Adequacy

Its practical content in Ohio is a critique of method. The Supreme Court of Ohio’s core finding in DeRolph I was not that the base cost figure was too low but that it was derived the wrong way round: the General Assembly decided what it would spend and divided by pupils, rather than determining what an education costs and appropriating that. verified This practice — residual budgeting — makes an adequacy claim unfalsifiable, because the standard moves with the appropriation.

Both the Evidence-Based Model and the Fair School Funding Plan are direct answers to that critique: each builds a cost from specified inputs so that the number has a derivation independent of the budget. verified Neither has been operated at its computed level for a sustained period, so in Ohio the adequacy question has been answered methodologically and not yet fiscally. inference

Adequacy is satisfiable without equity. A system that funds every district to a genuine costed requirement, and permits wealthy districts to spend far beyond it, is adequate and unequal. inference Ohio’s current design is of that shape.

A warning that belongs here rather than only on the metrics. A cross-sectional correlation between spending and measured achievement is not an adequacy test in either formulation, and the near-zero coefficients now recorded on expenditure per equivalent pupil should not be read as bearing on this doctrine. Adequacy asks whether resources meet a costed requirement. Whether districts that spend more score higher is a different question, answered by comparing districts to each other rather than to a standard — which is the equity frame wearing adequacy language. inference

What this repository computed #

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

The outcome formulation is now half-testable, which it was not before. contested below records the standing question of whether outcome or input measures should define the requirement. Until the corpus acquired the Performance Index it could only ever argue the input side, because it held no measure of a result. It now holds one. What it still does not hold is a threshold: Ohio publishes a continuous index and no declared sufficient level, so the outcome formulation can say where a district sits and not whether that is enough. An outcome-based adequacy claim needs a floor the state has not set, and DeRolph I’s objection to residual budgeting applies with equal force to a floor set after the scores come in. inference

And the outcome side turned out to be two measures, not one. The corpus now holds Ohio’s Progress (value-added) component beside the Index. They rank districts differently — they correlate at only +0.375 — and against the same spending variable, holding poverty constant, they carry opposite signs: −0.125 on level, +0.146 on gain. verified So “outcome measures should define the requirement” is not one position but at least two, and they do not agree about which districts are succeeding. Akron City is near the bottom of the state on attainment and four stars on growth. Any outcome-based adequacy standard has to choose, and the choice decides which districts are found deficient. inference