this quote is straight Brennan. Remember K12, Inc.? The nation's largest online charter school operator that Packard founded and ran for many years?

Guess which state propped up his national operation? If you said, "Ohio", you'd be half right. Between Ohio and Pennsylvania's generosity with their taxpayers' money, Packard consistently reported to the SEC that about 1/4 of his company's total revenue came from those two states.

As he reported in his annual 10-K from 2012 (and other years around that time):

"In fiscal year 2012, we derived approximately 12% and 13% of our revenues, respectively, from the Ohio Virtual Academy and the Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania. In aggregate, these schools accounted for approximately 25% of our total revenues. If our contracts with either of these virtual public schools are terminated, the charters to operate either of these schools are not renewed or are revoked, enrollments decline substantially, funding is reduced, or more restrictive legislation is enacted, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected."

He knows that in Ohio, there is a TON of profit to be made in the online charter school sector. In fact, there's enough for Ohio taxpayers to essentially subsidize an entire national operation.

Which is why he felt the need to qualify his "low margin business" quote to the PD to just the brick and mortar sector. And why he probably leaped at the chance to grab OHDELA from Brennan's fire sale.

But see, here's the problem. Brick and Mortar schools are not a very low margin business. We are told, even by charter school proponents, that they are a "non-profit" business. In fact, all charters are considered "non-profit" by the state.

Except the schools can hire sharks like Packard to run their operations. And Packard is allowed to make a profit. This profiteering hasn't led to billion dollar scandals or anything, has it?

Wait. Perhaps it has. 

Which is why Packard's growth and increased voice in Ohio should worry Ohio taxpayers who have been burned by 20 years of charter school profiteering.

This is why I'm so encouraged by House Speaker Larry Householder saying a few weeks ago that "those management entities, I believe should be nonprofit."

Not low profit margins. No profit margins.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Ohio Charters need a 22% Raise? Really?

Now that the Cleveland Plain Dealer has reported just how much more charter schools are demanding they be paid -- a staggering $2,000 per pupil -- I think it's fair to say that their request is a tall order.

If that increase had been granted this past school year, it would have cost the state another $208.8 million -- making the program cost taxpayers $1.1 billion.

How one could look at the above chart of state report card grades and call that increase justifiable, I have no idea. Especially when we are poised to have the most serious attempt in a decade at fixing school funding for the 90 percent of students attending local public schools.

Not only have Ohio charter schools not gotten appreciably better on the report card since House Bill 2 passed in 2015, but since the 2012-2013 school year, charter schools overall have received more Fs than all other grades combined on state report cards. This "House Bill 2 has fixed everything" mantra really bothers me. Even at the time, no one suggested that the fixes in HB 2 were a panacea. In many ways, the changes just caught us up to national norms.

Yet now those rather modest reforms are being used as justification for a massive new influx of your tax dollars.

Here's another complication: the average charter school spends about $400 more per student already. And they spend about $1,000 more per student on non-instructional administrative costs, eclipsing almost 25 percent of their total expenditure. So if they have another $2,000 per student to spend, their current spending patterns would place about $500 of that on administrators. The average school district would spend about half of that.

I hate to bring this up, but whenever charters ask for more money, I'm haunted by our past. As told in the groundbreaking and seminal report on Ohio's charter school roots, Akron Beacon Journal reporters Doug Oplinger and Dennis Willard -- using memos written by Akron businessman and Ohio school choice Godfather David Brennan -- described why Brennan switched from running voucher schools to charter schools:

"Why did Brennan give up on vouchers?

In his two Cleveland Hope schools, he was receiving more state aid per pupil than 85 percent of the public school children in Ohio. But it wasn’t enough to turn a profit.

Only nine weeks into the voucher program, Brennan began to lobby for a 44 percent increase -- or $1,100 -- in the value of vouchers. Brennan told the governor in writing that he was subsidizing his two voucher schools out of his own pocket. Some of that money came out of the Brennan Family Foundation, IRS records show.

In January 1998, Brennan wrote to Needles of the governor’s office and two new confidants -- state school board members Charles Byrne and Joseph Roman -- telling them that if the state didn’t raise the value of vouchers to an amount similar to charter-school funding, he was switching.

“I have indicated to you that the temptation to convert the operations at HOPE Central Academy and HOPE Tremont Academy is almost irresistible because of the higher funding from the community schools,” he told them.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Brennan gave a different reason. He said opponents of school choice made vouchers “a dirty word. Charters are a compromise to vouchers.”

But the numbers are revealing. By switching, he increased his state aid per pupil from about $3,000 in the voucher schools and $600 at Interfaith to at least $4,400 and possibly as high as $6,000. (emphasis added)"

Within a few short years of this switch, Brennan was the dominant charter school operator in Ohio and even the country on his way to becoming the single largest donor to Ohio Republicans the state has ever seen.

I know it's popular for charter proponents to pooh-pooh my and others' concerns about charters asking for more money. But as you can see, the history here isn't great. And when charters continue to not perform very well overall, and then demand pay raises over 22 percent, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars on top of the nearly $1 billion they already spent on these schools, is it understandable why we balk at that suggestion?

If This is Your Best Argument for More Charter Money, um....

Today, the Plain Dealer reported on an updated look at Ohio charter school performance from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO). The center, which is housed at the free market Hoover Institute at Stanford University, discovered that Ohio charter schools are performing about as poorly as ever.

"There is little to no progress in Ohio charter school performance," concluded CREDO Director Macke Raymond, whose comments several years ago about how the free market system hadn't worked in education caused quite a stir.

However, like most charter school analyses ever done in Ohio, CREDO did find pockets of success among brick-and-mortar charters, and blamed the overall stagnant performance on e-schools. Leave it to Aaron Churchill of the Fordham Institute to drive a truck through that mouse hole.

Here's how the PD reported it:

"After years of shortchanging charter students, lawmakers should finally move to fund brick-and-mortar charters equitably, helping to kick-start new-school formation and the rapid expansion of the state’s top-performing charters,” Churchill wrote.

Obviously trying to piggyback on his dubious claim that charters don't get enough money and have earned a raise from state lawmakers, Churchill really stretches out over his skis here. There are major caveats with CREDO's methodology (for a detailed breakdown, take a read here), but here is my major concern -- the group only looks at student growth.

That is one of MANY measures of a school's performance. And growth has always been an area where charters and districts perform more similarly. Districts still beat charters pretty well on the measure, but it's not quite the runaway contest that proficiency or graduation rates are, for example.

Here's another thing: Ohio's been artificially deflating school district performance for years now, dragging down their overall grades to better comport with historic charter school performance. Don't believe me? Take a look at the percentage of grades each sector has received each year since the state started using the A-F system in the 2012-2013 school year.

 What you can see is that since Ohio started changing its testing regime, and more heavily weighting the more charter-friendly "value added" measure, low district grades have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, charter grades have pretty well stayed the same during the same period -- overall pretty bad. Importantly, though, Districts still have less than half the rate of F grades as charters. Just saying.

This got me thinking about the whole light speed thing again.

"Huh?" you ask.

Let me explain.

According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light (though as a sci-fi fan, I sure hope it's not) because it requires infinite energy. So you can approach light speed, but never go over it.

How does this apply to state report card grades? Well, it's like this: Charter performance was so bad, it would have been impossible for them to get much worse. So they had nowhere to go but up, really. Meanwhile, school district performance was flying quite high in 2012-2013, with barely 10 percent of district grades being designated Fs. So when the state starts implementing new tests over a short period, districts have a farther way to fall, which they do (by design, I might add), which makes it seem like maybe charters are gaining on districts, when in fact district performance is simply being artificially dropped not by actual performance, but by state policy changes. 

Does anyone actually believe that districts are twice as likely to have failing grades today as they were 5 years ago? Please.

What is amazing is that charter school performance has remained remarkably consistent. And poor. Yes, their Fs and Ds jumped a bit after all the testing changes. But really, they've been at about 50 percent Fs all along. Is this because charters did a better job at handling the changes?

No. It's because they were approaching light speed already, and they couldn't have done much worse overall. So even though Churchill and others claim that charters have demonstrated their worth and earned the right for a pay raise from the state, I contend if you think they should get a pay raise now, why shouldn't it have come in the 2012-2013 school year when only 40 percent rather than 50 percent of their grades were Fs? Why would we reward their worse performance today?

Yes, it is true they've improved since the low point of 2015-2016 (the last of the three consecutive years of test switching). But they still receive a higher rate of failing grades than they did in 2012-2013 and have only seen a 17 percent drop in frequency of Fs. Districts have cut their F frequency by 22 percent.

Want another staggering data point?

Since the 2012-2013 school year, a total of 11,832 grades were handed out to the state's charter schools (only 7 schools were statewide e-schools for this whole period, by the way, so the vast majority of these grades are for brick-and-mortar schools). Of those 11,832 grades, more than half were Fs. That means since 2012-2013, charter schools have received more Fs than all other grades combined. The number of As? Barely 1,000. Out of nearly 12,000.

What grade have districts received more than any other?

As.

By more than 1,000.

And this is despite the fact that districts' performance has been intentionally Nerfed by state policymakers who desperately want charter schools to succeed even though the evidence is pretty overwhelming they aren't overall.

Can charter schools work here? I believe they can on a limited basis. Are there pockets of success?Yes. Of course. But for advocates like Fordham to contend an overall performance revolution in Ohio charter schools as the basis for an overall pay raise for this long-struggling sector that even charter advocates admit aren't improving a whole lot, stretches the bounds of reason, especially given how much the state has divested from the 90 percent of kids who aren't in charters.

Let's fund charters based on what it actually costs to educate kids there. Let's give performance bonuses where warranted. Let's do it without hurting kids who aren't in charters.

And let's see what happens.

The Fabrications of a Charter School Zealot

In a recent post by the usually sound Aaron Churchill, the Fordham Institute researcher takes some significant pot shots at William Phillis -- the legendary Ohio public school advocate whose work led to the Ohio Supreme Court ruling four different times that the way the state funds public schools is unconstitutional.

I played on Churchill's title for my title of this post.

Churchill's major problem with Phillis' analysis of charter school expenditures is Churchill doesn't like the inconvenient truth that the average charter school spends several hundred dollars more per pupil than the average school district.

Unfair! cries Churchill. You have to weight the average per pupil expenditure. That way it's more fair. He points to the calculation he made in his recent report arguing that more money needs to be given to charter schools as the only fair way to possibly calculate what charter schools spend.

See, here's the problem.

His "weighted" average per pupil expenditure is not an accurate reflection of how many tax dollars go to charters. If you multiply his "weighted" average by the number of students in charters, the amount isn't actually what charters spend.

If you multiply the "unweighted" amount, it does. All weighting does is make it look like charters spend less than districts.

At the end of the day, taxpayers want to know how much of their money is being spent. And in charter schools, about $400 more is being spent per pupil.

Period.

In addition, Churchill ignores the fact that charters, on average, spend about $1,200 more per pupil on administrative, non-instructional costs than school districts. Even big urban districts spend $300 less per student.

So, in other words, if Ohio charter schools reduced their administrative spending to that of Ohio school districts, even on Churchill's "weighted" calculation, they would end up spending about the same as districts.

It's funny how free market reformers like Churchill quickly disparage "bloated" school district administration, but never point out that if charters were simply more efficient at spending money in the classroom, they wouldn't be begging for more.

That's because overall, charters spend about twice the percentage of their money on administrators as school districts do, equating to about 1 in 4 dollars spent by charters.

Next, Churchill goes to the old argument that charter students have far more challenging populations than school districts. Which is generally true, on average.

However, Churchill always wants to compare charters with the state's 8 major urban school districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati. Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown).

If one does that, about 2 out of every 3 charter schools have 100 percent economically disadvantaged. Meanwhile, only 2 major Ohio urban districts have less than 100 percent economically disadvantaged populations. On average, Ohio's urban districts have about 5 percent higher rate of minority students and about a 10 percent higher rate of economically disadvantaged students than Ohio charter schools.

So, using Churchill's argument that schools with more challenged populations should get more money, it seems that the fact urban districts spend more per equivalent pupil than charters makes sense.

Also absent from Churchill's analysis is the fact that every dollar leaving Akron and Cincinnati for a charter school last school year went to a charter that performed worse on more state report card measures than Akron and Cincinnati.

Churchill also failed to mention that while lots of folks are rightly concerned that 14 Ohio school districts received overall grades of F on the state report card last year, marking them for state takeover, if one applied that standard to Ohio charter schools, 103 of 340 charters receiving grades either received Fs or "Does Not Meet Standards" if they're a dropout recovery school (mind you that "standard" is graduating about 7 out of 100 kids in 4 years).

So 3 out of 10 Ohio charter schools would be set for state takeovers, if the state takeover law applied to them the way it does school districts.

Oh, and about $200 million of your tax dollars went to charters that would have been marked for state takeover, if they were treated like districts.

I anticipate Churchill will complain that I'm comparing all charters with all Ohio school districts. Charter proponents demand their performance only be compared with school districts and buildings that struggle the most.

However, every school district but one had at least some state money transferred to charters from their state funding. You don't get to take money from every school district, yet demand you be held accountable relative to the performance of the most struggling districts.

Sorry, Aaron.

Especially when the current system forces local property taxpayers in those districts to fork over more of their property taxes to make up for the state funding transferred to charters.

And here is the breakdown of charter and district letter grades on the state report card this last year. As you can see, about half of all charter grades are F -- almost more Fs than all other grades combined -- and more than 7 out of 10 are D or F. Meanwhile, about 6 in 10 district grades were A, B, or C.

I guess what I'm most disappointed by though is Churchill's utter lack of deference and respect for Phillis, who more than any single person in the history of the state has held politicians' feet to the fire on equal and adequate funding for all students.

Frankly, Phillis has forgotten more education funding and policy than either I or Churchill will ever know. Churchill's cheap, ad hominem attacks on this man who has spent his life fighting for all kids to receive a world-class education is truly distressing.

My advice to Mr. Churchill would be to stick with trying to knock me around. Because with Phillis he is punching way above his weight class.

Should Charter Schools Get More Money for Buildings? Depends...

A recent call by the Fordham Institute and national charter school proponents has called for Ohio charter school facilities funding to be boosted by nearly 400 percent to match what they actually spend on facilities. While that may sound outrageous, especially given how Ohio charter schools have been near the bottom in national performance comparisons, I'm (surprisingly, perhaps) sympathetic to the idea.

And I told NPR so yesterday.

With major caveats.

First of all, let's talk money. Currently, charters get $200 per student for facilities funding. Yet they spend $785 per pupil, according to Fordham. Which means, they argue, charters need more money.

I do find it curious that when school districts argue they're not being paid enough by the state to cover expenses, free market folks like Fordham call districts wasteful or slovenly inefficient. Yet no such calls here. Hmmm.

Anyway, I've always believed that ensuring charter schools don't have to go into the waiting arms of ne'er-do-well, for-profit charter school operators would be a strong change in policy. One of the major reasons schools pick for profits is because for profits have access to capital and buildings. However, the for profits then fleece the schools on rents.

Here's the problem, though. That charter facility funding comes out of Ohio Lottery money. Last I checked, we were told the lottery was supposed to save us from having more property taxes. Now the state is removing about $16.6 million a year -- instead of putting it into school districts, potentially reducing property taxes -- and giving it to charters for facilities. If they quadruple that, it would be about $50 million more removed form Lottery funds to give to charters.

I don't think that's what the voters approved when they adopted the Lottery.

See, this has been, is and (I fear) will continue to be the problem with the way Ohio has funded school choice programs. The state siphons off a few million here and a few million there that would otherwise have gone to the 90 percent of students whose families choose local public schools. And they give it to privately run schools that aren't nearly as transparent as local public school districts.

And they generally perform worse that the school districts to whom that money was originally designated.

All that invariably forces local property taxpayers to pass more and bigger levies.

So, I am all for charters getting more facilities money because I think it helps keep the bad operators out of the game. But not if it means the 90 percent of Ohio students who remain in local public schools have to rely on more levies for their educations, or go with fewer opportunities.

If the state really believes in school choice, put your money where your mouth is and fund it with separate money that isn't taken away from local public school districts. Stop forcing property taxpayers to subsidize these payments.

I would feel better about Fordham's advocacy here if they identified a new revenue stream or something else to pay for this expense. But I'm suspecting that they'll just ask for a 400 percent jump in their facilities funding through the Lottery, which will siphons off more money originally meant for school districts.

Fish or cut bait. It's really that simple.

What Coulda Been (And Still Could Be) ...

This school year is the 10th since I was the Chairman of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee on the House Finance and Appropriations Committee. It was during that committee process that we developed (among other national award-winning education reforms) the so-called Evidence Based Model of school funding -- Ohio's most serious attempt to address the Ohio Supreme Court's four rulings determining that Ohio's education funding formula was inadequate at calculating the cost of educating Ohio's 1.7 million students and relied too much on local property taxes to fund.

Among the promises made in that package was a 10-year, phased-in funding plan. We picked 10 years because 2009 was the height of the Great Recession, which limited the additional revenue we could commit to the plan initially. But I required that the state publish the 10-year full funding version so that the public could at least hold future legislators accountable to fully fund the thing.

Here is a look at the research that backed each of the funding elements in the EBM. As you can see, there was evidence behind the model -- a far cry from today's "formula", which isn't really a formula in the classic sense.

Even with the limited additional revenue, EBM was beginning to work. The second year of that plan was the only time in Ohio history that more state than local revenue paid for Ohio's public education.

After the 2010 election, though, Gov. John Kasich killed the EBM, replacing it with a plan that initially cut money to education by about $1.8 billion. He then developed his own school funding plan, which was so despised that his own party rejected it in 2013. Ever since, Ohio has essentially created arbitrary per pupil funding increases, which bear no relation to the actual cost of educating kids.

However, that may be changing soon as state Reps. Robert Cupp and John Patterson have been working on a plan that sounds eerily similar to me, basing funding on what kids need and trying to reduce the need for local property taxes to pay for it. And that's all I've ever asked: Figure out the cost, pay for it and don't force us to go to the ballot every couple years to pay for your poorly calculated formula. I don't care what you call it. Just do it.

Given the historic nature of this school year, I wanted to show everyone what the EBM would have provided districts and what today's formula provides.

The difference is stark.

Only about 10 percent do better under the current formula. And 90 percent do worse. Usually significantly worse. For example, Cleveland receives $144 million less today than they would have under the EBM.

Think that would have helped CMSD implement its Transformation Plan? Instead, they've had to rely on local philanthropy and an historically huge local property tax hike to do not even all of what the plan called for.

For a district-by-district rundown of all the state's school districts, visit the spreadsheet I've posted here.

Now some may say that coming up with the $1.7 billion difference between a fully-funded EBM and what the state current spends is an outrageous amount. However, the state now has at least $3 billion fewer today than it could have because of various tax cuts that the state has instituted, especially during the Kasich years.

So we could have paid for a fully funded EBM if we had only cut taxes half as much. It wouldn't have required an additional income tax increase or anything.

Just not as big a tax cut. That's all.

And I bet you haven't even noticed the tax cuts. That's because the wealthiest 1 percent has seen a $17,618 tax cut. Regular folks have seen a $94 cut. And the least wealthy among us have seen an increase. That's right. Give back half of that $94 and your property taxes could have been dramatically cut by an average of $240 a year (depending on where you live, it could have been MUCH more than that).

Look, I get that finding money in this budget will be a challenge. I understand that given the makeup of the General Assembly and Governor's mansion, this will be a heavy lift.

But I also know that two House members are genuinely trying to get this right. I see a new House Speaker who lives in the school district where the DeRolph school funding case originated and probably feels like he has some unfinished business on school funding.

But most of all, I get that our kids need us to deliver for them. A new formula based on what kids need to succeed in the classroom and beyond. A mechanism that doesn't force voters to tax themselves at higher and higher rates every couple years. A system we can all be proud of.

Ten years ago, we were on our way to accomplishing that. Maybe over the next 10 years we can finish that mission.

Just as a personal aside, when I did EBM, my oldest son was in Kindergarten and my youngest had just been born. At the end of the coming two-year budget cycle, my oldest son will be driving and my youngest will be getting ready for middle school.

It is ridiculous that we are working on our third generation of Ohio students whose educations we've failed to properly fund or even calculate.

It's now no longer for my kids' sake we need to get this right.

It's for the generation behind them.

State Superintendent Tells New School Board Members Ohio School Funding is Constitutional. Data Say He's Wrong.

Well this is quite a thing. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Paolo DeMaria wrote a memo to school board members Sunday that openly claimed that Ohio's school funding system is now constitutional. Even though the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four times that it's unconstitutional.

Why did he say this? Because the court hasn't ruled on the issue since 2002. Yet the reason they haven't is because the Court dropped jurisdiction over the case, not because they thought anything was fixed. So plaintiffs are barred from suing over the issue anymore. Yet DeMaria is telling incoming State Board members that means it's constitutional.

Because plaintiffs can't test it?

Oy.

Vay.

Look, according to the fourth Supreme Court ruling from 2002, “Until a complete systematic overhaul of the system is accomplished, it will continue to be far from thorough and efficient and will continue to shortchange our students. The overreliance on local property taxes is the fatal flaw that until rectified will stand in the way of constitutional compliance.”

So let's use the test laid out by the Ohio Supreme Court (not the State Superintendent of Public Instruction) to determine whether today's school funding system is constitutional, shall we?

Systemic Overhaul

Today's school funding "formula" is not appreciably different from the one instituted in 2002. It has a few different calculations, but it's not unrecognizable. Certainly no "systemic overhaul." In fact, it's not even a formula, per se. The amount for basic aid was set up through arbitrary increases from the Building Blocks formula last calculated in 2007. It's so inadequate at calculating student need that nearly every school district gets too much or too little under its mechanism.

State Reps. Cupp and Patterson are working on a real formula overhaul. And in 2009, the Evidence Based Model certainly fit the definition of an overhaul that calculated an actual cost. But today's "formula"?

Please.

Overreliance on Property Taxes

This is pretty simple to determine. Do property taxes make up a greater share of the cost of education today than they did it 2002? The answer is, well, yes. In 2002-2003, the local share was 51.05%. In the 2015-2016 school year, that percentage was 51.75% -- and that doesn't include the nearly $800 million or so more that school districts lose in state revenue to charter schools and vouchers today than they did in 2002-2003.

So clearly, the cost to local taxpayers has gone up since 2002-2003. In addition, look at average property tax rates. In 2002-2003, the Ohio Department of Taxation reported that the average number of mills a district collected from property taxpayers to pay for schools were 30.06.

Today, it's 37.70.

That's a 25% increase in local property taxes paying for schools!

Under the key requirements set by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2002, today's school funding system fails to meet either.

The question remains: Why is the State Superintendent telling school board members the exact opposite? Especially given how potentially influential the state board could be in helping state lawmakers and the new governor adopt a real "systemic overhaul" of the school funding system that doesn't overly rely on property taxes to fund it?