Yesterday in the Ohio Senate Education Committee, school funding expert and Buckeye (OSU class of '66 and '72) Paul Hill offered testimony about how Ohio can go about reforming its system of school funding while at the same time raising student performance. Dr. Hill's comments were in stark contrast to the presentation last week in the Ohio House by Allen Odden and Lawrence Picus in support of Governor Ted Strickland's proposed ???????evidence-based??????? funding model (which actually differs pretty significantly from what Odden and Picus are selling). While the governor is attempting to provide all the answers (with spending restrictions and top-down mandates on things like staffing levels, class sizes, and new operating rules for schools), Hill admits that we don't always know the answers when it comes to how to best educate our students. Further, the answers are different for every child. And that's okay. Hill (based on five years of solid research) argues funding systems shouldn't seek to mandate how schools educate children.???? Instead, they should be flexible, promote innovation, and reward success through a system of continuous improvement:
This gets me to my critique of the Governor's plan. In short, it prevents experimentation with new ideas that can lead to continuous improvement. Instead of opening up experimentation and encouraging schools and districts to pursue more effective methods, the Governor's plan mandates particular uses of funds. It maintains, and even bulks up, an existing set of job descriptions, administrative structures, and rules on who can teach and how time is used.The Governor's plan violates the common sense dictum that you can't get a dramatically better result by doing a little more of the same thing. His plan claims, implausibly, that students will stop dropping out, and unproductive schools will turn around, if only the state mandates hiring of more teachers, administrators, instructional specialists, teacher leaders, clerks, building managers, secretaries, media services staff, non-instructional aides, and nurse's aides.
Some schools might benefit from these uses of money, but many won't. In particular, schools serving the disadvantaged need to find ways of providing more effective instruction, instruction that meets their students' needs and remedies their earlier learning deficits, not bigger administrative structures. Similarly, the highest-performing schools in the state generally don't need these beefed-up staffing tables and would use extra money in different and more productive ways if they had the choice.
The school finance provisions of the Governor's plan promote stasis, not continuous improvement. It makes big bets on increased staffing, heavier administration, and other mandates on uses of funds. Unfortunately those bets are essentially shots in the dark: no other school system has improved detectably by using money in these ways.
