NEW POLL: SB5 Headed for defeat

A new PPP poll just released shows that voters are being turned off by the dishonest campaign being waged by pro SB5 supporters. The margin has grown from 50-39 in August and is nowlarger 56-36.

The new poll finds strong bipartisan support. 30% of all republicans oppose SB5. 38% of people who describe themsevles as somewhat conservative oppose SB5, along with 70% of people who call themsevles moderate. Only 28% of women support SB5.

Poll	For SB5	Against SB5
PPP Mar 15th	31%	54%
Wenzel Apr 12th	38%	51%
Quinnipiac May 18th	36%	54%
PPP May 25th	35%	55%
Quinnipiac Jul 20th	32%	56%
PPP Aug 18th	39%	50%
Quinnipiac Sep 27th	38%	51%
PPP Oct 19th	36%	56%

A teacher schools the Dispatch

When we read this article in the Dispatch by senior editor Joe Hallet, we were taken aback a little by how fawning it was, and how it seemd to suffer from quite a lot of selective amnesia. One Worthington school teacher thought so too, and forwarded to us his email to Mr. Hallet.

Joe

I read your column on Sunday and came across this line:

(Kasich) used Senate Bill 5 to take on public-employee unions, whose pay and benefit packages were growing unsustainable for taxpayers, in part because their local government and school officials had forgotten how to say no.

I don't think this is a fair characterization at all. The front page article ("Public, private compensation in the same ballpark.") in the Dispatch on Sunday demonstrated that public employee salaries and benefits are on par with those in the private sector. By your logic, combined with the article on pg 1 Sunday, you could say that private sector salaries have also grown unsustainable since private employees have a slightly richer salary and benefit package than public employees.

No discussion of the impact of public employee salaries on budgets is complete without pointing out that, since 2005, the income tax was cut 21%, the estate tax was eliminated, and the locally collected tangible personal property (TPP) tax was replaced with the state collected commercial activities tax (CAT). The income tax cut resulted in a sustained decrease at the state level in tax revenue which was evident even prior to the recession even with the addition of new CAT revenues. In 2005 total state revenue was $56.5 billion - by 2011 that had fallen to an estimated $50.5 billion which is $43.5 billion in 2005 dollars!

On the local level, governments and school districts were literally robbed of tax revenue by the state legislature's elimination of the TPP and estate tax. All of this has dealt a crushing blow to the ability of local governments and school districts to sustain services by starving them of local revenue as well as state aid.

These tax changes were heralded in 2005 as essential to economic growth in Ohio with the promise that the reforms would result in job growth in our state. I think the record on this score shows that tax reform in Ohio has not achieved the promised results and has instead put incredible stress on the state and local governments' ability to provide vital and expected services.

It is disingenuous to say that public salaries and benefits are unsustainable while ignoring the impact tax reform has had on Ohio's ability to fund its government. Furthermore, the front page of the Dispatch on the same day as your column refutes the notion that public salaries and benefits are out of line or unsustainable.

Mark Hill, Worthington school teacher
Columbus OH

We previousy wrote about this issue in an article titled "GUTTING EDUCATION FOR A CUP OF CHEAP COFFEE"

Public Employees saved $1billion for tax payers

A new report has looked at collective bargaining compromises in Ohio and found that public employees have saved their employers and taxpayers a substantial amount of money (over $1 billion).

Among the findings:

• Public union workers have saved taxpayers $1,059,881,500 billion through collective bargaining concessions since 2008.
• Teachers and support staff accepted wage freezes in more than 90 percent of collective bargaining agreements this year – concessions not tallied in this report because they are not yet available.
• Last year, at least 65 percent of public employee contracts included at least 1 year of wage freezes, some furlough days, reduced compensation, rollovers or economic re-openers.
• Some of the lowest-paid public employees – non-teaching personnel such as custodians – have gone up to eight years without a pay increase in exchange for stable health care costs.
• A Warren police officer blames cuts in safety forces for the injuries he sustained while rescuing people from a burning building in which one person died.
• More than two-thirds of all teachers’ contracts increased employee insurance premium contributions or significantly changed their health plans, with the savings often used to improve educational opportunities for students.
• More than 93 percent of public workers already pay for their own pension contribution, with no pick-up from their employers.
• On average, county and state employees pay more than 15 percent for their health care plans.

Public Employees Shared Sacrifice Report

EdChoice Program Designated Public Schools list

The Ohio Department of Education has just released their EdChoice Program Designated Public Schools list.

The following is a list of schools that have either:
1) been in Academic Emergency or Academic Watch for two of the past three school years (2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011) or
2) ranked in the lowest 10% of public school buildings by performance index score for two of the past three school years and are therefore designated for the EdChoice Scholarship Program.

The following students are eligible to apply for an EdChoice scholarship:

• Students currently enrolled in and attending EdChoice-designated public school buildings in their district of residence
• Students enrolled in a community school who would otherwise be assigned to one of the EdChoice-designated public school buildings, or;
• Students currently enrolled in a regular public school in their district of residence or community school who would be assigned to attend one of the EdChoice-designated public school buildings for the upcoming school year. This provision is for students moving from one level of school to the next. For example, public school students moving from elementary to middle school would be eligible to apply if the middle school that they would be assigned to in the fall is designated for EdChoice;
• Students eligible to enter kindergarten in the next school year who would be assigned to one of the EdChoice public school buildings.

Ed Choice Eligible Public Schools

Can Education Be ‘Moneyball’-ed?

Data analysis is so trendy these days that Brad Pitt is getting millions of people to sit through a movie about quantitative methodology. Moneyball, based on the 2003 bestseller by Michael Lewis, traces the rise of new methods that the Oakland A’s used to identify undervalued baseball players so the team could win more games with a smaller payroll. A lot of education reformers are calling for a similar approach to evaluate teachers and improve student performance. Given that I’m a longtime reformer and love baseball, you’d think I’d be all over this idea. But there are some significant strikes against a Moneyball approach to education.

Poor data quality. In baseball, you can rely on the accuracy of a statistic such as a batting average or percent of at-bats a player gets on base. In education, we’ve seen an explosion of data and statistics during the past decade — it’s one of the quiet successes of No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, while states are trying to do better, all the data being produced are not yet high-quality. In some states, for instance, standards for accuracy are lax or the data isn’t audited to check for errors. And just 14 states have standards about what a district should do to try to locate or figure out what happened to a departing student, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national non-profit organization that has led the charge to improve state education data systems.

In addition, too many states have data systems that are inadequate or underutilized. According to the Data Quality Campaign, only 35 states are able to link student data to teacher data — and fewer states actually do this in practice, in no small part because it’s so politically contentious. And a lack of transparency plagues some states, where parents and other stakeholders cannot easily go online and find the data or use it to answer questions or learn about schools. What good is a lot of data if it’s difficult or impossible to use?

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Starving America’s Public Schools

Critics of America’s public schools always seem to start from the premise that the pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education system in this country is failing or in crisis.

This crisis mentality is in stark contrast to years of survey research showing that Americans generally give high marks to their local schools. Phi Delta Kappa International and Gallup surveys have found that the populace holds their neighborhood schools in high regard; in fact, this year’s survey found that “Americans, and parents in particular, evaluate their community schools more positively than in any year since” the survey started.

How could there be such a disconnect between a national narrative about public education and opinions about local schools? The two contradictory narratives draw on completely different sources of evidence.

Read the report.

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School Cuts Hurt Kids. . . 

. . . By Increasing Class Size

. . . By Eliminating Critical Classes

. . . By Eliminating Great Teachers