New School Year - New Cuts in Funding

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) have just issued a report that details the sad fact that most states have begun the new school year with more cuts to funding.

States have made steep cuts to education funding since the start of the recession and, in many states, those cuts deepened over the last year. Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding in the 2012-13 school year than they did last year in 26 states, and in 35 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels — often far below.

Ohio has fared particularly poorly under current Governor John Kasich, with the 7th largest per student cut in the nation

The “cuts-only approach” hasn’t worked, and many municipalities will have to raise revenue or cut needed services, said Jon Shure, the center’s director of state fiscal strategies. “What you’re seeing is that the jurisdiction-of-last-resort is now the one that has to honestly confront the situation because the buck has been passed.”

We're now seeing tax increases in local government to offset the local budget raid perpetrated by the Governor to balance his own budget. A website, www.cutshurtohio.com details a county-by-county breakdown of effects the budget has had. For example, in Cuyahoga county - where Cleveland schools reside, the cuts dwarf the $65 million budget hole the district is trying to plug

With rising tax revenues and the ability to close loopholes, there is no reason the Governor and his legislature cannot reverse this harmful trend, and use the next biennium budget to increase funding for Ohio's public school to adequate levels.

Choice, but for who

A couple of recent stories have highlighted how damaging the current school "choice" scheme is. Proponents of choice like to concentrate on the few that might benefit, but seem to willfully fail to acknowledge the many that suffer as a consequence. Only 5% of Ohio's students go to a charter school, yet they received 10% of the state funding.

This phenomena gets worse when one looks at the newly created special needs vouchers, as Stephen Dyer explains

The voucher is geared toward special education children and is not means tested. It provides up to $20,000 for a student to attend a private school. That money, by the way, comes out of the state aid meant for the child's district of residence.

The bill was introduced twice during my time in the House, and my argument was that it earmarked up to 1/3 of the state's special education money to serve 3% of the special needs children in this state. This, of course, left 97% of the state's special needs children with 2/3 of the money.

Does that sound right to anyone? Can even proponents of "choice" support this untenable situation? We suspect many of them do, because the agenda of many appears not to be about choice, but about subsidizing private education, and the data bears this out. In Cincinnati for example, 199 students were enrolled in this voucher scheme, yet

Cincinnati Public, for instance, said that only 15 of its Peterson voucher recipients are switching to a private school. Most of the other recipients live in the district but already attend private schools or are kindergartners, said Pat Cleveland, CPS’ manager of non-public schools special education services.

We are diverting millions of dollars of tax payer money to subsidize parents who have already enrolled their children into private schools. As a consequence, the children being served by their local public schools see their revenues drop, causing their educational opportunities to be diminished.

As if that isn't bad enough, one set of private school parents have decided to sue their local school district so their children can ride redirected public school buses to school. There seems no end to the entitlement of the few at the expense of the many.

But the problems don't stop there. The CATO Institute, a right wing think tank, has recently published a study that demonstrates the increase in "choice" via charter schools is having adverse effects beyond public schools.

Charter schools are changing public and private school enrollment patterns across the United States. This study analyzes district-level enrollment patterns for all states with charter schools, isolating how charter schools affect traditional public and private school enrollments after controlling for changes for the socioeconomic, demographic, and economic conditions in each district.

While most students are drawn from traditional public schools, charter schools are pulling large numbers of students from the private education market and present a potentially devastating impact on the private education market, as well as a serious increase in the financial burden on taxpayers.

Private school enrollments are much more sensitive to charters in urban districts than in non-urban districts. Overall, about 8 percent of charter elementary students and 11 percent of middle and high school students are drawn from private schools. In highly urban districts, private schools contribute 32, 23, and 15 percent of charter elementary, middle, and high school enrollments, respectively. Catholic schools seem particularly vulnerable, especially for elementary students in large metropolitan areas.

The flow of private-school students into charters has important fiscal implications for districts and states. When charters draw students from private schools, demands for tax revenue increase. If governments increase educational spending, tax revenues must be increased or spending in other areas reduced, or else districts may face pressures to reduce educational services. The shift of students from private to public schools represents a significant shift in the financial burdens for education from the private to the public sector.

Parents of private school students can save a lot of money by enrolling their children in quasi-private charter schools - placing additional burdens on public schools, tax payers and some private schools.

This system of the few benefiting at the expense of the many needs to be reversed. No child's education should come at the expense of others, yet that is exactly what is happening in Ohio right now, thanks to school "choice" proponents and their legislative supporters.

RNC Convention Final Day - Upstaged!

On education related issues, the final day of the RNC convention featured Jeb Bush, former Florida Governor and brother of former President George W. Bush. His speech centered on the issue of education, and if you're not a fan of corporate education reform, you probably didn't like what he had to say. The Washington Post reported it thusly

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say about education reform at the GOP convention — schools are failing and teachers unions are bad —
[...]
Here are some other things Bush said in his speech — and things he didn’t say:

* Insisting that American schools are failing, he threw out statistics such as: “Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students rank 17th in science, 25th in math.” But he didn’t note that Americans have always ranked ranked at best average in international rankings.

* “China and India produce eight times more engineering students each year than the United States,” Bush said, without noting, as my colleague Jay Mathews did in this blog post, that “we are light-years ahead of them in providing instruction and opportunity for every child who wants to go to college or adopt a useful trade.”

* Teachers unions are super powerful and their supporters are “masters of delay and deferral,” he said, without mentioning that the unions have lost so much political power that they have been unable to stop the implementation in a number of states of unfair teacher evaluation systems that link teachers’ pay to student standardized test scores. Bush’s implication that teachers unions are stopping academic progress ignores the fact that the problems that ail urban schools are the same in union states as they are in non-union states.

* Bush praised his own school reform program when he was governor from 1999-2007, which became known as the “Florida Miracle” and has been a model for other governors who have adopted its key tenets, which include standardized test-based accountability, charter schools, vouchers, virtual education, an end to teacher tenure, merit pay and assigning letter grades to school.

But he didn’t mention that the standardized testing regime that he pioneered, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is in shambles after a succession of scandals, and that his claims of great progress in student achievement are questionable.

Of course the highlight of the evening was to be the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney, but somewhere along the line the proceedings got sidetracked and overwhelmed by a bizarre 11 minute piece of theater performed by movie legend Clint Eastwood having a conversation with an invisible President Obama, or an empty chair depending upon your perspective.

A new internet meme has been born - Eastwooding (google it, but be prepared to waste some of your day).

Romney's speech lacked any policy specifics, "Where was the policy?" wrote one Washington Post reporter. Here's the word cloud of his speech - he mentioned America, a lot

Erasure scandal now a farce

The controversy over school attendance erasures started out life with questionable reporting, layered with supposition and innuendo and is now descending into farce.

Unable to perform their own investigation after years of oversight failure, ODE passed the investigation over to the State Auditor. Now the State Auditor is having to fire his own investigative staff.

State Auditor Dave Yost warned Columbus schools leaders a month ago that contacting the district’s internal auditor as she investigates claims of data rigging could have serious consequences.

Yesterday, a member of Yost’s own staff resigned after he failed to take his boss’s advice. John Davis, who also volunteers as a member of the school district’s audit committee, urged the school district’s internal auditor, Carolyn Smith, to speak with an attorney for the school board who has been meeting with district officials to ask about data rigging.

This comes just days after William Zelei, Associate Superintendent of Accountability and Quality Schools at ODE, submitted his letter of resignation.

It seems more heads are rolling among the investigators than the investigated. The one person from a district that has been fired, the Superintendent of Lockland, is now filing a law suit

Former Lockland Schools Superintendent Donna Hubbard and her son, Adam Stewart, Wednesday sued to keep their jobs, alleging the school board last week violated Ohio’s Open Meetings laws.

The lawsuits are the latest salvo in a battle between Hubbard and Lockland, one of the smallest school districts in Ohio with about 700 students.

The school board Aug. 23 voted 3-to-1 to begin the termination process for Hubbard after a state investigation found she and Stewart, the district’s database coordinator, falsely listed 37 habitually truant students as withdrawn from the district.

This entire scandal has nothing to do with educating students, it has everything to do with corporate education reform policies that require increasing large amounts of data with which to slice and dice. Not one bit of any of this will have any impact on what is going on in thousands of classrooms across Ohio right now - but it sure makes good theater.

RNC Convention Day 2 - chock full of misstatements

Day 2 of the RNC convention saw the introduction of Mitt Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, a life long public employee.

One reader described his speech as "chock full of misstatements" - something many major media outlets also noticed.

• Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech
• Ryan misleads on GM plant closing in hometown
• 6 Worst Lies In Paul Ryan’s Speech
• Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech

Indeed, there were so many whoppers, it is now being parodied - Ryan Launches Campaign Theme of Lying About Everything

As for Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he said he was working “around the clock” to add additional lies to his speech tonight: “I’m no Paul Ryan, but, darn it, I’m going to do my best.”

Here's the word cloud from Paul Ryan's speech

RNC Convention Day 1 - Ugly

Tuesday, August 29 was the first day of the RNC convention. As part of their proceedings, they released their education platform, which takes a sideswipe at educators

Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it wisely sees consumer rights in education – choice – as the most important driving force for renewing our schools.

Education is much more than schooling. It is the whole range of activities by which families and communities transmit to a younger generation, not just knowledge and skills, but ethical and behavioral norms and traditions. It is the handing over of a personal and cultural identity. That is why education choice has expanded so vigorously. It is also why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have not succeeded, but they have done immense damage.

Privatization and "choice" also take prominent position in the platform, as Ed Week notes

•Doesn't see more money as the solution for improving education. That tracks with the budget proposed by the presumptive veep nominee, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, which calls for big cuts in domestic discretionary spending, the category that includes education.

•Pushes what does works in the GOP view instead of more funding: accountability on the part of administrators, parents and teachers; higher academic standards; programs that support the development of character and financial literacy; and periodic testing in math, science, reading, history, and geography.

•Calls for rigorous academic standards, but doesn't actually mention the words "Common Core State Standards Initiative." Instead, it "affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations."

The biggest news from day 1 of the RNC Convention had little to do with education at all. According to widespread media reports, an attendee at the Republican National Convention threw nuts at a black camerawoman working for CNN and said “This is how we feed animals”.

This shocking and ugly event followed on from an earlier event that was similarly ugly

Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization—took her turn at the main-stage lectern. As she began speaking in her accented English, some in the crowd started shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
[...]
RNC chairman Reince Priebus quickly stepped up and asked for order and respect for the speaker, suggesting that, yeah, what we had just seen might well have been an ugly outburst of nativism

The video of the event is here.

Later in the evening Ann Romney spoke, and so did Governor Christie - both appearing to speak at cross purposes.

Ann Romney at the Republican National Convention tonight:

Tonight I want to talk to you about love. I want to talk to you about the deep and abiding love I have for a man I met at a dance many years ago. And the profound love I have, and I know we share, for this country. I want to talk to you about that love so deep only a mother can fathom it — the love we have for our children and our children's children.

Chris Christie, 20 minutes later:

But I have learned over time that it applies just as much to leadership. In fact, I think that advice applies to America today more than ever. I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.

While Ohio Governor John Kasich didn't speak of love, he did espousethe economic recovery in Ohio. He failed to mention however, the repeal of SB5 and his own budget that has caused a school funding crisis and local tax hikes.

So that was an eventful day 1. Probably a day the GOP would like to have back.