Independent Educational Consulting — Ohio
Independent, data-driven analysis of Ohio public school administrative data — statewide manuscripts and shorter analytic briefs, offered for citation and further inquiry.
This paper examines the roughly one-quarter of Ohio's traditional public school districts with the lowest enrollment statewide — 152 districts with 879 or fewer students, based on FY2024-25 data. Rather than tracking enrollment change over time, it looks at how this group is currently funded, how it performs on state-mandated measures, where it clusters geographically, and how it sits relative to current Ohio funding formulas and pending property-tax and consolidation legislation. A central finding: fiscal standing in a low-enrollment district does not track enrollment size in any simple way, since state aid and local property tax revenue are both largely decoupled from headcount. The paper is descriptive throughout — it documents patterns in the data rather than arguing for or against any particular policy response — and notes that "low enrollment" itself can be defined several different ways depending on the question being asked.
Fuller, M. L. (2026). Enrollment size, fiscal structure, and accountability performance in Ohio's public school districts [Unpublished manuscript]. Retrieved from https://www.drmikepsychology.com/#research
A note on AI's role in this work. Research, data analysis, and drafting for this paper were conducted with the assistance of AI tools, under the author's direction and subject to the author's review and editorial judgment throughout. All findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the author's own.
Disclaimer. This is independent research and has not undergone formal peer review. It is offered as a descriptive analysis of publicly available data, not as a recommendation for or against school district consolidation. Readers citing this work should verify figures against the primary sources listed in its references section.
This study examined building-level correlates of chronic absenteeism using a statewide administrative panel of Ohio public school buildings spanning SY2021–22 through SY2023–24 (10,122 building-year observations across 3,460 buildings and 947 districts). A cluster-robust regression model explained a substantial share of building-level variance (R² = .764): academic performance was the strongest correlate, and mobility, economic disadvantage, English learner share, and school discipline were also independently associated with chronic absenteeism. Net of these factors, buildings in urban districts averaged 4.04 percentage points higher chronic absenteeism than comparable rural buildings. Three robustness checks reproduced the same substantive pattern. The analysis is descriptive and correlational — it identifies statistical association, not causal effect, for every factor examined.
Fuller, M. (2026). Building-level correlates of chronic absenteeism in Ohio public schools: A statewide multivariate panel analysis, SY2021–22 through SY2023–24 [Unpublished manuscript]. Retrieved from https://www.drmikepsychology.com/#research
A note on AI's role in this work. Generative AI (Claude, Anthropic) was used to write and execute the data-cleaning and statistical analysis code, conduct the literature search, and draft the manuscript text, under the author's direction and subject to the author's review throughout. The underlying regression results were independently re-run and verified for reproducibility. All findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the author's own.
Disclaimer. This is independent research and has not undergone formal peer review. It presents a correlational, population-level analysis of publicly available administrative data and does not establish a causal effect for any individual factor examined. Readers citing this work should verify figures against the primary sources listed in its references section.
A companion screening analysis identified 87 Ohio middle and high schools whose chronic absenteeism rate consistently beat their own district poverty/urbanicity typology peers in every year studied, SY2021-22 through SY2023-24. This brief asks what these buildings have in common. Two variables — student mobility and, within typology, a lower current economic-disadvantage rate than each district's 2013 typology label implies — separate this group from their peers, echoing the same factors identified as significant predictors in the companion statewide regression. The buildings cluster geographically in two notable groups: a west-central Ohio belt of small, tight-knit rural and small-town districts, and a set of early-college/magnet programs inside otherwise high-poverty urban districts. This is a descriptive, exploratory read of an existing dataset — not a new study, and not a causal claim.
Fuller, M. (2026). Ohio's consistent secondary-school overperformers on chronic absenteeism: Commonalities among middle/high schools that consistently beat their poverty-typology peers [Unpublished brief]. Retrieved from https://www.drmikepsychology.com/#research
A note on AI's role in this work. This brief was produced with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), which wrote and executed the underlying data-cleaning, merging, and statistical code, conducted the literature search cited within it, and drafted the document's text. The author retrieved all source data directly from ODEW's public reporting systems, selected the research question and screening methodology, and reviewed and takes full responsibility for the accuracy of every figure, citation, and claim.
Disclaimer. This is independent, exploratory analysis and has not undergone formal peer review. It reflects ecological, building-level correlation — not individual-level or causal evidence — and is offered as a starting point for further inquiry, not a finished conclusion. Readers citing this work should verify figures against the primary sources listed in its references section.