Republican Vivek Ramaswamy said during his campaign rollout events last week that he doesn’t want to pick a fight with teachers’ unions if he’s elected governor in 2026.
But a political fight is probably what it would take to implement merit pay for teachers, a longtime item on Republicans’ wish list of educational policies.
Former Republican Gov. John Kasich lost that fight on multiple fronts during his time in office from 2011 to 2018. High-profile examples included 2011’s Senate Bill 5, a sweeping collective bargaining reform that also included merit-pay components. Voters resoundingly overturned the law in a referendum later that year. The Cleveland Plan educational reform bill of 2012 included some elements of merit pay. But those elements never got put into place after Cleveland Metropolitan School District administrators removed them in 2017 following a strike threat from the Cleveland Teachers Union.
“I kind of thought it was dead and buried,” said Steve Dyer, a former Democratic state lawmaker from the Akron area who’s now a liberal educational policy analyst.
The rub with merit pay
Merit pay involves something that sounds simple: paying teachers more for doing a good job. Texas and Florida, whose governance Ramaswamy has said he wants to emulate, are two prominent Republican states where merit pay has taken hold. Supporters say merit pay helps attract and retain good teachers while weeding out bad ones.
“Students need good teachers,” said Aaron Churchill, an analyst for the Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. “There’s nothing wrong with bringing that back into the spotlight and rewarding the best teachers.”
But disagreement over how exactly to evaluate teachers, plus opposition from teachers’ unions, have blocked efforts in Ohio and have caused them to stall elsewhere. Concerns included tying teacher evaluations too closely to standardized testing. Teachers have said this would create financial incentives for them to narrowly “teach to the test” while de-emphasizing other subjects.
Teachers in states with merit pay systems also have described struggles with personal budgeting, since big performance bonuses one year could end up evaporating the next year. And they have said students’ home lives – namely, their socioeconomic status – are the biggest driver of success, not teaching quality.
“The devil is in the detail with these things,” Dyer said. “And what the educational reformers learned the last go around was that it was a lot more complicated than the simple caveman approach.”
Changing how teachers are paid would require changing state law, since the state’s salary schedule for teachers, which is based on the years teachers have on the job and the level of credentialing they have, is set by statute.
This could set up a union-backed referendum effort similar to the 2011 SB5 repeal campaign, a major political setback for Kasich that he struggled to shake for the rest of his time in office.
In his stump speech, Ramaswamy said he wants to make Ohio the first state in the country to implement merit pay not only for teachers but also for school administrators.
“I will do whatever, and I mean whatever, what is required to stand for the achievement of our students, because that’s what we owe to the next generation,” Ramaswamy said.
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More 2026 teasing
Two big-name Ohio Democrats – Sherrod Brown and Tim Ryan – continue to seek publicity while remaining on the sidelines of the 2026 state elections.
Brown, the former longtime Democratic U.S. Senator, and Ryan, the former congressman who gained plaudits from national Democrats during his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022, this week used national media platforms to keep their profiles high – and talk up what they think the Democratic Party should do next given Donald Trump’s control over Washington.
Brown spoke out in an op-ed in The New Republic, a liberal magazine, on Monday. In it, Brown criticized Democrats for embracing free-trade deals in the 1990s. He argued that’s why the party has lost credibility with working-class voters, echoing closing themes from his Senate campaign. Brown didn’t reference plans to run for office, saying only that his work “in the coming months” will focus on pushing for a “generational effort” to change the Democratic Party. A former Brown Senate aide promoted the column in Ohio and elsewhere.
Ryan, meanwhile, appeared on a Monday podcast hosted by Jen Psaki, a former Biden administration press secretary who’s now a host on MSNBC. In the appearance, Ryan echoed the view from prominent party strategists that Democrats need to be strategic about which battles they pick with Trump. He also praised Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s views on the need for greater regulation of processed foods while sharply criticizing Kennedy’s other views, including those about vaccines.
The Tressel-Ryan connection
When Psaki asked him whether he may run for the Senate or Ohio governor in 2026, Ryan said he’s “entertaining all options.” But he said that remaining in Columbus would be better for his family. That would put him on a collision course with Dr. Amy Acton, the former state health department director who’s the only Democrat to get in the race.
Ryan also brought up new Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel as a possible “wildcard” in the governor’s race. If Tressel were to get in the race, Ryan said he’d stay out, citing the relationship that dates back to when Tressel – as coach of the Youngstown State University football team – recruited Ryan to play quarterback there. (Ryan is a former high school football star from Niles who quit football at Youngstown State and transferred to Bowling Green State University after a knee injury.)
“That would be tough. He’s a mentor, so I would never run against him,” Ryan said.
Tressel, meanwhile, is starting to make the political rounds. He’s a headline speaker at the Medina County Republican Party’s upcoming Lincoln Day Dinner, party officials announced on Monday, a rite of passage for any aspiring GOP candidate.
But Tressel told reporters Wednesday following an event at the Statehouse in Columbus that he hasn’t given any thought to whether he’ll run for anything next year. He also said he hadn’t followed Ramaswamy’s campaign launch and had yet to meet him.
“I’m just trying to figure out how I can be helpful in this role, let alone in any other role,” Tressel said.
No voting changes in transportation budget after all
Last week, the Ohio House approved House Bill 54, an $11.5 billion transportation budget that funds the state’s roads and highway construction and maintenance.
The measure passed unanimously, a notable feat in the current polarized political environment. That’s because Republicans ended up removing language that would have changed the state’s voting laws, including by requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote at the BMV.
