Peter Greene writes here about the 16 superintendents of Lorain County who are fighting the bad policies that will hurt students, demoralize teachers, and destroy public schools.
Greene has a special interest in Lorain because his first teaching job was at Lorain High School. Where the school was stood is now an empty lot.
The superintendents “have come together to call for big changes, particularly targeting “excessive student testing, overly strict teacher evaluations, loss of state funding to charter and online schools, and other cuts in funding.”
“Funding formulas are a special kind of bizarre in Ohio. According to the superintendents, the state actually pays more to send students to charters and cybers than to send them to public school. They offered some specific examples but the overall average is striking by itself– the state average per pupil payment to traditional public schools is $3,540 per student, but the average payment to an Ohio charter is $7,189.”
When the superintendents conducted a survey of the community, this is what they learned from the public:
“* their school districts are doing an excellent or good job,
* high quality teachers are the most important indicator of a high quality education
* earning high marks on the state report card isn’t that important
* increased state testing has not helped students
* decisions are best made at the local level,
* preschool education– especially for those students from poverty– should be expanded (and they said they would increase their taxes to support it)
* school finance is the biggest challenge facing our schools,
* and their local tax dollars should not be going to support private schools and for-profit and online charter schools”
Greene concludes:
“Ohio has been hammered hard by the reformsters, and the political leaders of the state have made no secret of their love for charters and privatization. It’s nice to see an entire county’s worth of school leaders standing up to fight back for public education.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is Senator Alexander hearing about this county?
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Average: $3,540 per pupil in public schools, $7,189 per pupil in Ohio charters.
¿? This is doing more for less?
Yes, more for the adult beneficiaries of self-proclaimed “education reform.”
For the vast majority of teachers and students and parents and communities—smash and grab.
And this is the “new civil rights movement of our time”?
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
The old dead Roman: right then, right now.
😎
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It’s the great untold story of charter funding in Ohio. Part of the reason it’s “untold” is because charter lobbyists muddy the water. I heard one on public radio last week pushing charters and she either doesn’t understand how her schools are funded or she’s deliberately misleading the public.
This is the basic scheme:
“When a district raises local revenue, the state counts that against them on their state money. So if a district can raise, say 50% of the cost of educating kids in their district, the state picks up the other 50%. This elimination of 50% of their state revenue to be filled in by local revenue is what’s called a “charge off.”
right now, the minimum charter school deduction from school districts is about $1,600 more than what the average Ohio district gets from the state because of this “charge off””
People don’t know this in Ohio. They don’t know that the charter is pulling a TOTAL share of the state subsidy, when the state never gave that total share per pupil to the public school in the first place. It’s a double whammy for public schools. It actively harms public schools.
http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2015/02/will-charter-schools-get-charge-off.html
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Professor John DiIulio, former adviser to G.W. Bush and professor at Penn, points out that privatization of government services is costing us dearly. Not only are the services not as good, but we may be spending more. I would love to see an accounting of all the money spent on private military services! Even though we privatize, we don’t make the government any smaller. We just shift who is getting the money. With privatization money is wasted advertising and bloated salaries for those at the top. Often the services are less efficient and effective as they may duplicate services that could be rolled into existing public budgets. Dilulio also says we often privatize services for poor people or things we don’t care about. It seems many states and POTUS no longer care about educating our future voters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-better-smaller-governmenthire-1-million-more-federal-bureaucrats/2014/08/29/c0bc1480-2c72-11e4-994d-202
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This is another good resource for Ohio public school state funding versus Ohio charter school state funding. You can plug in your district and see the declining state funding share for individual public schools.
For example, my district, which is an ordinary mixed income Ohio district, 1/2 lower income kids, gets only 2887 dollars in state funding per student.
It is ranked higher on test scores than every single charter school that pulls from it.
http://knowyourcharter.com/
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I know that many superintendents in our area here in Indiana are banding together and fighting but our Republican dominated legislature, Indiana, seems hell bent [literally] in killing our public schools. Our governor it seems wants to get to the White House and decisions made are political, not people or school beneficial.
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It’s nice to see an entire county’s worth of school leaders standing up to fight back for public education.” It would be great if every school board followed their lead and gave each of them unequivocal support.
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Reblogged this on Centerville United for Responsible Education.
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The Superintendent of Mason City Schools in Ohio, has joined the chorus of educators working to stop the testing abomination. Her article, stating her position, was in the Dayton Daily News, on Feb. 8, 2015. In the final paragraph she says, please e-mail contactmason@mason.k12.oh.us if you have ideas for how we can further make our voices heard at the state level.”
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