Ted Strickland has hung his success or failure as governor on fixing Ohio's school funding system. A quarter of the way through his term, he has yet to announce a timeline for his fix, let alone the specifics of a plan. Republican state Sen.
Ted Strickland has hung his success or failure as governor on fixing Ohio's school funding system. A quarter of the way through his term, he has yet to announce a timeline for his fix, let alone the specifics of a plan. Republican state Sen. Kirk Schuring jumped into the funding-fix fray last week with a joint resolution that would dedicate specific percentages of revenue from certain taxes to K-12 and higher education.
Schuring's proposal and Strickland's lack of one have received a lot of attention. Flying under the radar, however, is the State Board of Education's thoughtful and deliberate approach to developing recommendations for improving the state's school funding. While their colleagues in the General Assembly have been criticized for inaction over the past year (see here), the board is busy with real work toward mending Ohio's ailing school-funding system. Its school-funding subcommittee is considering novel approaches to relieving the state's reliance on property taxes to fund K-12 education. All ideas are on the table, from capping property taxes and opening the door for sales and income education taxes, to the regionalization of school funding.
Still unclear is whether the State Board of Education will make recommendations on modernizing how education dollars are spent. Funding inequities between schools within districts are as dramatic as, sometimes more so than, funding inequities between districts. As in the rest of the country, Ohio's current method of calculating per-pupil funding (the exception being special education) does little to consider the actual educational needs of individual students and the costs associated with meeting those needs.
For guidance on the equitable distribution of education revenue, the State Board of Education, Governor Strickland, and the General Assembly should look to the Fordham Institute's Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity & Antiquity in School Finance. This "manifesto" calls for weighted student funding that varies based on a student's individual learning needs and follows that student to the public school of his or her choice. Fund the Child also enjoys strong bipartisan support and reaches beyond traditional ideological boundaries (see the current list of signatories here)-something any Ohio school-funding plan will need in order to succeed.
On November 30, the Fordham Foundation, in partnership with the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Ohio Department of Education, the Franklin County Education Service Center, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, sponsored a charter-school board governance training program for about 85 charter school board members, operators, and sponsors. (Materials from the event can be found here.) Following is a report on a panel discussion that stressed the importance of hiring good leaders and teachers and getting parents involved in schools.
Unfortunately, as we have come to learn (see the editorial above), calling a school a charter doesn't automatically mean it is a good school. That's a shock to many novice charter-school board members who think that just about anybody can govern schools better than traditional public school boards.
The key to success, according to veteran charter-school board members, is to find and keep "roll-up-your-sleeves" leaders and teachers who can manage a classroom well and really know their subject matter, said Luther Brown, board chair for the Phoenix Community Learning Center in Cincinnati. Brown was puzzled why the poor, black children attending his school weren't doing better when he first helped to open the Cincinnati school in 2001. Good leadership and teachers may seem a no-brainer but experience has taught Brown over the years that teachers and principals are not effective teachers and principals just because they say so.
"It comes down to finding high-quality teachers," said Richard Penry, a 40-year veteran of public education and a board member of the Alliance Community Schools in Dayton and Springfield. The lack of more progress at his charter schools was especially befuddling to Penry because he works with a high-quality board of trustees, the schools are run by the country's largest school management company--Edison, Inc., and the sponsor of the schools is the Fordham Foundation.
Panelists also noted the importance of reaching out and developing strong partnerships with parents. Sometimes parents must be coerced, said Patricia Hughes, who oversees charter schools for the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation in Columbus. Panelist Judy Hennessey, director of the Dayton Early College Academy, said parents must attend a minimum number of research presentations and teacher-parent conferences. The high school goes out its way to make it easy by having presentations and conferences after regular school hours to accommodate parents' schedules.
School principals also ought to consider setting up a parent volunteer room or corner and, if they have the money, hiring a parent liaison to work with parents, said Sally Perz, a partner in the charter-school consulting firm JVS Group. "In one school it worked so well, the chief parent complainer became the parent coordinator and the school's biggest booster," she said.
Regarding a November 28 review by Emmy L. Partin:
If I were writing your article, I would have to have called it, "Schools Are Worse than You Can Imagine!" And it would apply to publicly-funded schools nationwide along with many of the private schools.
I am a retired Air Force research engineer and I have spent the last six years doing research at Richard Allen Schools in Dayton, Ohio, and developing what they call their E-Curriculum.
One recent article sort of sums it up for me. In the September 12, 2006, edition of the Wall Street Journal, there was an article titled, "Arithmetic Problem: New Report Urges Return to Basics in Teaching Math." This article says that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) now admits that they got it wrong when they pushed what has been derisively called "Fuzzy Math" back in 1989. And that now the NCTM wants to return to teaching the "Basics." The "Basics" would include memorizing math tables instead of giving calculators to kindergarteners.
I have no confidence (the NCTM) would be able to define...the "basics," or that they would easily jettison all the bad ideas that they have pushed for almost 20 years.
The same problem of no longer teaching the "Basics" that exists in math also exists in English language arts, science, and social studies... How can public schools be any good when their state academic content standards, their textbooks, their tests, and ultimately their curriculums are largely based on a lot of bad ideas?
From Bob Douglas
If you have something to say about The Ohio Education Gadfly, say it in an e-mail to an article author or to the editor, Mike Lafferty, at [email protected]. Correspondence may be edited for clarity and length.
Ted Strickland has hung his success or failure as governor on fixing Ohio's school funding system. A quarter of the way through his term, he has yet to announce a timeline for his fix, let alone the specifics of a plan. Republican state Sen. Kirk Schuring jumped into the funding-fix fray last week with a joint resolution that would dedicate specific percentages of revenue from certain taxes to K-12 and higher education.
Schuring's proposal and Strickland's lack of one have received a lot of attention. Flying under the radar, however, is the State Board of Education's thoughtful and deliberate approach to developing recommendations for improving the state's school funding. While their colleagues in the General Assembly have been criticized for inaction over the past year (see here), the board is busy with real work toward mending Ohio's ailing school-funding system. Its school-funding subcommittee is considering novel approaches to relieving the state's reliance on property taxes to fund K-12 education. All ideas are on the table, from capping property taxes and opening the door for sales and income education taxes, to the regionalization of school funding.
Still unclear is whether the State Board of Education will make recommendations on modernizing how education dollars are spent. Funding inequities between schools within districts are as dramatic as, sometimes more so than, funding inequities between districts. As in the rest of the country, Ohio's current method of calculating per-pupil funding (the exception being special education) does little to consider the actual educational needs of individual students and the costs associated with meeting those needs.
For guidance on the equitable distribution of education revenue, the State Board of Education, Governor Strickland, and the General Assembly should look to the Fordham Institute's Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity & Antiquity in School Finance. This "manifesto" calls for weighted student funding that varies based on a student's individual learning needs and follows that student to the public school of his or her choice. Fund the Child also enjoys strong bipartisan support and reaches beyond traditional ideological boundaries (see the current list of signatories here)-something any Ohio school-funding plan will need in order to succeed.
