Voucher welfare for big business

State Representatives Brenner, Patmon, Driehaus, Barnes, Butler, Maag, Newbold, Henne, Yuko, Young, Sears, Wachtmann, McClain, Huffman, Boose, Adams, J., Beck, Uecker, Stebelton, and Blessing have introduced HB242 which will "authorize nonrefundable tax credits for donations to nonprofit entities providing scholarships to low-income students enrolling in chartered nonpublic schools".

According to LSC the bill will;

• Allow a nonrefundable credit against the income tax or certain business taxes for taxpayers who donate to nonprofit educational scholarship organizations that provide scholarships to lower-income students attending chartered nonpublic schools.
• Authorize annual credits of up to $1,000 for individuals and $2,500 for joint filers, if the individual or joint filer is not a pass-through entity owner, and up to $300,000 for other taxpayers.
• Limit the total amount of such credits to $20 million in fiscal year 2010, and increases the credit ceiling each year by 20% over the previous year's ceiling if the previous year's ceiling is reached.
• Prohibit credits for donations designated for a specific child.

There is nothing in the bill however the limit the institution where the money can flow to. One can easily see the scenario where a "business" donates the maximum $300,000 to a fund, and gets a full tax credit for that amount - i.e. free money - and that business donation flows right back to a specific school.

In effect this bill simply expands the pool of voucher money by another $20 million - with a provision that it can grow by an additional 20% each year after the first.

This bill is nothing more than corporate welfare for the donors and the recipient private schools. Tax payers dollars should be used to fund public schools. That is the constitutional duty of the legislature, not to dole out precious money to private enterprise.

Ohio charters are solving the wrong problem

NPR has begun what looks to be a very interesting series of articles on charter schools in Ohio.

In 1998, Ohio opened its first 15 charter schools. There are now more than 300, and they’re enrolling more than 100,000 primary and secondary students. Ohio is paying upwards of $500 million to support those schools. But as charter schools have grown, so have divisions between them and traditional public schools.

The whole piece is worth the time to read. As charter schools are given ever greater license to expand and spread, they are coming under ever greater scrutiny. A handful of charters, with a few failing might be seen by most as no big deal, hundreds of charters with dozens upon dozens failing begins to stand out in sharp relief.

One hundred and twenty charter schools in Ohio have collapsed over the last 13 years. They owe the state millions of dollars in audit findings.

Considering there are only 300 charters in Ohio, that's an astonishing number. When you couple that with terrible academic performance and the catastrophic failure of e-schools in Ohio, maybe greater attention to charter reform is needed.

The great promise of charters was supposed to be their ability to innovate without the shackles of regulation. Instead, charter operators and their sponsors have used the lack of regulation in order to drive down the costs of providing education, which in turn has driven down the quality. Why is it, free from regulation, no charter or sponsor has decided to try and replicate successful education models used in countries like Denmark? Here's Diane Ravitch talking about our race to the bottom, and the alternatives

The corporate influence on the charter movement isn't creating excellence in education through innovation, it is simply driving out quality by drivning down costs. That's decidedly NOT the problem charters were sold to Ohioans as trying to solve.

There's nothing Super about charters

We were going to write a review and mythbusting article on the movie "Waiting for Superman", today. But our friends at American Society Today have a piece that says everything that needs to be said. It's good. Real good.

The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?

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The cost of Charters

One slide presented last night at the Dublin budget town hall really stood out.

Dublin City Schools Budget Presentation - May 11th, 2011

Dublin 

Schools
 only receive ~
$995 
per 
student 
from
 the 
state, but if a student in their district transfers to a charter school $5,732 is taken to pay for that. That's a disproportionate subtraction and one of the direct costs of so-called "Choice". In Dublin it's costing between $300,000 and $400,000 alone.

What's more baffling about this continued policy is that Dublin City Schools are rated Excellent with distinction and have one of the lowest percentages of expenditure on administration per pupil. There's simply no need for charter schools to suck money away from high performing districts like this, yet we allow it.