The corpus
How Ohio funds its public schools: the state foundation formula and its successive regimes, the constrained local property tax base beside it, the litigation that tested the combination against the Ohio Constitution, and the programs that route money around the formula. 137 nodes across 18 classes, with 1,280 links between them and 69 sources behind them.
What this is, and what it deliberately does not hold Contents
The corpus holds schema, mechanism, legal history, metric definitions, and a curated set of exemplar districts. It does not hold the per-district figures — roughly 610 agencies across every year with usable data would drown the graph, so those live as committed data files and are reached from here. A node names a series; it does not restate it. The numbers are on the district pages.
Every substantive claim carries its epistemic status inline: verified against a named source, inference drawn from what is verified, or open — a question asked and not yet answered. Those badges are the corpus's own, not this site's editorializing.
There is no fourth badge, and for a long time there was. A field nobody has filled in is not a weaker grade of support — it is the absence of a claim to grade — and set inline, in the same brackets as the three above, it read as a rung below open whatever it wore. It is structure now: the node names the missing fact and where the value lives, and the page renders those as a block headed What this node does not hold — the department's typology code, and then the sentence saying where to get it.
Classes Contents
| Funding Regime 5 | A named statewide method for distributing state aid to education agencies, holding for a bounded span of fiscal periods before being replaced. |
|---|---|
| Formula Component 18 | A structural mechanism inside a funding regime that performs one identifiable step of the distribution calculation — computing a base cost, applying a categorical weight, measuring local capacity, or capping and guaranteeing the result. |
| Formula Parameter 18 | A single named value that a funding regime consumes and the General Assembly sets, carrying a series of values across fiscal periods — a base cost per pupil, a special-education category weight, the 20-mill floor, a phase-in percentage, a state share index threshold. |
| Metric 9 | A defined, computable measure over education agency data, stated precisely enough that two people computing it from the same source get the same number — per-pupil expenditure, assessed valuation per pupil, state share percentage, effective millage, the dispersion of spending across agencies. |
| Legislation 16 | An enacted instrument of law that creates, amends, or constrains any part of the funding system — a General Assembly bill, most often a biennial budget act, or a provision of the Ohio Constitution. |
| Litigation 6 | A decided case testing some part of the education funding system against constitutional text. |
| Accountability Regime 2 | A named era of measuring schools and attaching consequences to the measurement — Ohio's report card system, No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act. |
| Doctrine 3 | A normative principle or analytical frame against which the funding system is judged — the constitutional standard of a thorough and efficient system, the distinction between adequacy and equity, local control, the residual-budgeting critique, phantom revenue. |
| Draft Legislation 5 | A set of provisions that is not law: a bill before the General Assembly, an alternative version of an act that did pass, or a change nobody has introduced at all. |
| Education Agency 7 | An IRN-bearing entity that receives Ohio public education funding and is a unit of distribution in the state formula — a city, local, or exempted village school district, a joint vocational school district, a community (charter) school, or a STEM school. |
| Fiscal Period 16 | A bounded span of state fiscal time that funding decisions attach to — an Ohio fiscal year running July 1 to June 30, or the biennium a budget act appropriates for. |
| Funding Program 10 | A separately-authorized initiative that moves education money outside the base formula. |
| Institutional Actor 4 | An institution that acts on the funding system — enacting law, deciding cases, administering programs, or publishing the data the rest of the corpus is grounded in. |
| Model Policy 2 | A template statute published by a national organization for adoption by state legislatures, and not itself law anywhere. |
| Revenue Stream 8 | A channel through which money reaches an education agency, binding a source of funds to a recipient under a specific legal authority — local property tax levied on a district's own tax base, state foundation aid, tangible personal property tax replacement payments, casino revenue distribution, federal Title I. |
| School Building 3 | A single school building. |
| State Intervention 3 | What the state does to an education agency or a school building that its accountability system has identified as failing. |
| Worked Scenario 2 | A named counterfactual: a set of parameter perturbations, applied against a baseline regime over a stated horizon, together with the per-agency results it produces. |
Sources Contents
Provenance carries more weight here than in most domains. A funding figure is only useful if a reader can tell whether it came from a department payment report, a Legislative Service Commission estimate made before the fiscal year closed, or a district's own five-year forecast — three numbers that describe the same thing and routinely disagree. Every numeric claim in the corpus should reach a catalog entry in one hop.
The 12 most-cited of 69 sources the corpus reaches. All 69, ranked by how often they are cited.
Decisions Contents
Everything above states a conclusion. The decision records state how each was reached — what was chosen, what was rejected and on what evidence, and where the answer turned out to be wrong. 65 of them, carrying 16 claims since withdrawn or superseded, each marked where it stands rather than edited out.
The records carrying the most corrections. All 65.