Seventeen years after the Ohio Supreme Court, in its landmark DeRolph v. State ruling, proclaimed that the Buckeye State “fails to provide for a thorough and efficient system” of educating its students, evidence continues to mount to support the premise that all public schools in Ohio are not created equal.

New illuminating data substantiates the court’s conclusion that Ohio’s system of funding schools largely through local property taxes is unconstitutional. It comes from an analysis of school curriculum data of all public districts by the state Department of Education.

The analysis concluded that rural districts average fewer than 6.5 high-level courses such as advanced math, specialized language-arts courses and nontraditional foreign languages. In contrast, suburban districts average 26 high-level courses, based on ODE curriculum data.