Kasich escalates public ed defunding

Ohioans would see income taxes fall, but would pay for them through higher sales and property taxes in the final Republican proposal

That's how the Cincinnati Enquirer opens its report on the massive last minute tax plan the Ohio GOP are planning to dump on the state, after months of internal disagreements.

Of particular concern to those who support public education, the budget conference committee decided not to restore the historic school funding cuts they made in the previous budget, but instead build upon it. Here was their starting point

FY12 (2011-2012 school year), which was the first year under Kasich's budget, saw a total of $7.52 billion in total state revenues. That's an 8% cut in total state revenue -- easily the largest cut since ODE started keeping these total state revenue figures in 1995.

And the bad news for districts is that FY12 won't represent the entire state divestment from education during Kasich's first budget. That's because the governor's budget phased down the Tangible Personal Property and Killowatt Hour tax reimbursement payments over two years. So the cut will be likely continued in FY13, pushing the total revenue figure down even lower.

As it stands, that $7.52 billion is the lowest amount provided by the state since the 2007-2008 school year.

Where they have ended up is even worse. In order to pay for their income tax cut, they have decided to eliminate the 12.5% property tax rollback.

The elimination of the property tax rollback will make future school levies harder to pass and more expensive, further shifting the burden from the state to local communities already struggling to support the needs of their students.

Eliminating the 12.5 percent property tax rollback for new taxes could make school levies harder to sell to voters. For example, without the rollback, last year's 15-mill Cleveland school levy would have cost $263 a year instead of $230 for the owner of a $50,000 home, and $525 a year instead of $459 for the owner of a $100,000 home.

The Governor and his legislative allies continue to shift the burden from millionaires to working people and their communities. We're going backwards at a time when the state can afford to move forward.

Education News for 01-30-2013

State Education News

• Educators speculate on Kasich’s budget plans (Columbus Dispatch)

Every school district in Ohio is waiting to hear Gov. John Kasich’s plan for school funding, to be unveiled on Thursday..Read more…

Local Education News

• Columbus schools seek public input on new superintendent (Columbus Dispatch)

The Columbus City Schools are inviting members of the public to weigh in on what they want in a new superintendent at a series of regional “focus groups” starting next week...Read more…

• School worker now at home (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

WARREN - A city school district employee charged earlier this month with carrying a concealed weapon was placed on home assignment pending the outcome of an investigation...Read more…

• Shared services with Hubbard may end in Liberty (Youngstown Vindicator)

A shared-services agreement between adjoining school districts soon may end...Read more…

Editorial

• Take a close look at attendance (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

Officials in some of Ohio's biggest school districts, including Columbus, were caught lying about student attendance numbers last year. They were inflated to make the school systems appear to be doing a better job than actually was the case...Read more…

Education News for 09-04-2012

State Education News

• Reading law has holdouts (Columbus Dispatch)

Mike Johnson loathes the idea of holding students back. But next year, Johnson, the superintendent of Bexley schools…Read more...

• Truancy rates in doubt (Columbus Dispatch)

The Cleveland school district wiped more than 1,700 students from its rolls in a single year for being chronic truants…Read more...

• Early college credit not enough (Columbus Dispatch)

Bryan Zake could have coasted in his senior year in high school. But he chose to get a head start on college by earning almost a year’s worth of classes at the University of Akron…Read more...

• Kids late, lost as busing blunders abound (Columbus Dispatch)

Some school buses have been late taking kids home, sometimes by a couple of hours. Children have been left at the wrong stop, far from home. Other buses never showed up…Read more...

• Students able to make up calamity days at home (Dayton Daily News)

Fifteen area school districts in the Miami Valley, as well as a couple of private schools…Read more...

• Law more stringent on elementary readers (Hamilton Journal-News)

The percentage of third graders held held from fourth grade could quadruple in some local school districts…Read more...

• Extra-curriculars keep students engaged (Marion Star)

A national report claims to shed some light on why students are skipping school. Local school officials say they hear a variety of reasons as they try different ways to encourage students to attend…Read more...

• Local schools in attendance probe (Marion Star)

Government inspectors have been poring over student attendance records in school buildings across the state…Read more...

• Area districts waiting out state report card delay (Middletown Journal)

The Ohio Board of Education’s delay in posting the state report cards has drawn mixed reactions from Middletown-area school districts. Some don’t mind the wait, while others would have preferred to be celebrating by now…Read more...

• Ohio sports fees are growing trend, cutting in to athletics programs (Newark Advocate)

For an increasing number of Ohio families, students playing sports also means parents paying for sports. Participation fees, which can run into hundreds of dollars…Read more...

• Schools prepare for third-grade reading guarantee (Youngstown Vindicator)

A law that takes full effect in the 2013-14 school year requires third-graders who aren’t reading at grade level to be held back another year…Read more...

Local Education News

• Teach For America teachers start school year in local charter schools (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

The Village Prep charter school had openings for nine teachers this school year…Read more...

• Football-concussion risk for middle-schoolers prompts protective moves (Columbus Dispatch)

Connor Laufenberg was a linebacker for his middle-school football team last fall when he took a hit that left him dizzy…Read more...

• District let girl stay home for six weeks (Columbus Dispatch)

When Stacy Cox read her daughter’s report card from Columbus City Schools’ Marion- Franklin High School, it showed almost perfect attendance…Read more...

• $2M deficit expect for Monroe schools at end of school year (Middletown Journal)

Monroe Local Schools will finish with a $2 million operating deficit at the end of the school year if no new revenue is brought into the district, according to treasurer Holly Cahall…Read more...

• Engineering course offered at Franklin High School (Middletown Journal)

For the first time, the Franklin school district is offering a nationally recognized pre- engineering program at the high school…Read more...

• Officer out of Monroe schools, again (Middletown Journal)

Monroe School District is once again without a school resource officer. City Council decided to reinstate a school resource officer for the first two weeks…Read more...

• Report card scores discussed at PCSD (Portsmouth Daily Times)

Parents, community members, teachers, and school administrators gathered Wednesday morning for the Portsmouth City School District…Read more...

• Ursuline leads Valley schools with 9 AP courses (Youngstown Vindicator)

Twelve seniors sit in a third-floor classroom at Ursuline High School discussing literature…Read more...

• Youngstown School District | Defining partnerships (Youngstown Vindicator)

The city school district is trimming its large list of partnerships, bringing such support more in line with the needs of students…Read more...

Editorial

• Drawing up a route to better Cleveland schools (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

The Cleveland School District seems to know what it wants to be in the near future -- an effective system where more students attend…Read more...

• Delaying state school district report cards is a necessity (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

The Ohio Board of Education wisely and unanimously decided recently to delay the release of critically important school district report cards…Read more...

• Wrong watchdog )Columbus Dispatch)

The Ohio Department of Education’s request for more authority to monitor and investigate school districts data collection is premature…Read more...

• Former school head should repay (Warren Tribune Chronicle)

''I just didn't know how else to do it,'' former Ohio state school Superintendent Stan Heffner told investigators looking into the scandal that forced him to resign earlier this summer…Read more...

Education News for 08-01-2012

Statewide Stories of the Day

• Districts already holding back students in advance of new state law (Dispatch)

At Hamilton Elementary, repeating a grade is a matter of playing catch-up. “The old thinking was, ‘Yes, some of these kids weren’t at grade level, but we’re not going to hold them back,’ ” said Susan Witten, Hamilton schools’ director of teaching and learning. “It was seen pretty much as a punishment, as a negative. We’ve reversed the way we thought about it.” This fall, a new state law takes effect, requiring school districts to hold back students who aren’t reading proficiently by third grade. Hamilton schools already are holding back more young students. Read more...

• Living in district tougher nowadays for superintendents (Dispatch)

The desire of some school districts to have their superintendents live within district boundaries is often at odds with the realities of today’s tough housing market. The Worthington school board voted last week to tack an extra year onto Superintendent Thomas Tucker’s grace period for moving into the district because he hasn’t been able to sell his home in Columbus. “The whole issue is the economy right now,” Tucker said. “I actually live only 5 miles from the district office, but it’s outside of the district.” Read more...

Local Issues

• Police officer stashed school-attendance records (Dispatch)

When district auditors began asking questions about student-data changes at Whetstone High School, the police officer stationed there hauled boxes of documents home with her, records show. Officer Nanci A. Ferguson, who inexplicably was responsible for attendance and data at the school, handed over a single notebook belonging to the former principal in response to a request from Columbus’ internal auditor. “I hauled the rest of the boxes out of here (and) stashed them at home in my garage,” Ferguson told the newly appointed Whetstone principal. Read more...

• Charter school rejected (Blade)

Toledo City Council on Tuesday narrowly turned down a national charter-school company's request to open up shop in the heart of downtown. Connections Education had planned to open a site on the fourth floor of One Lake Erie Center, 600 Jefferson Ave. Connections typically runs online charter and private schools; the new site would be a high school called Nexus Academy of Toledo and would provide a blended school, with students using online curriculum at home and spending part of the day at the site. Council voted 6-4 on a special-use permit. Read more...

• Cleveland school board OKs resolution for 15-mill levy, vows accountability (Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND - Cleveland school board members voted unanimously Tuesday night to put a 15-mill levy on the Nov. 6 ballot. The board voted 9-0 to put the issue to voters, drawing mixed reactions from about 40 people who attended the meeting. The tax is estimated to cost the average Cleveland homeowner with a $64,000 home an additional $294 a year for the next four years. Cleveland voters last passed an operating tax in 1996, and they approved a $335 million bond issue in 2001 for school construction. Resident Donna Brown told the board she will not vote for the levy. Read more...

• Lakota restructures athletics to save $315K (Journal-News)

LIBERTY TWP. — To help quell budget constraints at Lakota Local Schools, the district’s athletic department is being restructured with $315,000 in reductions. A major change is the switch to a district-wide athletic director and the elimination of associate athletic directors at the freshman schools, said Chris Passarge, executive director of business operations. Rich Bryant, 35, is taking on that role of athletic director effective Aug. 1. Bryant, a West Chester Twp. resident, had been serving as athletic director at Lakota East High School since August 2009. Read more...

Editorial

• Find the truth (Dispatch)

If substantiated, the attendance-rigging by Columbus City Schools officials is staggering in its scope. Not just the sheer size of the numbers involved — 2.8 million student absences allegedly erased over 51/2 years — but in the betrayal of district taxpayers, voters, parents and students. Such a scheme would artificially inflate the district’s academic rating, thus deceiving school-levy voters and parents, and allow the district to collect more in state financial aid than it should have. State Superintendent Stan Heffner has said that if the allegations are proved true. Read more...

• Cheating is unfair to students (Tribune Chronicle)

School administrators have an advantage their students don't: In effect, they grade some of the tests used to determine how well they are performing. Some of them are cheating, according to the Ohio Department of Education. Much of the data used by the state - as well as taxpayers and students' parents - to learn whether schools are doing a good job is prepared by school district administrators. Information on matters such as student attendance is submitted to the state, which posts it online. It is in school district officials' best interests for the numbers to look good, of course. Read more...

A different kind of investment

Education is often referred to as an investment in our future, and undoubtedly it is, as we prepare our young people to enter the workforce with creativity, energy and entrepreneurship. However, modest investment increases in public education also have an immediate, and direct, beneficial effect upon those making the investments.

A recent study by the Brooking's Institute revealed

An analysis of national and metropolitan data on public school populations and state standardized test scores for 84,077 schools in 2010 and 2011 reveals that:
[...]
Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.

This is clear evidence that investing a few hundred dollars per year to increase your local schools performance will have a dramatic effect on your home values - typically $11,000 per year, according to this study. The reason is no secret of course, people with school age children want to live in areas that have excellent schools, and are prepared to pay a premium for it. These results have been found to be true over and over. The St Louis Fed found

Traditional empirical models of the capitalization of education quality on house prices have established that the quality of primary school education is positively correlated with house prices. Recent capitalization studies have used various approaches to address concerns about omitted variable bias induced by failing to account for the correlation between school quality and unobserved neighborhood characteristics. Most of these variations on the traditional hedonic approach (including the boundary discontinuity regression) have assumed that the house price premium is constant because in all these models the contribution from school quality on house prices is constrained to be linear.

In this paper, we propose an alternative formulation that allows for nonlinear effects of school quality. We show that this formulation is preferred by the data over a baseline linear boundary fixed effects model and that the rate at which the house price premium rises increases over the range of school quality. In other words, the standard linear specification for test scores overestimates the premium at low levels of school quality and underestimates the premium at high levels of school quality.

In the St. Louis metropolitan area, houses associated with a school ranked at 1 SD below the mean are essentially priced on physical characteristics only. In contrast, houses associated with higher-quality schools command a much higher price premium.

Interestingly, and in contrast to many studies in the literature, the price premium remains substantially large, especially for houses associated with above-average schools. This is true even in our most conservative estimates, which complement the boundary discontinuity approach by explicitly controlling for neighborhood demographics. These estimates also reveal that the racial composition of neighborhoods is capitalized directly into house prices.

This then makes the move to downgrade Ohio's schools based on some new, arbitrary standard all the more baffling. Not only will this move potentially produce lower school ratings, it may also destroy tens of millions of dollars worth of housing value at a time when house prices are already under extreme stress and the economy struggling to improve.

Consider this then, when they vote one levies. A few hundred bucks could add thousands of dollars to the value of you home. One can only imagine the added wealth that could be created if the state lived up to its constitutional responsibilities and invested properly in public education too.

HB136 is dead, but will return

HB136 is dead. But a watered down version is likely to reappear in the form of another bill, or tucked quietly inside a bigger bill dealing with the new school funding formula. That was the message delivered by it's sponsor Rep Matt Huffman at a news conference yesterday.

Huffman said he'll change the funding mechanism so that no voucher will be worth more than the amount of per-pupil state aid that the home district receives. In a high-wealth district, that could be as little as a few hundred dollars.

"The practical effect is that not a lot of students from that district will use them," he acknowledged.

Huffman also said he'll limit the number of available vouchers to 1 percent of the home district's enrollment, which is roughly how many he expected would participate.

Statewide, that would be up to 17,000 students - far fewer than would have been possible in the original version of the bill.

He also will change the eligibility guidelines, tying them to the income levels that qualify children for state health coverage. And he will eliminate a provision that would have allowed families to spend unused voucher money on private high schools or college.

We'd speculate that it is unlikely that this new framework would appear in a bigger bill dealing with the funding formula. With over 300 school districts continuing to oppose this privatization plan in any form, a funding formula bill having its own issues, is not going to be a welcoming place for a contentious piece of legislation to be tucked inside.

Whatever the final form and function of this privatization proposal, it remains a terrible policy to transfer public monies to private schools at the expense of the majority of students. Even more so in light of recent revelations of ODE's inability to perform its basic oversight and accountability functions of private schools already receiving tax dollars.