What if education funding were not merely a budgetary residual? That term entered the lexicon in Ohio back in the 1990s as part of the Ohio Supreme Court’s series of decisions in the case for adequate and equitably distributed public school funding, DeRolph v. Ohio. Our state supreme court determined that the level of funding for K-12 education should no longer be determined through residual budgeting—what’s left after the legislature merely distributes available resources across the many functions of state government.

In other words, the legislature should consider what our children and their schools need, cost out those services, make broad policy choices that will distribute state resources to ensure that all children are served no matter their local school district’s  funding capacity or their families’ circumstances, create a public school budget to cover the costs, and establish a taxing structure to pay for it.  In the most basic terms this means that funding public education—instead of cutting taxes and/or creating universal private school tuition vouchers—would become the policy choice.

Spoiler alert: even though the Ohio Supreme Court declared residual budgeting unconstitutional, all these decades later, Ohio’s public school funding and the funding of our state universities has continued to be to be a budgetary residual: what’s left, not what’s needed. In a paywalled legislative briefing in 2021 as the legislature considered a new school funding plan, Ohio school finance expert Howard Fleeter described how the state had in recent years been allocating funds for public education without any research to evaluate the real cost of services: “Ohio’s most recent school funding formula, in place from FY14-FY19, did not employ any methodology for determining the base cost amount.”

In the state budget passed in June of 2021, the legislature began addressing this problem by enacting the Fair School Funding Plan, after several years of research to cost out the components of a basic education for the average student and the myriad added costs for students with disabilities, for English language learners, and for students living in concentrated poverty.  The new school funding formula—now, in 2024, two-thirds of the way into its phase-in—was designed to end residual budgeting for K-12 public schools, but our legislators are phasing it in only one biennial budget at a time because, they say, they don’t want to tie the hands of future legislatures if there should be a revenue shortage. Our legislators say full funding of the Fair School Funding Plan will depend on the availability of  revenue, while at the same time they also keep choosing to enact tax cuts and they just created a universal voucher expansion.

Residual budgeting is, of course, not merely an Ohio phenomenon.  Public schools across the states have routinely failed to make budgetary choices fully to address the needs of the nation’s children and adolescents. Last week the Iowa Capital Dispatch carried a troubling story about plans to let a significant number of teachers go at the end of this school year in the Grinnell-Newburg school district: “Last month, the Grinnell-Newburg school board voted to reduce the district’s budget by $974,331 for next school year. The district serves 1,600 students across five schools. the cuts include the elimination of 17 staff positions, including a third grade section and two middle-school English teachers… Among those who are choosing to remain in the district, many said morale is at an all-time low.”

Reporter Zach Spindler-Krage documents the problem as a statewide school funding problem—including years of residual budgeting across the state: “Across Iowa, the financing of public education has been in crisis. Des Moines Public Schools is cutting $14 million ahead of next year. Iowa City Community School District approved a $5.5 million reduction.” While Governor Kim Reynolds reports that the state is not cutting per-pupil spending this year, data from Iowa Senate Democratic staff explain: “Between 1973 and 1993, the supplementary aid increased by an average of 6.42% annually…. Over the next 25 years, the annual increase was a mere 2.59% on average with numerous years of a 1% increase or no increase at all. Kent Mick, a tenured 37 year teacher at Grinnell High School explains: “You can disguise it whatever way you want… But you cannot underfund your public education year after year after year… and then act as if it’s a surprise that schools are in trouble.”

To top it all off, last year Governor Reynolds and Iowa’s legislature established a new private school tuition voucher program, “that allows parents to take the sum of their child’s per-pupil allotment—now roughly $7,800 after the latest increase—and apply it to private school tuition,”  thereby diverting essential dollars out of the state’s public school system.

Earlier this week, we were treated to an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Indiana’s extreme far-right education provocateur, Mitch Daniels, who ignores masses of research showing that holding kids back in third grade accelerates the likelihood that they will drop out before graduating from high school. Daniels trashes public schooling in general and those who work in public schools as part of his rant in favor of what he believes is the Third Grade Guarantee cure-all. Notice how his disdain for school teachers and school principals and superintendents infects his entire argument:

“(T)he statistics showing our country’s systemic educational failure are too dreary and well known to need further recitation. And the educrat establishment of unions and career administrators continues to prove more than a match for reformers attempting fundamental, system-wide change… In the K-12 wasteland. the good news is that we know not only where to apply the leverage but also when. The critical skill is reading, and the critical juncture is third grade…. Ending the pernicious, self-defeating practice known as ‘social promotion’ is the key… Ensuring the brightest future for America’s children, and the nation itself, means working for expanded school choice, better use of technology and the reprofessionalization of K-12 teaching. But while we wait such miracles, the simple reform of ending social promotion would have far-reaching lifelong benefits for millions of students.”

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado recently launched a new project, The Price of Opportunity, to investigate what researchers consider the greatest problem for our public schools and for a society which has in so many ways abandoned the poorest children enrolled in public schools. Unlike Mitch Daniels, NEPC researchers look to the much broader problem we identified with Ohio’s term “residual budgeting”—or worse, lack of attention altogether.  Although from the nineteenth century in the words of Horace Mann, many have alleged that public schools alone can be the Great Equalizer for America’s children, most researchers now know it is not possible for public schools alone to solve the overwhelming problems of U.S. child poverty and racial and economic segregation. Despite that caution, NEPC researchers have undertaken to launch a project to identify what it would cost to ensure that schools effectively support children whatever their circumstances:

“What would it take to create a state school system where every student from any background or circumstance is provided with educational opportunities that prepare them to thrive economically and socially in college, career, and life? How much would such a system cost, if it could offer the resources and programs needed to help students overcome the challenges they face inside and outside or schools?”  The Price of Opportunity project, “considers the price tags for two distinct approaches for lifting all children up (1) (a) school-based approach, or (2) an approach that greatly reduces larger societal stratification and thus only looks to schools to play a straightforward education role. When our politicians choose to pursue the former—when they allow racialized poverty and concentrated poverty to inflict severe harms on the nation’s children—they create s situation where school resources must be multiplied.”  NEPC researchers have begun only with the first step—analyzing  a purely education-based strategy for addressing academic inequity.

A recent NEPC newsletter outlines twelve commitments that would be required: “Our estimates aim to offer a preliminary assessment of the costs linked to those responsibilities that are already placed on schools in our present sociopolitical environment.” While Mitch Daniels insults “educrats,” unionized teachers, and the career educators he says should be  “reprofessionalized” (whatever that means), NEPC prioritizes the urgent need for increased support for educators.

NEPC’s very first requirement is enough funding to ensure there is   “a well-prepared, high-quality, and supported teacher in every classroom.” NEPC’s experts are not going for expensive purchases of online Science of Reading curriculum or expansion of experiments with the Third Grade Guarantee, or requirements for consultant-driven school turnaround plans.  Instead NEPC recommends  that school districts must invest in improving “teacher working conditions, including class size, staffing, planning time, and compensation,” providing “teachers with ample support and mentoring,” increasing “teacher diversity” and providing “ample career pathways.”

NEPC’s second recommendation is that school districts must invest in supporting their school leaders—“a well-prepared,high-quality and supported principal in every school.”  States must invest to “align trainings for aspiring and current administrators with district needs, create administrative internships or fellowship program, differentiate administrator roles and workloads, protect administrators’ time to allow for instructional leadership and teacher–support, and elevate equity–focused administrator performance goals.” Again researchers identify very basic investments in enough well-qualified professional staff with the support and time to nurture children and administer their schools.

The stories of inadequate school funding and decades of residual budgeting in Ohio and Iowa are cautionary tales of a problem across almost all the states. And even if all the states were to undertake thorough school finance reform, the question remains whether well resourced schools on their own could possibly become the Great Equalizer in our society. Although NEPC researchers have not yet undertaken that second step of their new investigation, they warn: “Spoiler alert. We cannot build a school system where Every Child Thrives without meaningful and sustained investment. The panelists who devised the Every Child Thrives recommendation… were asked to limit their focus (in this first phase) to resources schools can realistically provide. They could not, for example directly address housing insecurity. But they did their best to design schools that would help children experiencing homelessness. This points to a foundational problem of looking to the nation’s public schools to play the Great Equalizer role that is often assigned to them.”