‘Cap’ on state aid shortchanges central Ohio districts, school officials say

Ohio uses a formula to allocate money to schools based on their needs, taking into account the number of poor students, non-English speakers and special-education students, as well as property values and other criteria.

Based on that formula, Columbus City Schools should be getting about $360 million a year in state financial aid, according to district Treasurer Stan Bahorek. Instead, it gets $275.5 million, about 76 percent of what the formula says, because state lawmakers have “capped” the amount that state aid can increase for any district in a single year.

And because lawmakers haven’t applied the same cap to charter schools, that means Columbus must pass along significantly more money for each charter student than it gets for students who choose to remain in the district. Once Columbus has passed through $136.8 million to charters, nearly $22 million for private-school vouchers and about $2.8 million in other deductions, it gets to keep a little more than $122 million to educate its students.

The charters get more state aid to educate their 18,000 students than Columbus gets to educate its 48,500 students.

“If we were getting the $360 million (that the formula allocates), the numbers would make a little more sense to us,” Bahorek said. “For a school (system) that’s on the cap, this is why it’s so painful.”

(Read more at the Dispatch)

Big Change Coming For Next Year’s Round Of PARCC Tests

A consortium of state education leaders have voted to make a big change to the standardized test known as the PARCC. The PARCC’s Governing Board, which includes state education commissioners and superintendents from around the country, has decided to scale back on testing to just one window late in the year. This year there were two testing periods, with the first in February.

Top teachers cite anti-poverty programs as No. 1 school reform necessity

In January, the Southern Education Foundation issued a report saying that for the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students — 51 percent — come from low-income families. That statistic came from a new analysis that the foundation did — using 2013 federal data — on the percentage of public school students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch programs, which has for years been used as a rough proxy for poverty. Critics said the figure was inflated because students can qualify for reduced-price lunches if their families earn an annual income of between 135-185 percent of the federal poverty limit, and they qualify for free lunches if their family has an annual income of at or below 130 percent of the poverty line. Given that the official poverty line for a family of four is $24,250, it is clear that many families above the line are struggling mightily to pay their bills every month.

My Post colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote a story about that report that included quotes from a teacher about the condition in which her students come to school. Here’s a sample:

“When they first comes in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

(Read more at the Washington Post)

Ohio’s phaseout of tax still hitting schools’ finances

A decade after state legislators eliminated what was regarded as one of the worst taxes in Ohio, the move continues to haunt state officials and local school districts.

A relic from the days when manufacturing made Ohio a national economic powerhouse, the tangible personal property tax, known as the TPP, was assessed on equipment, inventory and furniture.

Although most people still agree that getting rid of the tax was a good idea that made Ohio more competitive in attracting business, it remains a headache for those trying to craft school-funding plans, and a worrisome problem for schools trying to manage their budgets.

The state is still reimbursing schools for that lost TPP revenue, but those reimbursements have been cut significantly in recent years and are set for an additional $239 million reduction in the new two-year budget.

Losing more of the reimbursement “will decimate the Princeton educational system and our community,” Edward Theroux, interim superintendent of Princeton City Schools, recently told a Senate panel. His Hamilton County district gets about a quarter of its total budget from the TPP fund.

“We will not be able to recover and meet the needs of our students,” Theroux said.

(Read more that the Dispatch)

New standardized tests bring technical challenges, concern

Call this the year of the test. Or, at least the year of standardized test mania.

Standardized test season in K-12 classrooms has been dominated in some states by widespread technical problems or by parents allowing their children to opt out. But testing officials say the rollout this spring of new standardized tests taken by computer in many U.S. public schools has been without major problems in much of the country.

The next step? Seeing how students did - and how parents and educators respond. Test scores don't just inform parents of their child's progress; they are used to judge schools and teacher performance, too. The new exams are expected to be harder in many states than the state assessments they replaced, but they've been billed as a more accurate testing of what students are actually learning.

Read more at NBC4i)

How Common Core tests are scored: PARCC and Pearson graders can shoot for 60 answers per hour

Grading a student answer each minute could easily be overwhelming for the 121 graders at Pearson Inc.'s Ohio scoring center for the new Common Core exams from PARCC.

But this operation in a suburban office complex outside Columbus is a very focused assembly line operation: Scoring 55 to 80 answers an hour is no problem for most.

"I feel like I've been doing well," said scorer Launica Jones, who previously worked as a substitute teacher in both Cleveland and Columbus and started grading PARCC exams last month. "I've actually been told to slow down a few times."

It's a pace that works here, partly because the dozens of full-time graders in Ohio spend their eight-hour shifts focused on just third grade math tests. If your third grader took the PARCC math exams this spring, there's a good chance that one of their answers was scored a laptop here at this Westerville office.

They don't grade English here this year and don't score any other grades either. Those are for the other dozen PARCC scoring centers to worry about. (The pace for English essay questions is a bit slower, but still quick: 17-19 per hour for high school exams.)

Graders don't score whole tests. They work with just one question at a time, grading that single question a few hundred times a day.

And each grader has been drilled several times in how students should answer that particular question before they start.

Michelle Kohlhorst said she has also managed the speed just fine. Since starting as a full-time grader April 13, she has scored a succession of five third grade math questions. Each time, she said, she and other graders pick up speed the more they work with a new question.

"When we first start training on an item, I think, 'Whoa! This is confusing'," Kohlhurst said. "The more we talk about it and go through training, it gets a little easier."

(Read more at Cleveland.com)