Funding Our Public Schools

Time for Ballot Measures in Our States?

This is my latest Beat. Updates will n-o-t produce emails. To return, just bookmark this post, or visit my home page from a web browser, or via the Substack App, see my Table of Contents, which now has a link to this. This intriguing piece by Laura Hancock in the Cleveland Plain Dealer/Cleveland.com, Kentucky, Nebraska, Colorado voters rejected private school vouchers. Could they be on the Ohio ballot next? has me thinking again about something close to my heart: an issue raised long ago by Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, the diminution and in some ways death of public education as we knew it.

As I see it, school board democracy was the root of our larger system of democracy. There were once over 800 elected school boards in Ohio. The schools were a literal lesson in civics, before the constant consolidation and growth of larger and larger school districts and their growing bureaucratization. Kozol’s book inspired my dissertation in social work and sociology at That School Up North: The Social System of Real Property Ownership: Public and Nonprofit Property Tax Exemptions And Corporate Tax Abatements in City and Suburb, 1955-2000.

And it lead to one of my biggest regrets: not finishing my contract with Johns Hopkins University Press for The Social System of Real Property Ownership: Public and Nonprofit Property Tax Exemptions And Corporate Tax Abatements in City and Suburb, 1955-2000. I started last year to collect updated data that could further information questions about Ohio public school finance, and I hope to continue this work this year and approach another publisher.

Ohio and many other states watch as growing voucher systems siphon off public school dollars to charter schools. This threatens our democracy in ways we may not realize. I would argue that the property tax exemption was the foundation of religious freedom in the USA. Starting with glebes given by the British King to those who wanted to build Anglican churches in the colonies, after independence, the early established churches wanted exemptions under state law, but once one denomination received them, how could the state deny other denominations? Religious liberty flourished on these institutional foundations.

But what is not as well understood is that public schools and their elected school districts were virtual factories for democracy. Other than small villages, they were the smallest unit of democratic representation. The very roots of American democracy were in our elected school boards. Also, the public schools and other public institutions also enjoyed a property tax exemption. Once a school district, controlled by state-prescribed systems of democratic representation bought land for school purposes, it had a path-dependent quality.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, there was a growing trend towards consolidation of districts into larger and larger entities. We used to have over 800 school districts in our 88 counties, which include the 18 urban counties in my dissertation. After consolidation, operating under an unconstitutional system of public school financing in Ohio, many school districts began to sell off their buildings to charter schools, after they themselves were starved for funding. This must stop!

We need a truly sustainable system of public school financing. School board democracy must be truly restored, starting in Cleveland. Mayor Bibb must agree to open up a debate and another Cleveland plebiscite about proposing state legislation to end mayor control of the Cleveland Schools, but I think that debate must be broader. I think we should break up the massive bureaucracies running school districts in our largest cities and re-create smaller citizen-run districts. My principle is this: one high school, one district. The superindendtent’s office would be right in that high school.

They would know full well when elementary and middle schools or junior high schools were not functioning well. Ohio should mimic Michigan’s practice of having intermediate districts, which enable multiple districts to collaborate on things like special education. Such focused intermediate school districts for special ed would quite well, but there could be parallel intermediate districts to collaborate on things like teacher training, HR, supplies, snow removal, maintenance, and perhaps school security as well.

Some might say that one high school, one district would create segregation. You know what? Nothing could even possibly by more institutionally racist than what we have now. Let’s put the local residents and PTAs back running our schools, with input fron students. Not huge bureacracies full of patronage and politics.

We need to take real risks and at one and the same time restore school district democracy and restore a constitutional system of public school finance. We need a new vision for public education in Ohio, one that devotes public dollars to public schools, not to private entities that want to feed off the public trough.