‘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.

Revere school board requests changes in Ohio laws on charter schools

For the five members of the Revere Board of Education, enough is enough when it comes to charter school regulations in the state of Ohio.

The board last week unanimously passed a resolution asking Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio General Assembly to “enact meaningful laws to ensure greater accountability and transparency among Ohio charter schools.” Essentially, the board was requesting laws that would fundamentally level the educational playing field and hold charter schools to the same standards as those required of traditional public schools.

“As a board, we are enacting a resolution to change state law regarding charter schools,” board member Diana Sabitsch said before reading the lengthy document into the meeting record.

In addition to changing state law, the resolution requests actions to stop the proliferation of poor-performing charter schools and to establish a separate funding stream for those schools that “does not drain valuable resources from Ohio’s public education system.”

(Read more at Ohio.com).

Ohio E-Schools: Ohio's Baddest Apples

Four years ago, I helped write an Innovation Ohio analysis of Ohio's E-Schools that was one of the first examinations of the statewide impact of those schools on Ohio's kids and districts. Needless to say, E-School performance was dreadful. The report kind of put IO on the map and was cited by many national outlets and in Diane Ravitch's most recent book.

Fresh off the revelations that the Ohio Virtual Academy -- the state and nation's second-largest for-profit school -- may have been fudging their enrollment data to get paid, I decided to take another look, this time with our partners at KnowYourCharter.com. The results are worse now.

Here are the highlights:

More than half of the money going from better performing Ohio school districts to worse performing charters goes to 6 statewide E-Schools

98% of all the children attending charters that performed worse than their feeder districts on all the state’s report card measures went to the same six statewide Ohio E-Schools – at a cost of $72 million

Local Ohio taxpayers have had to subsidize $104 million of the cost of Ohio E-Schools because students in E-Schools receive so much more per pupil funding from the state than would their local public school.

What else is remarkable is that the school districts that have the most similar rates of poverty also outperform E-Schools. By a substantial margin. And E-Schools provide a substantial portion of the money and children lost to the worst performing charters in Ohio.

Charters would still be a problem in Ohio, and their performance would remain worse than districts overall. However, the gap would be narrowed.

Read more at 10th Period

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)

Senate hears from proponents of tougher charter-school rules in Ohio

Concerned that Ohio’s charter schools do not provide enough detail about how they spend taxpayer money, the state auditor, Ohio newspapers and a Cleveland-area charter operator urged the Senate to take action.

A Senate subcommittee continues to debate a pair of bills designed to make a major overhaul of Ohio’s much-maligned charter-school laws, which critics say have turned the state into the Wild West of charter-school operations.

The Senate version of the bill, which is more wide-ranging than the House-passed version, contains a number of recommendations from Auditor Dave Yost. He stressed on Wednesday that the nonprofit and for-profit operators who receive most of a school’s money to run day-to-day operations need to provide more detail.

The current requirement, Yost said, is very general. He proposed a more-detailed accounting of how operators spend taxpayer money.

“It’s just one piece of paper,” he said. “It does not disclose any proprietary information or disclose how the company is run. The footnote just shows how money is being spent on instruction."

The Senate bill includes Yost’s operator requirement, but the House resisted operator-disclosure provisions, arguing it did not want to impose public reporting standards on private companies.

Breakthrough Schools, a nonprofit operator that runs 10 charter schools in Cleveland and will soon run 11, offered broad support of the charter-school bills and also called for more openness.

“Of primary importance is transparency,” said John Zitzner, a founder of Breakthrough Schools. “ Students attending schools that are sponsored and operated in a transparent, responsible manner will be more likely to succeed.”

(Read more at the Dispatch)