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Major education overhaul underway
It’s happening largely out of the public eye, but by year’s end the way Ohio funds and administers public education could be dramatically transformed.
Barbara Mattei-Smith, a top education official from Gov. John Kasich’s administration, spent last week hearing from school leaders and teachers about what should be included in a new formula being developed to fund the state’s more than 600 public schools.
Meanwhile, Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro is working on a proposal that would strip away regulations for state universities that receive more than $2 billion in taxpayer money each year.
The overhaul of both systems at the same time is unusual and may be unprecedented. “These are important reforms to education policy across the board that are long overdue,” said Rob Nichols, Kasich’s aide.
The effort to overhaul these systems comes as public education, from kindergarten classrooms to college campuses, lost nearly $1 billion in the recent biennium budget, largely because stimulus money has run out and the state doesn’t have the tax revenue to replace it.
It also comes out of necessity. Ohio is the only state without a permanent education model after Kasich undid many of the education reforms his predecessor, Ted Strickland, implemented.
Finding a new model
Kasich campaigned on scrapping Strickland’s “evidence-based model” for funding K-12 education, saying the state couldn’t afford it. But coming up with an alternative plan that satisfies educators, taxpayers and court judges, and without harming students, will be no small test.
And the clock is ticking. Kasich hopes to deliver a new funding model to lawmakers by the end of the year, with implementation in time for the 2012-13 school year.
“If we develop a model that we can’t fund then we haven’t developed a model,” Mattei-Smith told administrators during her “listening tour” Monday at the Miami Valley Career Technology Center.
The new funding system is just one part of a package of major changes in the works for education policy, including the implementation of a merit-based pay system for teachers, ranking schools’ performance and using test scores to hold schools accountable for student achievement.
Another reform, Senate Bill 5, which will limit collective bargaining rights, is facing a possible voter referendum.
Democratic state Rep. Clayton Luckie, a former Dayton school board member, urged caution. Luckie hopes the Kasich administration will not undo all of the work the previous General Assembly accomplished, which he believes helped the state win $400 million in federal Race to the Top dollars.
“A lot of the reform we did was where the rest of the nation is heading,” Luckie said. “Our fear is a lot of this stuff will get out of center and more of the financial burden will be put on the taxpayer.”
It’s unclear what the new formula will look like, but residents like Tom Craft, a retired engineer from Kettering, want to see drastic changes . Craft has spoken out in the past about school funding issues and feels the system unfairly relies on property owners.
“We need to better distribute the burden on everybody,” Craft said. “It’s out of balance.”
Craft also feels pay and benefits are too generous and vary too widely from district to district. He fears state budget reductions will force districts to pursue more local tax hikes. “I’m all for the state cutting costs and tightening their belt, but the districts don’t want to,” he said.
Hunting for answers
Local and state school officials are hoping the new formula will find a better way to equitably fund both poor and wealthy districts. The Ohio Supreme Court has declared other models unconstitutional due to an over-reliance on property taxes and issues of equitability.
“This is an extremely difficult and complex task to accomplish,” said Tom Ash, director of governmental relations for the Buckeye Association of School Administrators. “We have to consider not only property values, but the capacity of residents to pay for education.”
Ash’s group, along with the Ohio School Boards Association and the Ohio Association for School Business Officials, are helping to coordinate meetings between school officials and Mattei-Smith, the governor’s point person for developing the new funding model.
More than 100 school officials attended the three meetings held last week, one of which was held in the Miami Valley.
“There is obviously a lot of passion about the need for a new school funding formula,” Ash said.
At the meeting at the Career Technology Center, area school officials peppered Mattei-Smith with questions about what the new formula might look like:
• How will the state pay for special needs students? • In what ways will districts be able to raise revenue ? • Will the state mandate a minimum percentage for classroom spending?
“They want to know what it will look like. There’s not a lot of answers because it’s still being developed,” Ash said.
Nichols, Kasich’s spokesman, said the formula will follow the “over-arching principal of driving more money into the classroom.”
Districts the state considers wealthy are nervous a new model could be more detrimental than the previous one. Some of the Miami Valley’s top performing schools — Beavercreek, Centerville and Kettering — all lost more than 20 percent of their state funding.
“It will mean looking deeply into what we can cut or change in our budget,” said David Roer, a Centerville school board member for 18 years. “The only way to reduce the budget is with personnel.”
Roer and others fear a “Robin Hood effect” with any new formula, essentially taking from wealthy districts and distributing to those with a lower tax base.
“Bringing down a good or excellent (district) to help a struggling one is not a good idea,” Roer said. “It is fair to give more to those that need it, but don’t take it from those that are doing a good job.”
High stakes
The stakes are just as big for higher education.
Public colleges and universities lost more than $200 million in state subsidies in the biennium budget — some of the largest reductions in history.
At the same time the state has capped the amount schools can raise through tuition to recoup those losses.
“The budget was difficult; we knew it would be,” said David Creamer, chief financial officer for Miami University, which will lose 17 percent of its state funding, or $11 million, next year.
Next month, Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro will introduce a proposal for charter or “enterprise” universities that college officials hope will make it easier to weather budget cuts.
The idea is to loosen state regulations, thereby giving schools the ability to operate more independently, in exchange for less state funding.
Just how much less funding schools are willing to take is a key point for Bruce Johnson, president of the Inter-University Council, which advocates on behalf of the schools. Johnson is a former Republican lawmaker and lieutenant governor.
“Not much,” Johnson said about how much in funding cuts schools can tolerate. He noted that while higher education spending has remained flat, enrollment has boomed, sending down the amount of per-pupil funding schools receive.
Johnson believes making drastic cuts to universities could hurt the entire system.
“If the logic goes, we create enterprise universities to inspire them to be world class, then how does taking $100 million away and substituting tuition dollars accomplish that goal?” Johnson said.
Critics of the concept worry the reduced oversight will result in higher tuition. “We are already one of the costliest places to go to college in the U.S.,” Luckie said. “We need to look at how we fund colleges.”
University officials hope Petro proposes a “combination of real small stuff,” Johnson said. No one wants to price students out of the market.
“If we are talking about deregulation, it is a series of things dealing with the hiring and firing of employees and purchasing regulations that slow down the apparatus,” Johnson said. “The question is: Why not allow them to act like an enterprise rather than a bureaucracy?”
Johnson sees reasons to be cautious . In some states, a tiered system of public universities has emerged, he said, conferring a certain status on some schools but not others.
Miami University’s Creamer said universities get “whipsawed” depending on which political party or administration is in charge.
“We’d like to have some assurance the rules are not going to change,” he said. “It makes it difficult to plan and be able to execute in any way.”
In the end, reforms to both K-12 funding and higher education should have students’ needs at the core, officials in both systems said.
Nichols echoed that sentiment. “ Students come first,” he said. “Their needs have to be paramount.”
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Schools and Politics
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By Maxwell Powers
July 19, 2011 11:59 PM | Link to this
I am not condoning the cheating done in Georgia and (probably) elsewhere, but the problem is that it’s not all about getting bonuses. In some cases, it’s in order to GET BACK money that used to be part of salary.
By ohiodale
July 19, 2011 8:24 AM | Link to this
Schools should be funded through an additional sales tax so ALL pay and the burden is shifted away from property owners. It is completely unfair that only property owners pay the majority of the school funding while many parents of kids in school live in apartments. Please do not use the argument the property taxes are included in the rent because the amount is insignificant compared to the amount home owners pay. Why is Kettering considered a wealthy district? Kettering is middleclass not wealthy.
By Philman
July 19, 2011 6:26 AM | Link to this
The problem with merit based pay was just revealed in the last couple of weeks in Georgia & pennsylvania, I believs the DDN missed that story(whats new) Hundreds of teachers were busted holding FIX THE TESTS PARTIES, WOW instant raise for teachers, their has to be a fair & equidible system of pay, or maybe we just need to find teachers of OLD that felt it was their calling. google the teacher video in wisconsin screaming show me the money we want some money, sounds like she is more concerned about her wallet..