As Poverty Increases, Reformers Cling to the “New Status Quo”

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released new data that confirms what every advocate of public education has been trumpeting for years: poverty is a growing scourge on public schools. According to its 2013 Condition of Education report, one in five schools in the United States are considered high poverty. Twenty percent of public school students attended these schools in 2011, considerably more than the 12 percent who did in 1999–2000. That year, 45 percent of students attended a low-poverty school. Now only 25 percent do. Overall, approximately 10.9 million school-age children are from families living in poverty, a four percent increase from a decade earlier.

The trend is stark – poverty is affecting more and more students. And yet, the debate over education – at least how it plays out in the national media and many legislatures across the country- continues to freeze out substantive discussions about poverty and its obvious impact on student achievement. The ongoing fascination with market-driven education reform proposals and their media-savvy boosters leaves room for little else, although recent scrutiny over faulty standardized tests is reason for encouragement.

For years now, the American people have been told that the key to close achievement gaps is to use high-stake stest scores to evaluate teachers and schools, and close schools that are deemed “under-performing” and replace them with charter schools. Obviously it’s easier to champion these ideas once the discussion of poverty and its consequences for millions of students is severed from the equation.

The stakes are high. There is, after all, a lot of money to be made. Reform has become an industry.

“There are people who look at our investment in public education, and they see a treasure chest,” National Education President Dennis Van Roekel recently wrote in The Huffington Post. “Their first thought is, how can they tap into those funds for their own private gain? If just one percent of education spending were diverted to private profit, it would mean $5 billion a year in someone’s pockets.”

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Rejected Kasich formula coming back?

The Ohio Senate revealed its version of the Budget, and it contained a number of changes to education policy proposals proposed by the Governor and the House. What it didn't contain was a school funding formula, for that we are told we will have to wait another week. A familiar story.

Based upon reporting, there should be some serious cause for concern. The Toledo Blade reports

A huge chunk still missing from the budget is how the chamber plans to deal with K-12 schools, preventing lawmakers from putting a total price tag on the two-year spending plan for the moment. Talks continue, but Mr. Faber predicted that the final product is likely to be closer to what Mr. Kasich initially proposed than what the House put forth.

Mr. Kasich’s school funding plans, particularly his promise that more money would flow to poorer schools, were initially greeted with optimism by school superintendents across the state. But that mood quickly soured when the administration released numbers showing that some 60 percent of school districts would see no funding increases while some wealthier, fast-growing, suburban districts were in line for large increases.

The House, in turned, capped the growth in subsidies to those suburban schools, resulting in more districts being in line for increases, including Toledo Public Schools. Mr. Faber would not speculate what the Senate’s total K-12 pot of funding would be larger or smaller than in the House version.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has a reaction

Senate Minority Leader Eric Kearney, D-North Avondale, said the small business tax cut wouldn’t provide business owners with enough money to create new jobs. He also lamented the budget’s lack of additional funding for local governments and schools.

“Our schools and local communities have suffered drastic cuts since Governor Kasich took office and today’s amendments by Senate Republicans to (the budget bill) did nothing to change that,” he said in a statement. “That’s not good news for local taxpayers who’ve been forced to pick up the slack from state funding cuts by voting for more local levies.”

Senate Republicans said they won’t have education funding numbers until next week, when they plan to reveal their final K-12 funding plan.

The Governor promised that poor districts would receive more, which should not have been a difficult task after he cut education funding by $1.8 billion in his last budget. But even that promise turned out to be empty as almost 400 school districts were set to receive flat funding. The House promised to fix the Governor's mess, and attempted to do so by returning to the Taft era building blocks formula - only they cut school funding by a further $200 million in the process. Now the Ohio Senate wants to return to the Governor's rejected formula. As we predicted, we have a school funding disaster on our hands, unless the Senate is also going to attach significant amounts of additional money to the plan to make it workable.

School administrators were not kind about the Governor's funding formula the first go-around, and here's the graph to demonstrate why

Will Ohio's media be bamboozled a third time by Republican legislators?

A decade of stalled teacher pay

The OECD has just released a report "OECD Education at a Glance 2011", which can be found in full below. We wanted to bring one particular chart to your attention. The chart below shows that in the US, teacher salaries over the last decade have remained unchanged in real dollars, in stark contrast to most other developed countries.

This news should come as little surprise, as one reads article after article detialing teachers bargaining wage freezes, or at best increases barely enough to keep up with even modest inflation.

OECD Education at a Glance 2011

Shock Doctrine Summer

As American public education arrives at the summer of its discontent, we have to contemplate how a system that has already had over 201,600 jobs wrung from its payrolls since August 2008 will handle the prospect of having to shed nearly a quarter of a million more jobs.

The litany of deep education cuts being forced on public schools is prompting many educators in cut-happy states like Texas , where the state legislature reduced per-student funding for the first time since World War II, to wonder if under-funding schools has become a "chronic" condition. School children in at least 21 states are looking at "identifiable, deep cuts in pre-kindergarten and/or K-12 spending," with states like Mississippi proposing school budgets that "fail to meet statutory requirements," and states like Florida enacting legislation that takes school spending back in time to 2005.

But it would be a mistake to assume that deep cuts in direct services to school kids mean that increases in education-related spending aren't occurring somewhere else. In fact, many of the very same governors behind draconian cuts to classrooms and schools also muscled through state houses new legislation to increase spending on new programs for charter schools and vouchers.

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Teachers sacrifice and prove SB5 is not needed

Example 86734 that SB5 is not needed comes in the form of news that Delaware teachers, through the collective bargaining process, aggreed to a no-raise contract next year.

The 330-member Delaware City Teachers Association won't get raises in base pay or increases for longevity or additional education, saving the district $340,000 in the one-year deal.

Without the pay freeze approved by teachers, six additional positions would have been eliminated, Superintendent Paul Craft said. Already, the district will lose 23 positions as part of $2.5million in cuts the board made final on Monday night. Six of those jobs probably will be cut through layoffs; the rest were through attrition.

"It's a real sacrifice and a real acknowledgment of the challenges that we face, that the teachers were willing to sign a contract to give up what has always been part of the contract," Craft said of the step and education increases.

Example 86735 that teachers continue to demonstrate sacrifice for their communities comes form Worthington

Worthington teachers agreed today to replace their contract for the 2011-12 school year with a three-year pact that would include a freeze on raises, including some step increases, which are awarded for education and experience.
[...]
"Our teachers recognize that the state budget cuts will have a devastating effect on our school district," Mark Hill, president of the Worthington Education Association, said in a statement. "We wanted to demonstrate that we want to be part of the solution."
[...]
"This agreement is unprecedented," Superintendent Melissa Conrath said in a statement. She said that Worthington teachers "want to contribute to a solution that will ensure the long-term sustainability of the district."

Under the agreement, teachers also would pick up any additional costs of health insurance in 2014. They contribute 14 percent toward their insurance premiums.

If SB5 were to pass and eliminate the ability to collectively bargain, unprecedented deals like this would not be possible. Why break what is clearly proven to be working time and time again, all across the state?