Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July > 19
Monday, July 19, 2010
Editorial: Schools have to anticipate more cuts
Ohio’s education policy makers need to get real.
The Ohio Department of Education’s proposed budget for the upcoming two years is ridiculously unrealistic. Everyone in education knows that — unless they’ve been living under a rock.
Meanwhile, a new school funding commission, charged with recommending and advising how much schools should get from the state in an ideal world, also has proposed a big jump in state aid. Among other things, the commission doesn’t believe that the state is compensating districts for the true cost of paying teachers.
Ohio faces up to an $8 billion shortfall in its coming two-year budget. (Currently, the budget is about $50 billion.) So it’s absurd to think that, in this next budget cycle, lawmakers will be interested in making everything right and fair for schools (or anyone).
Put aside, for a minute, the funding commission’s belief that districts aren’t being given enough state support to adequately pay their teachers. The education department’s plan alone would increase education spending by $929 million. But that’s not accounting for the fact that the current budget was bailed out by $845 million in federal stimulus aid for schools, money that cannot be counted on to be there again.
This means that to do just what the education department proposes, lawmakers would have to find another $1.7 billion. All told, the education department wants spending on schools to grow by 4.5 percent the first year and 3.4 percent the next, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Both the education department’s spending plan and the funding commission’s proposal are designed to keep the state on track to pay for Gov. Ted Strickland’s “evidence-based” funding model.
That program was designed to incrementally create a constitutional school funding system built on eight years of spending increases. The problem, of course, is that no one knows where the necessary new money is going to come from.
What with Ohio’s school funding method having been declared unconstitutional four times, the governor has the right goal and some good ideas. But he has yet to say how he will pay for his changes. With state revenue expected to increase only minimally for a good time to come, there isn’t any easy solution.
The state desperately needs a jolt of realism. Legislators and policy makers are right to be in reform mode. But the reforms they should be promoting need to be about saving money. They have to find ways to maintain critical state services while spending less.
Smart local school leaders and their school boards are already preparing for the worst. They have to believe that the downsizing that many of them have been going through won’t be stopping any time soon. Every school district should be working on a contingency plan for that very real possibility. Teachers’ unions across the Dayton area, for instance, have been agreeing to contracts with low or no raises.
Floating fantasies that a state funding increase could be around the corner is only distracting schools from the hard work that needs to be done.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
Scott Elliott: DuBois story shows how charters can go wrong
The first time I met Wilson Willard, he was whisked into the room at a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation event, surrounded by Fordham folks who were giddy for people to meet him.
Willard was the founder of an extraordinary Cincinnati charter school called the W.E.B. DuBois Academy which, in 2004, Fordham had just taken over as sponsor.
The school had outstanding test scores and state report card ratings, despite being located in the inner city and serving mostly very low-income students.
People who visited DuBois came away raving about Willard, his teaching staff and the quality of instruction.
Fordham was thrilled to have the school in its stable and used Willard and DuBois as examples of all that was good about the charter school movement.
Then, suddenly, it all went to pieces.
Willard, it turned out, had so botched the school’s financial record-keeping that the state couldn’t even audit its books. But things got worse. Fordham began to hear horror stories — that Willard could be explosive and inappropriate, that he sometimes used students to do work around his house during school hours.
Then the big bombshell: Willard was charged with theft of school funds. In 2008, he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to four years in prison and was ordered to pay $179,000 in restitution to the state, and the now shaky school’s state rating had fallen to “academic emergency.”
The DuBois Academy story is the most stunning and fascinating chapter in a new book written by Fordham’s Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan and Michael Lafferty. How could Fordham, the nation’s foremost advocate for charter schools and a consistently strong voice for tough school accountability, be taken in by a fraud like Willard?
In “Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines,” the authors say they were fooled much the same way Bernie Madoff’s investment clients were fleeced in his Ponzi scheme. Like Madoff, Willard was dynamic and had an unimpeachable reputation. Unlike Madoff, Willard was also the real deal, at least when it came to academic results.
In the book, the authors describe how Willard’s fans recounted repeated examples of his heroism. The guy worked incredible hours at the school and was personally involved in nearly every aspect of the operation, they said. He hired great teachers and carried the school’s successful curriculum mostly in his head. What he did — build a high-performing school full of very poor kids from scratch — is a rare feat.
Among the last to believe the charges against Willard was the governing board that employed him. The board was made up of Willard’s friends and supporters, who had been with him from the school’s beginning. Despite Fordham’s increasingly harder nudges, the board resisted taking action against him for far too long, which helped seal the school’s fate.
Ohio has gotten much better at screening new charter school applicants. In the early days of the charter movement, the Akron Beacon Journal reported how the Ohio Board of Education approved stacks of charter applications, sometimes without even reading them. That put state money in the hands of too many people with agendas that had more to do with their own personal gain than with educating kids.
Those early charters were often overseen by boards hand-picked by the school operators. Sponsors were, by design, kept at arm’s length to allow charters freedom to innovate. In too many cases, such schools still exist today.
Deregulating schools in this way was supposed to unleash creativity and encourage reforms. But it also gave cover to the ill-intentioned.
Oddly, Willard was on both sides of that fence. His creativity and academic success made it that much harder to spot his sinister side.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Link the funds for clean coal to bigger plan
“Clean coal.” Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Renewable energy — wind, solar, geothermal — requires big new investments and threatens the jobs of people in West Virginia and Ohio who work in the coal industry.
But the old fossil fuels are dirty and otherwise threatening to the environment. Most specifically, coal gives off carbon dioxide that is linked to global warming by the overwhelming majority in the scientific community.
So how should society choose between the old and new forms of energy?
Cleaning up the coal sounds perfect. (Well, almost perfect. It does still leave the coal industry changing the face of Appalachia, to the distress of many.)
But money is a problem. The coal industry — though it provides half the electricity in this county — can’t afford all the needed research.
The government has put up $3.4 billion through the federal stimulus. There was also government money in the 1980s. Now there’s talk of more.
Some environmentalists are skeptical about whether affordable clean coal is achievable. But some credible scientists say the effort is starting to come together.
Now Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is joining with Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, to propose $20 billion in federal spending over the next decade, combined with industry money, to develop a way to burn coal cleanly and make money doing it. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, also says he’s interested.
To their credit, the sponsors provide a source of funding in their legislation, rather than just adding the cost to the deficit. They’d put a fee on utility bills. That helps sustain Sen. Voinovich’s cherished reputation as a “deficit hawk.” Whether it helps pass the legislation is another question.
A similar approach didn’t help the health care bill get any Republican votes. And there’s going to be opposition to what amounts to a tax.
The two sponsors say that a sweeping energy bill that has been much talked about in Washington — sometimes referred to as “cap and trade” or “Kerry-Lieberman” — is dead. That effort is designed to limit the release of carbon into the atmosphere by aiming incentives and punishments at emitters.
Sens. Voinovich and Rockefeller say the death of the bigger idea should not mean the death of carbon-related legislation.
But some ask: Why put money into a dying industry using an exhaustible resource when there are clean and inexhaustible alternatives?
Of course, renewable forms of energy are getting government aid, too, including $16.6 billion in the stimulus. Indeed, the stimulus has been widely sold as promoting the country’s move to cleaner energy.
The case for an “all-of-the-above” approach to our energy future has much to be said for it. So long as the coal companies are not digging in their heels against change — not insisting the old ways are good enough — they should have a place in the discussion and a shot at some money.
However, Washington should be focused on a passing a larger bill. If the coal industry gets what it wants in a piecemeal way, that will affect its attitude toward the larger bill. Best to keep the research money at bay, in hopes of putting a coalition together for a more systematic approach.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Energy, Locals in national affairs, Martin Gottlieb, National government
