Model Policy
2 nodes · kind (ufo)
A template statute published by a national organization for adoption by state legislatures, and not itself law anywhere. It is a Kind for the same reason legislation is: a model bill’s identity is fixed at the version its publisher finalized, and an amendment produces a new dated version rather than changing what the old one said.
It is deliberately not the legislation class. That class means enacted — it carries a bill
designation, a numbered General Assembly, a signing date, an effective date, and line-item
vetoes. A model policy has none of those and never will. Holding both in one class would let a
reader take a template for a statute, which is the specific error this class exists to prevent.
What a node of this class may and may not claim. It may state what the model text
specifies, because the text is published and quotable. It may state where Ohio’s enacted
arrangement matches or departs from it, because both sides are documented and the departure is
checkable. It may not state that Ohio adopted it. Establishing that needs sponsor testimony,
committee records, or drafting history against the enacted section, none of which is in this
repository — so adoption_evidence exists to hold that answer and is [open] on every node
in the class. A class that could record a resemblance but had nowhere to record the absence of
provenance would read as an accusation.
Why the publisher is a property and not an actor node. The actor class covers institutions that enact law, decide cases, administer programs, or publish the data this corpus is grounded in. An advocacy organization does none of those. Its position in this graph is the publisher of a source, which is what a catalog record already encodes — the treatment Fordham Institute — Ohio Base Cost Model Commentary has had since it was first cited, with its alignment stated in the record and no corpus node of its own.
Nodes
| Education Savings Account Act | ALEC's template education savings account statute, adopted in 2017 as the successor design to the voucher model: money goes to an account a parent spends across a list of approved uses rather than to a school as tuition. Not law in Ohio. |
|---|---|
| Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (Universal Eligibility) | ALEC's template voucher statute, in the variant that makes every school-age student eligible. Not law in Ohio or anywhere else. It is here because its funding mechanism is a specific, checkable claim against what Ohio actually does. |
Properties
What a model policy may carry.
| Property | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher | string | The organization that issued it, and its stated policy alignment |
| Version | string | The date the publisher finalized the text, and any amendment dates |
| Eligibility | text | Which students the model text makes eligible |
| How the award is set | text | How the model sets the amount that follows a student |
| Effect on district funding | text | What the model does to the resident district's funding — whether the award is deducted from the district, who keeps any remainder, and whether the student stays in the district's count. Declared because it is the field on which a model bill and Ohio's enacted arrangement can actually be compared: this corpus has established Ohio's answer against the department's own calculator, so a claim here is falsifiable rather than atmospheric. |
| Regulation of private schools | text | What the model requires of, or forbids regulators from imposing on, participating schools |
| Evidence of adoption | text | What is established about whether any Ohio instrument was drawn from this text. [open] throughout the class; see the class description for why the field is mandatory rather than omitted when the answer is nothing. |
Relationships
The edges this class may enter into. Out is declared by the node itself; in is declared by the node at the other end.
| Relationship | To | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Parallels out | Funding Program | An Ohio program whose design the model text resembles. parallels and not template-for or adopted-as: the verb has to survive adoption_evidence being [open], and a resemblance between two published texts is all that is established. |
| Parallels out | Legislation | An Ohio enactment whose provisions the model text resembles, on the same reading as above |
| Departs from out | Funding Program | An Ohio program that works differently from what the model specifies. The counterpart to parallels and the more informative of the two here, because Ohio's funding mechanism diverged from the model's while its eligibility design converged on it. |
| Contested under out | Doctrine | A normative principle the model text's design is argued against or defended on |