School Funding: Ohio

School Funding: Ohio
School funding is a complicated and somewhat confusing issue.
According to the Plain Dealer which cited the Ohio Department of Education there is a variance of per pupil spending of $13,000. Keystone Local School district spends $7,381 and Beachwood spends 21,099 dollars per pupil. Where does this money currently come from? According to Ohio’s Current School Funding System, “Most states, including Ohio, fund schools through a combination of state, local, and federal funds. Federal funds make up only about 8% of the total. While it is a major portion of the state's budget, state spending for schools represents 46%.The remaining 46% of funding for schools come from local taxpayers.” First the state determines how much it should cost to educate a child with no special needs. That amount is currently set at $5,732 in the Ohio. This set amount of money is based on several factors including, average class size, average teacher salaries, average support staff salaries, and building maintenance and overhead. This is referred to as the foundation amount. A portion of this foundation amount is paid by the locality. This local portion is generally equal to how much a district would raise with a 2.3% property tax. In addition the state provides supplemental dollars for educational services which are considered to be beyond basics.
Supplemental funds for special education, vocational education, and transportation costs (requires a local match.)
Poverty Based Assistance to help schools with additional costs they may incur for educating economically disadvantaged students
Parity aid to offset differences in school districts' ability to obtain local dollars from property taxes (beyond the required local share)
Finally, a guarantee provision (known as transitional aid) provides that each school district should receive no less state revenue in the current year than it received in the preceding year. (Ohio’s Current School Funding System)
As we all know this system has been declared unconstitutional four separate times, most recently in 2002. Ohio schools have been operating as Unconstitutional for 15 years. The major flaws in the current system include: heavy reliance on property taxes, inequities amongst school districts, not tied to effective strategies, and routinely leaves districts scrambling for dollars, according to Ohio’s Current School Funding System. There currently does not exist a formula which details how much it costs to provide an education to a regular education student, let alone a student with special needs or one who is deemed disadvantaged. One model that is being considered is the Evidence based model for costing out. This model is being used in Arkansas and Kentucky and is advocated by Governor Strickland. The goal is to bring all students up to state standards using scientific based practices. According to School Funding Matters, “As a relatively newer model, the evidence-based approach (or the expert judgment approach), relies on research into effective educational practices and the judgment of experts who have developed or analyzed these practices to determine appropriate levels of spending. According to Governor Strickland’s proposed budget the state portion of education would rise to 56 percent by 2017. One opponent of Strickland’s plan to revamp the school funding and practices in Ohio is John Hill. He claims: Ohio needs an easy flow of people and money from less to more productive uses. A fair comparison of alternative uses of funds, incentives for innovation, and performance based accountability. The flaws that Hill finds with Strickland plan are: It ties up funds at the school and district levels and mandates spending on programs that have nothing to do with education, no provisions encouraging trade-offs between staffing and other uses of money, no provisions for experimenting with new approaches to instruction and deliberately tilting the playing field against charter schools and on-line schools, and no careful assessment of student achievement results of using money one way versus another.

The question I would like to pose is whose plan do you feel would work best the current proposed plan by Governor Strickland or the type of plan proposed by John Hill in Ohio at the Crossroads? What are some of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of each?

Issue #20

Issue #20 Should Alternative Teacher Training be Encouraged?

Yes: Robert Holland, from “How to Build a Better Teacher,” Policy Review (April & May 2001)
“Holland argues that current programs for teacher certification are inadequate, especially given the growing shortage of teachers” (341).

Holland feels that there are two major issues facing education. He states there is a shortage of teachers and that the teachers we have are lacking in quality. Holland discusses the three different ways that he thinks teacher preparation could be enhanced. He discusses value-added assessment and the idea of placing the professional preparation of teachers under the control of one centralized body (344). He also briefly touches on the idea of teachers coming from different backgrounds and teaching what they are experts on (349-50).
Holland talks about William Saunders who developed the idea of value-added assessment. Saunders created an elaborate formula to test the effectiveness of teachers, which he first implemented in Tennessee (344). Through his assessments he is able to identify which teachers are highly effective and which are lacking. “No excuses” schools are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of highly qualified educators through the schools achievement rates of students from low socio-economic statuses (345). The principals in the “no excuses” schools credit teacher success to high dedication, coming in early, staying late and offering extra tutoring opportunities (345). Through value-added assessments principals would be able to weed out undesirables in the profession without being held to the practice of tenure (344).
A centralization of overseeing all teacher preparation is what the unions would like to see. The NEA would like to strip the states of their separate educating and licensing procedures and replace them with a uniform set of national criteria (346-49). The NEA has close links with the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), an organization which would like to see teacher licensing controlled by private organizations. NCTAF would like to see boards set up in each state to keep all the states in tune with national criteria and for all teachers to become master teachers by becoming certified in professional teaching standards by a national board (346).

The last approach Holland mentions is allowing people to teach that have not been trained as teachers but that are masters of a certain subject area (350). In this way talented people that are really excited about their subject could pass that enthusiasm on to the children. In closing Holland seems to think that a combination of this type of recruiting of teachers along with the value-added piece might be the best bet for evaluating and reforming a teacher’s effectiveness.

No: Linda Darling-Hammond, from “How Teacher Education Matters,” Journal of Teacher Education (May/June 2000)
“Educational professor Linda Darling-Hammond offers evidence of failure among alternative programs and responds to criticism of standard professional preparation” (341)

Linda Darling-Hammond represents the flip side of this argument. She believes that teachers are best taught in a school of education. She states that the current discontent in teacher preparation can best be fixed by strengthening current teacher education programs (353). Hammond claims that the research points out that the idea of alternative education for teachers is detrimental to the students (355). She further contends that teachers that come from other fields or receive abbreviated training tend to leave the profession at alarming rates (354).
Hammond is an advocate for schools that have added a fifth year to their teacher education program. These schools allow the teaching candidate to devote the fifth year strictly to preparation for teaching. She mentions that many foreign countries have required additional years of study for education students for many years (357). Statistics seem to show that graduates of the extended programs are not only extremely satisfied with their level of preparation, but also regarded as highly competent by their co-workers (358). Hammond believes that while many people may be masters of a subject they cannot therefore necessarily be teachers of that subject. She contends that teachers need to complete an education program to be the most effective teacher possible (359).
In our own class we have several students that do not have education degrees. Do you think that these students will be able to teach as effectively as those with education degrees? Why or why not?