Research & Analysis

Ohio Common Ground White Papers

In-depth, evidence-based research on the issues affecting Ohio. Every paper includes documented sources, transparent methodology, and practical analysis.

Featured Publication

White Paper No. 013Published: August 7, 2026

Does Per-Pupil Spending Track Academic Performance?

Ohio Common Ground White Paper No. 013 examines whether a district's per-pupil spending is associated with its academic performance across all 607 of Ohio's traditional public school districts, using Performance Index scores and expenditure per equivalent pupil from the 2024–2025 state report cards. It finds essentially no unadjusted linear or monotonic relationship at the district level (Pearson r = −0.016): average performance is nearly flat across spending quintiles, with the lowest- and highest-spending fifths differing by about $6,100 per pupil yet posting the same average Performance Index of 87.2. Weighted by enrollment the association turns weakly negative (r = −0.149, with the highest-spending quintile's average falling to 78.6), driven by several large, higher-spending districts with lower measured performance, and the one strong component relationship is that expenditures from federal funds per pupil are higher in lower-performing districts, consistent with poverty-targeted aid like Title I. The paper is strictly descriptive: it draws no causal conclusion, makes no funding recommendation, notes that a single-year cross-sectional comparison cannot separate spending from confounders such as student poverty, district size, and regional costs, and identifies a need-adjusted multivariable model as the next step.

Download PDF Read Online

Browse by Topic
(coming soon)

Explore our research library across key policy areas affecting Ohioans.

Affordability

Healthcare

Government

Elections

Education

Economy

Public Safety

Infrastructure

Energy

Housing

Property Taxes

Constitutional Rights

White Paper No. 018

August 19, 2026

Who Pays for American Healthcare?

"Who Pays for American Healthcare? Generational Patterns in Health Care Financing, Coverage, and Government Programs" examines how Americans finance health care across the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z, and how those patterns have shifted since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965. Drawing on CMS National Health Expenditure Accounts, U.S. Census Bureau coverage data, and Bureau of Labor Statistics spending records, the report finds that national health spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, that payment sources shift sharply with age — from employer coverage in working years to near-universal Medicare after 65 — and that, at matched ages rather than today's differing ages, real household health spending has been higher for each successive generation. It also traces how enhanced ACA subsidies expiring in 2026 are already reshaping coverage for working-age adults, and examines Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and VA financing in detail. The report is descriptive rather than evaluative: it documents what the data show without recommending policy changes or ranking any generation's experience against another's.

White Paper No. 017

August 17, 2026

Governor and General Assembly Institutional Leverage Under a Legislative Supermajority

Governor and General Assembly: Institutional Leverage Under a Legislative Supermajority (White Paper No. 017) examines what the Ohio Constitution and Ohio Revised Code actually authorize when one party holds a three-fifths legislative supermajority in both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly and the other party holds only the governorship. The report catalogs the Governor's constitutional powers — including the veto, line-item veto, appointments, clemency, and agency administration — alongside the legislature's own tools for constraining a governor of the opposite party, such as appropriations control, statutory rulemaking review, and compulsory investigative process, and distinguishes which of these mechanisms actually depend on a veto-proof supermajority from those available to an ordinary legislative majority. It further analyzes how the party affiliation of Ohio's four other independently elected statewide executive officers — Attorney General, Auditor of State, Secretary of State, and Treasurer of State — affects a governor's practical, as distinct from formal, leverage. Consistent with OCG Research Center standards, the report is descriptive rather than evaluative: it takes no position on any candidate, party, or election outcome, and analyzes these mechanisms symmetrically regardless of which party holds which office.

White Paper No. 16

August 12, 2026

Ohio Housing Affordability: Prices, Income, Rents, and Cost Burden, 2015–2026

"Ohio Housing Affordability: Prices, Income, Rents, and Cost Burden, 2015–2026" • This report examines housing affordability in Ohio from 2015 through the most recent available data, drawing on the Federal Housing Finance Agency's house price index, U.S. Census Bureau household income data, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation data, and the Ohio Housing Finance Agency's Housing Needs Assessment. It finds that Ohio's median home-price-to-income ratio reached 2.6 in the most recent data — the highest level since 2005 — and that, over the common 2015–2024 period, inflation-adjusted Ohio home prices rose approximately 41% compared with a 17% increase in real median household income; home prices continued rising afterward, reaching roughly 52% above their 2015 level by the first quarter of 2026. The report also documents a 22% real increase in two-bedroom rents from 2019 to 2024, a rise in severe renter cost burden to 26% of renters in 2023, more than 1.2 million Ohioans living in severely housing-cost-burdened households, and average 30-year mortgage rates more than doubling between 2021 and 2024. As a Research Center publication, this report is strictly descriptive: it documents these patterns without identifying a cause or recommending a policy response.

White Paper No. 15

August 11, 2026

Has Ohio Been Defunding Public Education?

Ohio Common Ground's newest Research Center white paper, Has Ohio Been Defunding Public Education?, tests the competing claims at the heart of Ohio's school-funding debate against two decades of primary-source data — from the Ohio Auditor's Longitudinal School Finance Study, the Department of Education and Workforce, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. Its central finding is that "funding" is not one number and "defunding" is not one standard: from FY2000 to FY2022, Ohio's public-school spending rose substantially in total, inflation-adjusted, and per-pupil terms even as enrollment fell 8.3%, while the state's share of total revenue declined, the current funding formula remains funded below what it calculates, and state payments for nonpublic scholarships grew from roughly $175 million to about $1.1 billion. Because each of those facts is true at once, the paper defines seven distinct meanings of "defunding" and applies each consistently — showing exactly which common claims hold up under which measure, where reasonable people diverge, and what the evidence does and does not establish. Descriptive, nonpartisan, and fully sourced, it makes no policy recommendations; it simply lays out the record so Ohioans can judge for themselves.

REVISED White Paper No. 13

August 10, 2026

REVISED: Does Per-Pupil Spending Track Academic Performance?

THIS REVISED VERSION of OCG's White Paper No. 013 examines whether per-pupil spending tracks academic performance across Ohio's 607 rated traditional public school districts, using published 2024–25 school report-card data. Prompted in part by a reader's question, this revised edition incorporates internal and external peer review and adds a central methodological finding: the answer depends on how students are counted. On the state's need-weighted "equivalent pupil" basis, district spending and Performance Index show essentially no relationship (a correlation of about −0.02); on an unweighted average-daily-membership basis — the "cost per pupil" figure from the District Profile ("Cupp") report — the same spending shows a moderate negative correlation (about −0.34). The revised edition presents both measures side by side, and adds enrollment-weighted results, outlier and small-district sensitivity checks, and a downloadable replication package. As throughout, the analysis is strictly descriptive: it reports single-year, unadjusted associations in published data, and does not estimate the causal effect of spending on outcomes or recommend any change to how Ohio funds its schools.

White Paper No. 14

August 10, 2026

Accountability and Funding for Ohio’s Public Districts and Nonpublic Scholarship Schools

"Accountability and Funding for Ohio's Public Districts and Nonpublic Scholarship Schools" compares what Ohio law currently requires of public school districts against what it requires of the nonpublic schools that accept EdChoice, EdChoice Expansion, Cleveland, Autism, and Jon Peterson scholarship funds — covering financial audits, academic testing and reporting, staff background checks, records retention, and related obligations. The report also documents the legal and legislative context shaping this comparison: the ongoing constitutional challenge to EdChoice in Columbus City School District v. State of Ohio, where a Franklin County trial court found the program unconstitutional on several grounds in June 2025 before staying its own ruling pending an appeal now before the Tenth District Court of Appeals; and Senate Bill 443, pending legislation that would extend several public-school accountability requirements to participating nonpublic schools. This report is descriptive, not prescriptive — it does not rate, endorse, or recommend any policy position, and takes no view on whether current requirements are adequate or appropriate.

White Paper No. 013

August 7, 2026

Does Per-Pupil Spending Track Academic Performance?

Ohio Common Ground White Paper No. 013 examines whether a district's per-pupil spending is associated with its academic performance across all 607 of Ohio's traditional public school districts, using Performance Index scores and expenditure per equivalent pupil from the 2024–2025 state report cards. It finds essentially no unadjusted linear or monotonic relationship at the district level (Pearson r = −0.016): average performance is nearly flat across spending quintiles, with the lowest- and highest-spending fifths differing by about $6,100 per pupil yet posting the same average Performance Index of 87.2. Weighted by enrollment the association turns weakly negative (r = −0.149, with the highest-spending quintile's average falling to 78.6), driven by several large, higher-spending districts with lower measured performance, and the one strong component relationship is that expenditures from federal funds per pupil are higher in lower-performing districts, consistent with poverty-targeted aid like Title I. The paper is strictly descriptive: it draws no causal conclusion, makes no funding recommendation, notes that a single-year cross-sectional comparison cannot separate spending from confounders such as student poverty, district size, and regional costs, and identifies a need-adjusted multivariable model as the next step.

White Paper No. 012

August 5, 2026

How Good Is K–12 Public Education in Each State?

There is no single "best schools" ranking — there are many, and they disagree because they measure different things under the same word. This report catalogs the national products that rank the states on K-12 public education, records what each one actually measures, and shows why the same state can finish near the top of one list and mid-pack or lower on another released the same year. It sorts the products by what they reward — student outcomes, spending, safety, higher education, or adopted policy — and documents, source by source, how each publisher builds its result. A worked comparison of Ohio against six other states across four 2026 rankings shows the pattern directly: Ohio ranges from 14th on the K-12-only U.S. News Pre-K–12 list to 41st on ConsumerAffairs, depending on how much each ranking folds in higher education, funding, and safety. The report is descriptive, not evaluative: it does not crown a best ranking or a best state, and every figure is traced to the publisher that produced it, so readers can tell what a headline is really measuring before they repeat it.

White Paper No. 010

August 3, 2026

How Many School Districts Does Ohio Need?

Ohio has 611 traditional school districts — a number that draws regular comparison to states like Florida and Tennessee, where districts are organized largely by county. How Many School Districts Does Ohio Need? takes that question seriously and answers it with evidence rather than opinion. Drawing entirely on primary sources — the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the U.S. Census, and federal education finance and assessment data — the paper documents how Ohio actually organizes its schools (a median district enrolls 1,483 students, and about 30 percent enroll fewer than 1,000) and sets it side by side with eight other states across four measures: structure, administrative cost, staffing, and student outcomes. The findings are real but bounded: general administration costs less per pupil in more consolidated states, and the same size-and-cost pattern holds among Ohio's own districts — but general administration is a small share of total spending, the comparisons are confounded by wages and demographics, and the measured student outcomes show no simple relationship to how a state organizes its districts. Consistent with our editorial standards, the paper does not recommend a number, rate any structure, or model savings of its own; it lays out what the record shows and lets Ohioans weigh it for themselves.

White Paper No. 011

July 31, 2026

Rewriting the Rules of Access (HB 314, 136th Ohio General Assembly)

House Bill 314 would make several changes to Ohio's Public Records Law (R.C. 149.43) at once. It would create a court process a public office could use to limit or deny requests it believes are meant to harass the office or disrupt its operations; let political subdivisions charge an optional hourly fee for records — no charge under ten hours, up to $200 per request — in place of the current "at cost" standard; authorize private contractors to handle voluminous requests, with certain costs chargeable to the requester; exempt student and parent school email addresses; and add an evidence-verification step for public-defender requests. This white paper documents what each provision actually does against current law, notes that the bill's title names two of these mechanisms while the fee schedule and school-email exemption are not named in it, and flags an apparent internal cross-reference inconsistency in the as-passed text. The bill passed the House 78–18 and was pending in the Senate as of the report's status date. Consistent with the Research Center's approach, the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it explains what the bill would change and how far it has advanced, drawing every claim from primary sources, without taking a position on whether it should pass.

White Paper No. 009

July 31, 2026

Who May Levy What

Where Did the Money Go? Taxpayer-Funded Fraud, Waste, and Improper Payments in Ohio State Government, 2001–2026 is a Research Center review spanning 25 years and four Ohio governors — Bob Taft, Ted Strickland, John Kasich, and Mike DeWine, Republicans and a Democrat alike. Drawing on findings from Ohio's Auditor of State, Attorney General, and federal oversight bodies, the paper documents cases ranging from the 2005 Coingate scandal to pandemic-era unemployment insurance fraud to the FirstEnergy/House Bill 6 bribery case, organized by administration and labeled by evidentiary standard — adjudicated fraud, agency-identified fraud, audit findings for recovery, and questioned costs are never conflated with one another or summed into a single total. Consistent with Ohio Common Ground's editorial firewall, the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it reports what independent auditors and prosecutors have themselves found, assigns no blame to any individual officeholder, and reaches no conclusions about which party or administration performed better or worse.

White Paper No. 8

July 29, 2026

Where Did the Money Go?

Where Did the Money Go? Taxpayer-Funded Fraud, Waste, and Improper Payments in Ohio State Government, 2001–2026 is a Research Center review spanning 25 years and four Ohio governors — Bob Taft, Ted Strickland, John Kasich, and Mike DeWine, Republicans and a Democrat alike. Drawing on findings from Ohio's Auditor of State, Attorney General, and federal oversight bodies, the paper documents cases ranging from the 2005 Coingate scandal to pandemic-era unemployment insurance fraud to the FirstEnergy/House Bill 6 bribery case, organized by administration and labeled by evidentiary standard — adjudicated fraud, agency-identified fraud, audit findings for recovery, and questioned costs are never conflated with one another or summed into a single total. Consistent with Ohio Common Ground's editorial firewall, the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it reports what independent auditors and prosecutors have themselves found, assigns no blame to any individual officeholder, and reaches no conclusions about which party or administration performed better or worse.

White Paper No. 007

July 27, 2026

Options Identified for Reducing Ohio State Government Spending

Options Identified for Reducing Ohio State Government Spending catalogs proposals that have been publicly advanced to reduce Ohio state spending or slow its growth, drawn from the Buckeye Institute's Piglet Book series, the 2010 Budget Planning and Management Commission, the 2008 Advantage Ohio procurement review, the Ohio Auditor of State's performance audits, and the enacted state budget itself. The paper is descriptive, not prescriptive — it identifies who proposed what and how well-sourced each figure is, from a $6.7 billion Medicaid savings estimate and $2.25 billion in tax loopholes to a confirmed $429,000 in verified school-district savings, without ranking, grading, or endorsing any option. Fraud, waste, and improper payments are addressed separately in a forthcoming OCG publication.

White Paper No. 6

July 24, 2026

Replacing Ohio Property Tax Revenue - An Evaluation of the Options

A citizen-initiated constitutional amendment would prohibit real property taxes statewide — but it doesn't specify how the roughly $21 billion in annual revenue that funds Ohio's schools, police, fire departments, and local governments would be replaced. This white paper evaluates twelve distinct mechanisms that have been proposed or discussed to address that gap, from raising the state sales or income tax, to spending cuts and consolidation, to targeted relief for specific taxpayers, to the state assuming a larger share of school funding — documenting what each would require, who it would affect, and what remains unresolved or unverified in the public debate. Drawing on primary sources including the state's own fiscal analyses, legislative testimony, and campaign finance filings, the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it does not recommend any option, and presents where officials, advocacy groups, and campaigns currently stand without taking a position of its own.

White Paper No. 005

July 18, 2026

Leadership, Population, and Place

Do Ohio's struggling cities have Democratic mayors to blame? Our latest white paper checks that story against the record — and finds it doesn't hold up. Six of the eight Ohio cities we examined have actually had a Republican mayor within the last 46 years (Dayton and Canton more recently than most people assume), while Nashville, held up nationally as the model Sun Belt success story, has been continuously Democratic-led since 1975 — as long as Cleveland. Meanwhile, poverty rates across Ohio's cities range from 17% in booming Columbus to 36% in Youngstown, which just elected an independent mayor after 45 years of Democratic leadership. Party label alone doesn't explain any of it.

White Paper No. 4

July 17, 2026

One Ranking, Many Measures Ohio's Position in State Business Competitiveness Rankings, 2022–2026

One Ranking, Many Measures Ohio's Position in State Business Competitiveness Rankings, 2022–2026. On July 9, 2026, CNBC named Ohio the #1 state for business in America — the state's first top finish since the study began in 2007. In the same year, other established rankings placed Ohio anywhere from #7 to #39. One Ranking, Many Measures examines how that's possible. This white paper compares six independently produced state-competitiveness rankings — CNBC, Chief Executive, the Tax Foundation, ALEC–Laffer's two Rich States, Poor States measures, and U.S. News & World Report — setting out what each one actually measures, how Ohio has placed on each since 2022, and what underlying federal and state economic data show over the same period. It does not rank the rankings or endorse any of them; it gives readers the methodological context needed to understand what a claim like "the #1 state for business" does, and does not, mean.

White Paper No. 003

July 15, 2026

The Price of the Silicon Heartland

"The Price of the Silicon Heartland - Tax Incentives, Job Creation, and Fiscal Return in Ohio's Data Center Boom", Ohio Common Ground's newest research publication examines the fiscal side of the state's data center boom: how much state and local tax revenue has been forgone through Ohio's data center sales-tax exemption program, how that figure compares to the number of long-term jobs individual agreements are contractually required to create, and what tax revenue — if any — the construction and development phase itself generates. Drawing on state fiscal data, independent watchdog analyses, and industry-aligned research, the paper finds that Ohio's state sales-tax exemption cost grew from $554.9 million in FY2024 to $1.568 billion in FY2025, with individual agreements ranging from roughly $470,000 to over $3.6 million in forgone tax per required job. The paper does not take a position on whether the exemption should be continued, modified, or repealed; it lays out the available figures, notes where sources disagree, and flags where the public record doesn't support a precise answer.

White Paper No. 002

July 13, 2026

The Ledger Behind the Deal

Ohio Common Ground Research Center. The Ledger Behind the Deal: A Framework for Assessing JobsOhio's Return to Ohio Taxpayers. OCG White Paper No. 003, Research Library ID RL-2026-004. Dublin, Ohio: Ohio Common Ground, 2026.

White Paper No. 001

July 6, 2026

The Uncontested Majority

Ohio Common Ground Research Center. The Uncontested Majority: Competition—or Its Absence—in Ohio’s 2026 State Legislative Primaries. OCG White Paper No. 001, Research Library ID RL-2026-001. Dublin, Ohio: Ohio Common Ground, 2026.

Our Research Standards

Ohio Common Ground is committed to the highest levels of academic and analytical integrity.

Evidence-Based

Uses publicly available data and documented sources to ensure all findings are verifiable.

Transparent

Sources and methodology are fully published alongside every paper for complete transparency.

Nonpartisan Analysis

Research focuses strictly on evidence and documented facts, free from partisan campaign styling.

Corrections Welcome

A published correction policy with full version history ensures our research remains accurate.