FSFP Performance Supplement

Every other component in this class pays for an input — a pupil, a category of need, a tax base. This pays for a rating: $13 a pupil times the greater of the district’s overall star rating and its progress component rating, so the amount runs from $32.50 to $65.00 per pupil.

Three routes qualify a district and only one is about being good:

an overall rating above 3.5 stars        288 districts
a progress rating of 3 or more           120 more, whatever the overall rating
a progress rating higher than last year   18 more, whatever the level

The two progress routes exist to blunt the obvious objection to outcome-based funding — that it pays for intake. They carry a fifth of the recipients. verified

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

It is distributed inversely to need # ↑ Contents

By economically disadvantaged quintile, the mean supplement per pupil runs $55.92, $43.51, $35.62, $30.62, $21.84 from least-poor to poorest, monotonically, and the share of districts qualifying runs 94.21% to 47.20%. The least-poor districts receive 2.56 times per pupil what the poorest do. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs

Every figure in that sentence moved when it was first bound to the crate. The table had been published as $54.74, $43.24, $36.21, $30.03, $23.31, the qualification rates as 91% to 49% and the gradient as 2.3 — none of them what project::panel computes, and all of them under [verified], because the test that stood behind them asserted the gradient was > 2.0 rather than what it is. The direction of the finding is unchanged and its size is a quarter larger.

This wants stating precisely rather than as an accusation. Ohio’s attainment measures track composition — this corpus established that spending per weighted pupil against performance is substantially a composition proxy — so any program keyed to them follows composition whatever its intent. That explains the gradient; it does not remove it. $55.7m of a formula built to equalize flows against the grain of everything else in it, and no published figure says so. The progress routes are what hold the gradient to 2.56 rather than whatever it would otherwise be. inference the mechanism verified the measurement

It compares two report cards, and the column headers name neither # ↑ Contents

The calculators head O2 “Progress Component Rating 2023-2024” and O3 ”… 2022-2023”. Both headers are a year early. O2 is the 2024-25 progress rating for every one of the 607 rated districts, and O3 the 2023-24 rating for every one of the 606 that card rates, each matched against the department’s high-level download for that year. The two cards differ for 233 districts, so neither match can be a coincidence. O1, the overall rating, is the 2024-25 card too. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs The FY2026 workbook carries the same headers and the same values in all three columns for all 612 rows, so it pays on the same two cards. verified read from the cached workbook; no test holds it, because no FY2026 panel is extracted

So the Directions sheet’s “uses 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 report cards” is right and its own column headers contradict it. The third route pays for a progress rating that rose from 2023-24 to 2024-25.

One district clears it on a rating the card never gave. The 2023-24 card rates Put-in-Bay’s progress NR, and the calculator writes that as 0. A 2024-25 rating of 1 star is then “higher than the year before”, and Put-in-Bay is paid $2,057.90 through the third route, one of the 18 it alone qualifies. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs Whether the department means an unrated year to count as zero, the sheet does not say. open

It pays districts the same report card put under state control # ↑ Contents

Ohio has had three academic distress commissions — a state takeover of a district’s budget authority, triggered by R.C. 3302.10 on three consecutive years below two stars. All three districts are in the FY2027 model, and the one still under a commission is paid: Youngstown City, on the 2024-25 report card 2.5 stars and a progress rating of 3, $162,207.67. East Cleveland, released, takes $55,029.14. Lorain, whose commission an act of the General Assembly dissolved, qualifies on none of the three routes and takes nothing. verified crates/project/tests/the_supplements_outside_the_formula.rs

The reason both positions can be held at once is that the two mechanisms read different numbers. R.C. 3302.10 triggers on the overall rating. This supplement pays on the greater of the overall and progress ratings, through three routes, two of which read progress alone — and both paid districts above qualify on progress, neither on stars. The two components disagree by design, which is exactly what Progress (Value-Added) records: the same spending variable carries −0.073 against attainment and +0.209 against growth.

And the paying threshold sits below the releasing one. R.C. 3302.10(N)(1) needs three stars to begin a transition out of a commission. 59 districts are rated below that and 15 of them are paid, $3,036,977.90 between them — not one through the star route, because a district below three stars cannot reach it. verified computed That is 5.5% of the statewide supplement going to districts too poorly rated to start their own release.

It is not an inconsistency in the statute. R.C. 3302.10 is about control and R.C. 3317’s supplement is about payment, and nothing requires them to use the same measure. It is worth recording that they do not, because the corpus had assumed they did. inference

The gradient is real and the size is not # ↑ Contents

Whether the supplement is large enough to matter distributionally has two halves, and they point opposite ways.

The gradient is there and it runs against the grain: $55.92 per pupil to the least disadvantaged fifth of districts against $22.06 to the most, monotone across all five quintiles, a factor of 2.5. But the supplement is 0.77% of realized state aid, it reaches at most 7.0% of any one district’s aid, and the ninetieth-percentile district gets 2.8%. A mechanism pointed the wrong way and turned down almost to nothing. verified crates/project/tests/questions_the_corpus_left_open.rs

Recorded precisely because it reads as either alarming or trivial depending on which of the two numbers is quoted alone. The reason to keep watching it is that the gradient is a property of the design and the size is a property of one appropriation.

$55.7m against $7.28bn of state aid is 0.8%, so a district’s whole supplement is smaller than the noise in most other lines — and a regressive 0.8% inside a progressive $7.28bn is a different object from a regressive program. The gradient is measured, and whether it moves any district’s position is now measured too.

It moves them, by about one place # ↑ Contents

Order Ohio’s 609 districts by total state support per pupil and take the supplement away. 370 of them change place — by a mean of 1.0673 places, a largest anywhere in the state of 8, and 4 crossings of a quintile boundary: Fremont City, Monroeville Local, Madison Local and Fort Frye Local. More than half the state moves, and it moves one place. verified crates/project

And it narrows the equalization, which is the regressive reading and not a refutation of it # ↑ Contents

The coefficient of variation of state support per pupil is 0.5242 with the supplement and 0.5281 without it, so the supplement compresses the distribution of state aid by 0.0040 — 0.0075 of the dispersion. That sign is easy to state backwards. Ohio disperses state aid on purpose: the poorest quartile of districts receives $10,265 per pupil against the least-poor quartile’s $4,851 — each the mean over the districts in that quartile rather than over their pupils, per a district mean is not a state figure — and that gap is the equalization. A payment that falls with need therefore rises as a share of aid, and compresses the gap. verified

Against the aid a district already has, the supplement is worth 0.011408 of the least-poor quartile’s and 0.002173 of the poorest’s — a ratio above five where the per-pupil gradient is 2.56. That is the number that decides whether the distribution moves, and it is twice the one the per-pupil table shows. verified

Why it has any purchase at all # ↑ Contents

Because the guarantee does not absorb it. The supplement is line [O] and the guarantee holds a district at a base computed from [H], so a guaranteed district is paid on top rather than held flat — 217 of the 294 districts on the guarantee receive one. Being outside the guarantee is what this node records as the supplement’s exposure; it is also the only grip on a district’s position it has. verified

What none of this settles is whether one place in an ordering, or four quintile crossings, is a consequence. Position in the state-aid distribution is not position in total resources per pupil, which is the quantity equity is stated over, and the model this is computed from carries no local revenue. open