Much has been much written about the challenges of understanding Ohio Gov. Strickland's school-funding plan. For example, the Akron Beacon Journal asked, why some "wealthy districts receive more state money than much poorer ones? How were the costs calculated for components of the key funding factor, the Instructional Quality Index?" (see here and here). If, however, the numbers are a mystery for traditional school district officials they are--stealing a line from Winston Churchill--"a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" for charter schools.
The accompanying graph shows a sample of charter schools in Dayton and how their funding would improve, or suffer in 2010 under the governor's Evidence Based Model of school funding. The numbers were shared in mid-March through a simulation provided by the Ohio Department of Education. The X axis shows student enrollment in each school while the Y axis shows the revenue gain/loss in thousands of dollars for each school in the scatter plot.
What one sees here is that there are some winners, and some big time losers. Why are there such extreme differences in funding? There is no clear answer. In looking at the data it seems, at first blush, that the smaller a school is - that is, the fewer children it serves - the more it gains under the governor's plan. The small Dayton sample in the graph tends in this direction, and when looking at numbers for charters across the state this also seems to be the trend.
The reason small schools may benefit is because the proposed funding model is based on a series of "organizational units." One of these units is for all nonteaching staff in a school. Thus, funding for a charter school includes one "administrative organizational unit" whether the school serves 40 kids, 100 kids or 1,000 kids. Smaller charters gain and larger charters lose because the funding for administration is static regardless of how many students a school serves. It is a classic one-size-fits-all budgeting model that assumes a charter serving 48 students needs as many administrators as one serving 657 students.
But, when one looks deeper this explanation doesn't fully satisfy. Even with the small Dayton sample this doesn't make sense because the Trotwood Fitness and Prep Academy (TFPA) is an outlier. It serves 286 students while the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) serves 285 students, yet the TFPA would receive a net gain of $333,000 in 2010 under the Governor's plan while DECA would see a hit of $536,000.
Other possibilities for such strange and extreme funding differences could relate to things like students with special needs, children in poverty and the like, but those differences exist in the state's current school-funding formula. Yet, there aren't nearly the extremes in the current formula that one sees in the governor's plan.
Again, using DECA and TFPA as examples, in 2009 DECA received $1.9 million in state funding while the TFPA received about $2.2 million. This was a funding difference of about $300,000 which could be attributable to things like differences in special education students and students in poverty. But, under the governor's proposed funding formula, which must assume the schools are serving the same types of students in 2010 as they served in 2009, the difference between funding for DECA and TFPA jumps to a whopping $1.12 million.
The final riddle here relates to academic achievement. The governor's plan as written would punish the charter schools that are most successful while rewarding those that are mediocre or downright terrible. Some schools with a long track record of academic failure would see a bump in new state dollars while some high flyers would see serious cuts in funding.
One final explanation for these discrepancies is that the numbers shared in the simulation are simply inaccurate. They neither accurately reflect the current numbers for charter schools nor the proposed numbers under the Governor's plan. If this is indeed the case, it helps explain why the Governor has outsourced the rewrite of his plan to "fix" school funding to outside consultants at Driscoll and Fleeter in Columbus. But if true, then such incompetence raises real concerns about other parts of the Governor's education plan that would increase the responsibilities and authority of the state department significantly in coming years.
It is good to know that the governor, the House and the Senate are all working hard to revise version 1.0 of the Governor's school reform plan as it is indefensible in its current manifestation. Hopefully, for the children and taxpayers of Ohio, version 2.0 will be debugged and much improved.
