But in arguments filed with the court, Voinovich, Aronoff and current House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, R-Reynoldsburg, argued that school funding should be left to the legislative and executive branches of state government, not the judiciary. Judicial intervention into Ohio's system of funding public schools is constitutionally suspect and potentially disastrous. If the court pushes, I think it will get done. The legislature has played games. There seems to be a lack of political will to do the right thing.
Few lawmakers deny that Ohio's public school system is in a state of crisis.
A Beacon Journal analysis of school finances in May showed that one out of every six districts had less money to spend per pupil in 1994 than it did 10 years earlier, after adjustments for inflation. About 500 of the more than 600 city, village and local school districts in Ohio did not have enough income in 1994 to cover all of their bills and, over the last decade, one in six has essentially gone bankrupt. Ohio became the focus of national attention this year when the U.S. Government Accounting Office reported that the state's 1.8 million schoolchildren are more likely to be in unsafe or unsatisfactory classrooms than those in any other state in the nation. And a special public television program on problems in America's schools, hosted by Bill Moyers, used Ohio as its case study because the wide disparities in per-pupil spending between rich and poor districts here were considered representative of problems found throughout the nation. The program aired nationally in September.