Fordham Institute — "Ohio House puts the brakes on Cupp-Patterson"

Source. Thomas B. Fordham Institute (Ohio), commentary on the House-passed version of H.B. 96 of the 136th General Assembly. Attributed to Aaron Churchill, Fordham’s Ohio research director, published on or about 8 April 2025. inference the page returns no byline and no dateline to a fetching tool; both come from search metadata rather than from the document. The House passed H.B. 96 on 9 April 2025, so the piece is contemporaneous with the floor vote and precedes the Senate and the conference report Type. Secondary source — policy analysis of a bill stage that did not become law. Location. fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/ohio-house-puts-brakes-cupp-patterson.

What it contains. An account of the House “bridge” plan: every district and community school held at FY2025 state aid through a guarantee, with prescribed formula increases above FY2025 cut in half. Foundation funding increases FY2025 → FY2027 of $179m (2.2%) for traditional districts, $80m (6.3%) for community schools, $38m (7.6%) for JVSDs — $297m and about 3% overall, against $149m in the executive proposal. A distributional figure by district typology (typology 6 suburbs +4.9% against the Ohio Eight +1.3%; $118 per pupil against $100), a table of districts with the largest FY2022–FY2025 enrollment losses, and a statewide enrollment decline of 2.5% over three years. Three forward-looking claims: that Cupp-Patterson is on its way out and Ohio is returning to caps and guarantees; that the House declined to stop funding empty desks; and that it left disadvantaged pupil impact aid unfixed when direct certification was available to fix it.

The stage caveat, which here is the whole record # ↑ Contents

Every figure above belongs to the House-passed bill. The enacted act is a different instrument, and LSC Budget Analysis — H.B. 96 (FY2026-27)’s stage rule is what keeps the two apart. The commentary is therefore not a description of Ohio law and must never be read as one — it is evidence about what one chamber proposed in April 2025 and about what a school-choice-aligned analyst wanted from the budget.

The headline did not survive conference. The bridge formula was dropped; the enacted act took the phase-in to 83.33% and then 100%, completing the Cupp-Patterson schedule on paper, and applied its brake to the other dial instead — the cost inputs, held at FY2022. verified Am. Sub. H.B. 96 (2025) — FY2026-27 Budget So the piece’s central claim was overtaken, and the mechanism it named as the retreat is not the mechanism the retreat used.

What reproduces, and against what # ↑ Contents

The commentary’s FY2025 baselines are the same ones LSC carried to the greenbook, which is what makes a stage comparison possible at all rather than an equivocation over two different years. Its implied bases — $8,136m, $1,270m, $500m — sit on the greenbook’s $8,117.9m, $1,270.3m and $497.2m. verified crates/project/fixtures/dew-greenbook.txt, Table 2

Placed beside the act that passed, in millions:

school type            FY2025      House-passed        enacted     enacted - House
traditional           8,117.9    +179   (+2.2%)   +141.5 (+1.7%)          -37.5
community and STEM    1,270.3    + 80   (+6.3%)   +128.5 (+10.1%)         +48.5
JVSDs                   497.2    + 38   (+7.6%)   + 69.7 (+14.0%)         +31.7
total                 9,885.4    +297   (+3.0%)   +339.7 (+3.4%)          +42.7

The enacted budget spent $42.7m more than the House bridge plan and gave traditional districts $37.5m less. The whole difference, and $37.5m besides, went to community schools and JVSDs — the two sectors the commentary reports as the House plan’s relative winners, and both did materially better under the law than under the proposal it is criticizing. verified the greenbook table against the commentary’s own percentages

The enrollment claim holds in direction and rough size, on a window this repository can see. Fordham reports −2.5% over FY2022–FY2025. The department’s FY2027 model gives −2.62% over FY2024 → FY2026, with 500 of 609 districts declining. verified crates/foundation/fixtures/fy27-department-model.csv Different windows, so this corroborates rather than confirms.

The empty-desks critique survives the enacted act intact, and is arguably stronger against it. The FY2027 model carries 294 districts on the temporary transitional aid guarantee at $879.0m, 10.8% of net state funding; 263 of them are shrinking, and they hold $786.7m of it. East Cleveland — the commentary’s own example of a district funded through a freefall — goes 1,135.9 → 1,058.3 enrolled ADM across FY2024–FY2026 and carries a $13.7m guarantee in the model. verified

The typology figure is now half checkable, and the half that is not is not about typology. This read that no typology assignment was committed anywhere and that valuation per pupil was the nearest proxy the corpus held. The department’s own assignment is committed — Typology of Ohio School Districts — the department's own similar-district grouping, on every district in the feed — so the grouping side of the claim can be reproduced. verified

What still cannot be reconstructed is the other side: the district-level distribution of the House plan was an LSC simulation of a bill that died, and nothing here reconstructs it. So the figure remains uncheckable, for a reason that has nothing to do with typology. open

The DPIA recommendation, which the enacted act adopted # ↑ Contents

This is the reason the entry is worth more than a bibliography line. The commentary calls the disadvantaged pupil impact aid count “a mess” — economically disadvantaged rates inflated by community eligibility until they no longer distinguish a poor district from one that serves free meals to everybody — and names direct certification, “already used by the state”, as the fix.

The enacted act did exactly that: the count becomes 75/25 and then 65/35 between the FY2025 economically disadvantaged ADM and each year’s directly certified ADM. verified FSFP Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid So a recommendation made against the House plan was enacted three months later, and its effect is computable from the department’s own FY2027 model, which publishes both counts per district.

The targeting claim is correct. Holding the statewide dollar total fixed so that only the distribution moves, the 65/35 blend sends the Ohio Eight +$16.07m (+11.3%, +$96 per pupil) against the pure economically-disadvantaged count. The districts that pay for it are the ones the commentary described: the largest single loser is Pickerington Local at −$3.08m, a Columbus suburb reporting 97.9% economically disadvantaged and 25.5% directly certified, followed by Teays Valley, Canal Winchester and Cloverleaf on the same profile. The top valuation decile is untouched (+0.6%, +$2 per pupil). 423 of 609 districts gain. verified crates/foundation/fixtures/fy27-department-model.csv; the DPIA function reproduces the model’s published column to +0.019% statewide, with 607 of 609 districts inside 0.5%

And it is worth about a fifth of what the same provision took away. The count change is not distribution-neutral: it is a cut. Statewide DPIA for traditional districts falls $84.5m (13.0%) then $31.8m (5.6%), $649.2m to $532.8m before phase-in. verified the greenbook The Ohio Eight hold 30.1% of enacted DPIA, so their share of that $116.4m is roughly −$35.1m against +$16.1m of improved targeting — a net loss near $19m. The commentary asked for a better measure and received a smaller pot measured better, and it argued for the first without pricing the second. inference the proportional split of the level effect is an apportionment, not a department figure

Caveats # ↑ Contents

Never merge this with the department’s series. The commentary’s figures are LSC simulations of a bill stage; the per-district figures above are the department’s FY2027 calculator. The two describe the same quantities and disagree — statewide DPIA is $532.8m in the greenbook and $525.1m in the model, which is a vintage difference and not an error in either.

The level-neutral comparison is a construction. The statewide economically disadvantaged percentage the index divides by, 0.533380310606710, is defined by R.C. 3317.02(I)(1)(a)(i) as a computation whose denominator this corpus cannot reconstruct from the one year of calculator it holds — the implied denominator, 1,354,592, is smaller than traditional enrolled ADM. So the counterfactual holds the total fixed and rescales the index rather than recomputing it, which isolates redistribution and deliberately declines to price the level. The level is taken from the greenbook instead. open what the statewide percentage would have been under the prior count

Akron City is the one district the reproduction does not fit, at +0.53% ($101,615). Every other district is inside 0.5% and the median residual is −0.00004%. Why Akron differs is unestablished. open

Alignment, stated as it is for the other record. Fordham is a school-choice-aligned organization, and this piece reports community-school and e-school increases approvingly while treating traditional-district increases as a cost problem. That does not make its arithmetic wrong — none of what could be checked here was wrong — and it is the reason to check rather than adopt. See Fordham Institute — Ohio Base Cost Model Commentary, which sets the footing this entry follows, and “Advocacy literature”, which decided that an advocacy publisher is a catalog record and never a corpus node.

Access constraints. Freely available. The page will not yield a byline, a dateline or its verbatim text to a fetching tool, so both attributions above are [inference]. Not pinned by digest and fed by no connector.