The Lesson
The evidence does not clearly favor Republicans or Democrats.
And it does not point toward spending levels alone.
That does not mean money doesn’t matter. Ohio’s reliance on local property taxes raises legitimate questions about fairness and the distribution of educational opportunity. How resources are distributed matters.
But Ohio’s decline in student achievement cannot be adequately explained by simply saying the state didn’t spend enough. Current National Education Association data put Ohio’s per-student spending at $16,856, 27th nationally—essentially the middle of the country.
Instead, the evidence points toward something every executive, public official, nonprofit leader and educator should recognize: Execution.
Ohio’s challenge was never a lack of effort.
Teachers were working.
Administrators were working.
Parents were invested.
Legislators were passing reforms.
Education leaders were launching initiatives.
Activity was never in short supply. Results became the question.
Between roughly 2010 and 2019, Ohio repeatedly revised academic standards, assessments, accountability systems, teacher evaluations, reading interventions, graduation requirements, funding approaches and school-choice policies.
Many of those reforms were well-intentioned. Some may ultimately have produced benefits.
But collectively, they created enormous organizational change while Ohio struggled to demonstrate sustained improvement in the fundamental product of education: Student learning.
Organizations can fail not because they resist change, but because they confuse change with improvement.
Ohio does not need another decade of reform for the sake of reform.
It needs a decade of disciplined execution.
Ohio Was Better—and That Matters
Ohio’s historical performance demonstrates that better results are possible.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress—NAEP, often called the Nation’s Report Card—Ohio’s fourth-grade mathematics score climbed from 219 in 1992 to 246 in 2013. By 2019, it had declined to 241.
Reading presents another concern. National and Ohio performance weakened during the latter part of the decade, before COVID ever reached a classroom.
That timing matters.
COVID did not create Ohio’s educational challenges.
The deterioration in important academic measures had already begun.
But COVID would dramatically amplify them.
Today, Ohio remains competitive nationally. In the latest 2024 NAEP, Ohio’s scores were higher than the national public-school averages in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and mathematics. Ohio’s eighth-grade math score, for example, was 279 compared with 272 nationally.
So this is not a story about a failed education system.
It’s a story about a state that has demonstrated it can perform better than it does today.
The question is: What happened?
Too Much Change, Without Enough Evidence of Improvement
Between 2010 and 2019, Ohio changed a remarkable number of elements of its education system.
- Standards changed.
- Tests changed.
- Teacher evaluations changed.
- Accountability systems changed.
- Reading policies changed.
- Graduation requirements changed.
- School-choice policies changed.
- Funding approaches changed.
Any individual reform may have been defensible. The problem is cumulative.
Every major change consumes something organizations have in limited supply: time, attention, training and organizational capacity.
When too many things change simultaneously, teachers and administrators spend considerable energy implementing the changes themselves.
That creates an important distinction: Implementing a reform successfully is not the same thing as demonstrating that the reform improved student learning.
Reading provides a particularly revealing example.
Ohio enacted its strengthened Third Grade Reading Guarantee in 2012. The state identified struggling readers, required intervention and increased accountability.
Yet researchers at The Ohio State University’s Crane Center subsequently found no meaningful or statistically significant improvement in statewide fourth-grade reading achievement following implementation of the guarantee.
Ohio correctly identified the problem.
- It created a policy.
- It measured performance.
- It required intervention.
But statewide reading achievement did not meaningfully improve.
That suggests a lesson that extends well beyond literacy: Identifying a problem and creating a program to address it are not the same as solving the problem.
Then Came the Attendance Crisis
An excellent teacher cannot teach a child who isn’t there.
And Ohio’s attendance problem did not begin with COVID.
The percentage of Ohio students classified as chronically absent was already 16.7% in 2018–19.
Then it exploded:
- 24.0% in 2020–21
- 30.2% in 2021–22
- 26.8% in 2022–23
Ohio defines chronic absenteeism as missing at least 10% of school hours for any reason.
Think about what those numbers mean.
At the peak, nearly one in three Ohio students was chronically absent.
No new curriculum, accountability system, funding formula or teacher evaluation can fully compensate for that amount of lost instructional time.
This is where COVID becomes critically important. COVID wasn’t the beginning of Ohio’s educational problems. It was an accelerant.
An education system already dealing with years of policy churn, literacy challenges and significant absenteeism suddenly experienced the greatest disruption to classroom instruction in generations.
It was a perfect storm:
Policy churn + unresolved instructional challenges + chronic absenteeism + COVID disruption.
What Should Ohio Do Differently?
If Ohio’s problem is primarily one of execution rather than ideology, the answer should not be another sweeping reform agenda.
It should be disciplined focus on a small number of measurable priorities.
1. Make Attendance Ohio’s Top Operational Education Priority
Before we debate the next curriculum, funding formula or accountability system, we need children in classrooms.
Ohio should establish a simple statewide objective: Drive chronic absenteeism below its pre-COVID level—and keep driving it down.
District-level attendance dashboards should identify trends early rather than waiting until the end of the school year. Schools should use early-warning systems to identify students approaching chronic-absence thresholds.
But Ohio should resist assuming every absence has the same cause.
Transportation problems, family instability, health issues, disengagement, school climate and parental attitudes require different solutions.
The state should give communities flexibility to address their particular causes while holding them accountable for the same outcome: More children in school, more often.
2. Make Literacy Ohio’s Academic North Star
Ohio has already made an important change.
In 2023, Gov. Mike DeWine launched ReadOhio, emphasizing instruction grounded in the science of reading. Ohio defines that evidence base around explicit, systematic instruction including phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and writing.
Now resist the temptation to change direction again before determining whether it works.
And don’t measure success primarily by: teachers trained, curricula purchased, district plans submitted, or compliance reports completed.
Measure: Can more children read?
Ohio should establish multiyear reading targets and publicly report whether student achievement actually improves.
If the approach works, protect it from political churn and scale what works.
If it doesn’t, determine why and correct the execution.
3. Shift Accountability From Activity Toward Outcomes
Ohio should continue measuring compliance where necessary.
But the ultimate accountability question should be:
Did students learn more?
Every significant education initiative should begin with clearly defined outcomes and include independent evaluation, public reporting and a scheduled review.
Before implementation, policymakers should answer:
What specifically should improve?
By how much?
By when?
How will we know whether the program caused or contributed to the improvement?
Programs demonstrating results should be protected or expanded.
Programs consistently failing to produce results should be modified or discontinued.
4. Create an Education Return-on-Investment Review
Ohio spends billions of taxpayer dollars annually on K–12 education.
The objective should not be spending less.
Nor should it automatically be spending more.
The objective should be spending effectively.
For every major program, Ohio should ask:
- What was the objective?
- What did it cost?
- What measurable student outcomes changed?
- Were those improvements meaningful?
- Could the resources produce greater results somewhere else?
That is not an argument against education funding.
It is an argument for treating every education dollar as an investment in children rather than simply an expenditure.
5. Stabilize the System
This may be the hardest recommendation politically.
Stop changing things simply because a new administration wants its own education legacy.
Ohio should establish a higher evidentiary threshold for major statewide reforms.
That doesn’t mean freezing education policy.
Bad programs should be changed. New evidence should alter practice. Technology will create new opportunities.
But change has a cost.
Educators need sufficient stability to master curriculum, improve instruction, analyze results and make incremental improvements.
The next governor should resist the temptation to announce another sweeping overhaul simply to demonstrate action.
Sometimes restraint is leadership.
6. Build One Ohio Education Performance Dashboard—and Keep It Consistent
Ohio should establish a small set of measures that remain substantially consistent across governors and administrations.
I would start with:
- Third-grade Ohio reading proficiency
- Fourth-grade NAEP reading
- Fourth-grade NAEP mathematics
- Eighth-grade NAEP reading
- Eighth-grade NAEP mathematics
- Chronic absenteeism
- High-school graduation and readiness
- Postsecondary, military and workforce outcomes
NAEP is particularly valuable because politicians in Columbus cannot simply redefine Ohio’s proficiency standard to make performance appear better.
The dashboard should show at least three things:
- Where are we now?
- Where were we five and ten years ago?
- Where have we committed to be five years from now?
If Ohio continually changes the ruler, meaningful accountability becomes much harder.
7. Find the Ohio Schools That Are Beating the Odds—and Copy What Works
Some Ohio schools and districts perform better than would be expected given the challenges facing their students.
Find them.
But don’t simply identify the schools with the wealthiest tax bases or highest test scores.
Compare schools serving similar student populations with similar resources and identify the outliers. Then determine what they’re doing differently: instructional methods, leadership, teacher development, attendance strategies, school culture, parent engagement, intervention, and resource allocation.
Ohio does not always need to import the next national education theory. Some of the answers may already be working in Ohio classrooms.
A Different Kind of Education Agenda
This approach isn’t particularly Republican.
It isn’t particularly Democratic.
And that may be its greatest strength.
It is an execution agenda:
- Get children into school.
- Teach them effectively.
- Make literacy foundational.
- Measure whether they’re learning.
- Invest in what works.
- Stop doing what doesn’t.
- Learn from Ohio schools producing exceptional results.
- Give successful approaches enough stability to succeed.
And then report the results publicly, whether they’re good or bad.
Final Thought
Ohio’s problem was not that people weren’t trying.
It was that enormous amounts of activity, reform and spending did not consistently translate into better student outcomes.
Then an already complicated system collided with serious absenteeism and COVID.
The answer isn’t another ideological revolution in education.
It is disciplined execution.
A decade focused on attendance.
A decade focused on literacy.
A decade focused on instructional excellence.
A decade focused on measurable outcomes.
Because the purpose of education isn’t to create programs.
It isn’t to create reports.
It isn’t to create compliance.
It isn’t even to create reform.
The purpose of education is to help children learn.
The ultimate measure of success isn’t the number of initiatives launched, regulations written or dollars spent.
It’s the number of young people who leave Ohio’s schools able to read, write, think critically, solve problems and build productive lives.
Everything else is secondary.
The next chapter in Ohio education should not be about changing the system again.
It should be about proving the system works.
Principal Sources
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — Historical State Mathematics Data, Grades 4
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_222.50.asp
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
The Nation’s Report Card — NAEP Data Explorer
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/
Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
National Assessment of Educational Progress in Ohio — 2024 Results and Ohio State Snapshots
https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Testing/National-and-International-Testing/National-Assessment-of-Educational-Progress-in-OH
Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
2024 NAEP Results: Focus on Literacy and Math Remains Critical Following Release of Nation’s Report Card
https://education.ohio.gov/Media/Ed-Connection/Jan-29-2025/NAEP-Results
Ohio Attendance Taskforce / Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
Ohio Attendance Taskforce Recommendations Report
https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Student-Supports/Attendance-Support/Attendance-Taskforce-Recommendations-Report.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US
Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, The Ohio State University
Logan, Justice, Davies O’Leary & Purtell, Has Ohio’s Third-Grade Reading Guarantee Led to Reading Improvements? (2019)
https://crane.osu.edu/files/2020/01/Third-Grade-Reading-Whitepaper_032019_WEB2-1.pdf
Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
The Science of Reading / ReadOhio
https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Learning-in-Ohio/Literacy/The-Science-of-Reading
National Education Association (NEA)
Educator Pay and Student Spending: How Does Your State Rank?
https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank
U.S. Census Bureau
Annual Survey of School System Finances
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/school-finances.html
