Education Next has just released an interesting and tantalizing debate on school funds. In the wake of Flores, issues of funding equity have again risen to the fore. It’s lucky then that the participants in this debate, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth (authors of the tome Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools) and Michael Rebell (author of the forthcoming Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts) are here to hash it out. Hanushek and Lindseth argue that spending the money already going into education more wisely is the ticket, specifically by reforming teacher pay scales to a performance-based model. Rebell counters that if you take a second look at the numbers, American education funding is actually neither adequate nor equitable. Definitely worth a read!

And if this topic interests you, Fordham (in concert with Brookings) will be publishing its own (slightly more general) contribution on this conversation in the form of the forthcoming book From Schoolhouse to Courthouse. Keep an eye out for its release in August.

Our own Checker Finn is opining for National Journal’s just-launched Education Expert Blog, which poses a question every week to a panel of education heavyweights. Checker gets straight to the point in answering this week’s query, “What is the best use of stimulus money?” Checker’s response: “I feel as if contributors are being asked to opine on whether the sun should rise and set tomorrow.” Read more on the Education Experts Blog.

An interesting bit of school news in the Los Angeles Times today. Seems that due to tough financial times the LA Unified School District won’t be hiring any new Teach For America teachers next year! TFA of course places talented young college grads into teaching positions in low-income, struggling schools. According to the piece, the district has worked with TFA since the 1990s. But now, belt tightening is forcing painful changes. The story says that on top of not accepting any new TFA teachers next year, the district is also considering laying off some of its current 67 first-year TFA teachers.

Today’s Ohio Gadfly is a must-read. In Capital Matters, Checker, Terry, and I offer Fordham’s recommendations for the state’s pending biennial budget. Terry ponders, amidst Democrats and education interest groups clamoring for more money, if we haven’t in fact seen the “golden age” of school funding in the Buckeye State.  Mike highlights the ups and downs endured by Columbus Collegiate Academy in the start-up charter school’s first year of operation, Matt and Rachel recommend some good reads, and more!

Ohio is in the midst of a heated debate about the future of school funding. The governor, supported by House Democrats, has presented an “Evidence-Based Model” of school funding that is based largely on the work of professors Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus. This model has been roundly criticized by professor Paul Hill, professor Eric Hanushek, Fordham, and Republicans in the Senate who dismantled the governor’s plan in their version of the state biennial budget.

Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth write in their new book on school funding that such evidence-based models are “simply not credible.” As an alternative to the evidence-based model, Senate Republicans have proposed moving closer toward a system of school funding that funds the child. This has triggered calls from groups like Education Voters of Ohio for “a list of citations that suggest per-pupil funding does a better job than the evidence-based model in determining what an excellent education looks like.”

In response to such calls following is a list of some of the most recent and thoughtful pieces on the advantages of funds following the child:

1)    Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. This peer-reviewed document includes more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the studies involved an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country’s best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation.

2)    Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio from Achieve, Inc. and McKinsey & Company. This report drew on a wide range of internationally recognized experts in education and specific best-practice examples from around the world.

3)    Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity and Antiquity in School Finance from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This bipartisan manifesto on Weighted Student Funding was signed by 75 educators and policymakers from across the country, including three former U.S. Secretaries of Education, a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, and two former governors. This extraordinary coalition urged a “new method of funding our public schools - one that finally ensures the students who need the most receive it, that empowers school leaders to make key decisions, and that opens the door to public school choice.”

4)    An Integrated Approach to School Funding Reform in Ohio, a report of the School Funding Subcommittee of the Ohio State Board of Education, adopted by the full board in December 2008. This report from the Ohio State Board of Education provided recommendations to state policy makers for moving toward Weighted Student Funding in the Buckeye State.

5)    Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance, by Public Impact and the University of Dayton School of Education and Allied Professions. This report provided a detailed plan for how the state of Ohio could move toward Weighted Student Funding. It was authored by leading school funding experts in Ohio (Professors Dan Raisch and Barbara DeLuca at the University of Dayton) and the Harvard-trained (and Rhodes Scholar) school funding expert Bryan Hassel of Public Impact.

6)    Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education they Need by William G. Ouchi. This book drew on the results of a landmark study of 223 schools in six cities, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Ouchi and his research team discovered that the schools that consistently performed best also had the most decentralized management systems, in which autonomous principals—not administrators in central office—controlled school budgets and personnel hiring policies.

The American Enterprise Institute is holding an event next Tuesday entitled, “Schoolhouses and Courthouses: Does Court-Driven School Reform Deliver?”

The focus? State court judges have used the “education clauses” of their state constitutions to deem education funding inadequate and force states to dedicate more dollars to it. Has increased funding led to commensurate gains in student achievement? If not, what would it take for these investments to deliver? Stanford University’s Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth, a senior partner in the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brenna, will discuss such questions. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, will respond. Our pal Rick Hess will moderate the chat.

You can find more event details on the AEI website.

Checker has an op-ed up at The National Review’s “The Corner” blog, in which he compares and contrasts the auto industry’s bankruptcies with the education system’s.

To be sure, schools are smaller than giant corporations, but they’re at least as burdened by employee contracts, long-term obligations, community roots, political entanglements, all manner of vendors and suppliers, and “shareholders” in the form of children and parents that depend on them. And because they are public agencies rather than private firms, there is nothing quite like “Chapter 11″ through which they can be stripped of their debts and obligations, reorganized, and given a fresh start.

This fresh start, or “reconstitution,” can take the form of school closures, and that’s just what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is looking to do with thousands of “dreadful schools,” as Checker terms them. More from Checker:

As Education Secretary, Duncan runs no schools and has no direct authority over closing or reconstituting even the worst of them. He can, however, manipulate three levers:

Billions in discretionary spending under the federal “stimulus” package, far more than any of his predecessors had. With that cash, he can try, in effect, to bribe states and districts to get serious about school reconstitution - much as Geithner, Obama et. al are doing with automakers, banks, etc.

The overdue re-authorization of NCLB, which could change the ground-rules and - if lawmakers are really gutsy - remove federal funding from slacker schools, districts or states. (Of course, Duncan and Obama would need to persuade Congress, which heretofore has been loath to take money away from even the worst of public schools.)

Itching to find out what Arne’s third lever is? Can you think of five “core problems” with the closing-and-then-reopening model that make it so difficult to pull off? Checker can.

Or, if that’s not enough to send you to the source, maybe the fact that Checker makes an athlete’s foot-related analogy will do it. Bon voyage.

A few months ago, we reported that the NJ Supreme Court refused to kill off the half-dead and long-damaging Abbott v. Burke. Corzine, backed by the New Jersey legislature, had come up with a new funding formula that would no longer favor the 31 poor districts (”Abbott” districts) singled out by the case. (For reference, the 2008-2009 NJ budget allocated $4.1 billion to the 31, while the remaining 616 districts only got $7.8 billion for the whole lot of them.) Yesterday, a NJ Superior Court judge in Hackensack upheld the new formula as constitutional, calling it a “thoughtful, progressive attempt to assist at-risk children throughout the state of New Jersey, and not only those who by happenstance reside in Abbott districts.” Hallelujah and Amen!

Regarding Mike’s post below, I’m sure it depends on the type of reform. Firing practices certainly become more relevant in hard economic times, but on the other hand, standards-based reforms may fare better when there’s money to pay for them. As the Washington Post reports today, Virginia may join Florida and Georgia in cutting testing budgets:

[Virginia Superintendent Patricia I.] Wright said the $380,000 a year saved through elimination of the [third grade history] exam could be used to construct new kinds of questions for math tests, put fifth- and eighth-grade writing tests online and bolster elementary reading exams.

And Andy points out below that North Carolina is making a similar move, cutting back on tests not required “for high school graduation or by federal law.”

Budget woes would seem to give the anti-testing crowd an excuse they can use.

Back in early January, when the full scope of the Great Recession was just starting to become clear, and the stimulus bill was but a glimmer in President Obama’s eye, Checker Finn, Rick Hess, and I argued that bailing out local school districts would be a big mistake, because it would forestall opportunities for reform:

There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value - and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.

Kevin Carey, writing at Quick & the Ed, referred to that as the “school poverty gambit” and later the “Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform.” And he demurred:

Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work...Are there any examples-any?-of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefited students in the long run?

That’s a reasonable counter-argument. But I’ve suspected that, for example, if districts were forced to lay off teachers, and moved ahead with “last hired, first fired,” parents and citizens somewhere would rise up in revolt, and push to change that and other onerous policies. And guess what? It’s finally happening, in Seattle of all places. Columnist Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times describes the situation:

Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.

But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools’ newest teachers in a “last hired, first fired” manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.

More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing “great distress and upheaval” in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.

“Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids,” wrote one parent.

“We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids,” wrote another.

“Teacher unions are an anachronism,” said another.

The organizers of the petition are a group of parents called Community and Parents for Public Schools. They agree what they’re doing is very un-Seattle.

Seattle! Now, this is hardly a national trend (yet!), and who knows if the parents will win this battle. (God bless ‘em, though.) But this is the beginning of something important.

I met with former American Enterprise Institute president Chris DeMuth yesterday, to interview him for a book project I’m starting, and he said something very interesting. Reform doesn’t happen because someone in a think tank somewhere writes a brilliant white paper, he argued. Reform almost always happens as a reaction to scandal. And oftentimes, the scandalous behavior has been going on for years, right out in the open, until suddenly it sparks a populist outrage.

Well, “last hired, first fired” is an outrage. It makes a mockery of meritocracy. It saps the energy from our youngest teachers, and rewards longevity over effectiveness. And it’s been sitting there for a long, long time. Maybe now is the time that it comes to be seen as the scandal it is, and maybe now is the time that it will spark the populist outrage necessary for reform.

Photograph by borman818 on Flickr

Last week’s Fordham Institute and Catalyst Ohio report, Checked Out: Ohioans’ Views on Education 2009, still has people talking in the Buckeye State.  On Sunday, Fordham’s own Terry Ryan discussed the survey findings on the Ohio News Network’s statewide public affairs program, Capitol Square.  Yesterday, the Columbus Dispatch editorial board questioned components of Governor Strickland’s education reform plan in light of the survey:

...no one should be surprised that Ohioans have relatively little faith in the state government to fix education. Asked which entities they would trust to decide how to spend tax money for schools, 47 percent said they would trust their local school districts most. Another 22 percent would trust individual schools most. Only 17 percent said the State Board of Education. The least faith was placed in the governor, at 3 percent, and lawmakers, 4 percent.

Many education reformers argue, and respondents to the Fordham survey seem to agree, that improvement is more likely if states set performance standards and give school districts and principals plenty of latitude in deciding how to achieve them.

How unfortunate, then, that Gov. Ted Strickland’s proposed education plan is heavily prescriptive, setting detailed formulas that mandate precisely how school districts should spend their state money—primarily by hiring more teachers, counselors and aides and otherwise continuing business as usual.

If the survey is an accurate portrait, the governor and lawmakers have their work cut out for them in persuading Ohioans that they know what they’re doing and that what they’re proposing is best.

Ohio’s governor and House of Representatives are supporting a state budget bill that would add billions of dollars in state spending on public education over the next decade and would mandate more decisions about public education at the state level. Yet a new Fordham Institute & Catalyst Ohio survey released today, Checked Out: Ohioans’ Views on Education 2009, indicates that 74 percent of Ohioans believe that if the Buckeye State decided to spend more money on the public schools, the money would not get to the classrooms and improve education and instead “would get lost along the way.” Further, just 3 percent of Ohioans want the governor making “decisions about how to spend tax money allocated to Ohio’s public schools” and a meager 4 percent trust the state legislature with the task. Read our take on the survey’s results in today’s special edition of the Ohio Education Gadfly.

Yesterday in the Ohio Senate Education Committee, school funding expert and Buckeye (OSU class of ’66 and ’72) Paul Hill offered testimony about how Ohio can go about reforming its system of school funding while at the same time raising student performance. Dr. Hill’s comments were in stark contrast to the presentation last week in the Ohio House by Allen Odden and Lawrence Picus in support of Governor Ted Strickland’s proposed “evidence-based” funding model (which actually differs pretty significantly from what Odden and Picus are selling). While the governor is attempting to provide all the answers (with spending restrictions and top-down mandates on things like staffing levels, class sizes, and new operating rules for schools), Hill admits that we don’t always know the answers when it comes to how to best educate our students. Further, the answers are different for every child. And that’s okay. Hill (based on five years of solid research) argues funding systems shouldn’t seek to mandate how schools educate children.  Instead, they should be flexible, promote innovation, and reward success through a system of continuous improvement:

This gets me to my critique of the Governor’s plan. In short, it prevents experimentation with new ideas that can lead to continuous improvement. Instead of opening up experimentation and encouraging schools and districts to pursue more effective methods, the Governor’s plan mandates particular uses of funds. It maintains, and even bulks up, an existing set of job descriptions, administrative structures, and rules on who can teach and how time is used.

The Governor’s plan violates the common sense dictum that you can’t get a dramatically better result by doing a little more of the same thing. His plan claims, implausibly, that students will stop dropping out, and unproductive schools will turn around, if only the state mandates hiring of more teachers, administrators, instructional specialists, teacher leaders, clerks, building managers, secretaries, media services staff, non-instructional aides, and nurse’s aides.

Some schools might benefit from these uses of money, but many won’t. In particular, schools serving the disadvantaged need to find ways of providing more effective instruction, instruction that meets their students’ needs and remedies their earlier learning deficits, not bigger administrative structures. Similarly, the highest-performing schools in the state generally don’t need these beefed-up staffing tables and would use extra money in different and more productive ways if they had the choice.

The school finance provisions of the Governor’s plan promote stasis, not continuous improvement. It makes big bets on increased staffing, heavier administration, and other mandates on uses of funds. Unfortunately those bets are essentially shots in the dark: no other school system has improved detectably by using money in these ways.

Education is full of irony. For example, in Ohio - as in other states - charter schools were born in the late 1990s out of lawmakers’ exasperation with failed district schools that were constantly seeking more funding through adequacy lawsuits in the state courts.

Fast forward to 2009, and Ohioans are still debating school funding and charter schools. The Ohio House released its version of the state biennial budget this week and during a press conference leadership claimed that the budget would finally make Ohio’s school funding system “constitutional.” Deep in this 3,679-page budget document, Democratic lawmakers propose the creation of four classes of charter school funding. All of these levels of funding, by the way, are less than what traditional district schools would receive—some charters would simply be shorted less than others.

The proposed categories are:

1) District-sponsored brick-and-mortar charter schools. These schools, regardless of their state academic rating, receive the base charter funding plus the “Ohio educational challenge factor.” This factor is an index ranging from 0.75 to 1.65 that is intended to adjust funding for each school to account for student and community property wealth and socioeconomic factors. Charter schools that are sponsored by the district from which the majority of their students hail will be assigned the educational challenge factor of that sponsoring district. This is a significant bump in school revenue—for example, in Dayton the educational challenge factor is 1.448 while in Cleveland it is 1.59. There were 47 schools serving 5,800 children in this category in 2007-08, and only 15 were rated “C” or higher by the state.

2) Non-district-sponsored brick-and-mortar charter schools rated “C” or higher by the state. These schools get the same funding as district-sponsored brick-and-mortar charter schools except they are assigned the statewide average educational challenge factor (1.22). There were 65 schools serving 15,000 children in this category in 2007-08.

3) Non-district-sponsored brick-and-mortar charter schools rated “D,”"F,” or not rated at all by the state. These schools get less funding than either of the two categories above. They are not assigned an educational challenge factor so will operate with the base funding only. A charter school in Dayton in this category would receive about 31% less funding than a district-sponsored school, a charter in Cleveland would receive nearly 40% less, and a charter in Columbus more than 20% less. There were 180 schools serving 37,800 children in this category in 2007-08.

4) Cybercharter schools, regardless of sponsor. These schools get dramatically less funding—at least half of what a poor-performing district school would receive. There were 34 virtual schools serving 24,000 children in this category in 2007-08.

Here is the irony. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court declared the state’s funding system of public education unconstitutional: “Due to glaring discrepancies in school buildings, facilities, access to technology and curriculum, some students within the state are being deprived of educational opportunity.” Yet, in 2009, the governor and House Democrats, in seeking to make the state’s system of school funding “constitutional” are in fact proposing the creation of a statutorily sanctioned class of underfunded public schools. Students in these schools are predominately needy and children of color - 65% of Ohio charter school students are economically disadvantaged while 57% are minority!

The irony here would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that we are talking about real children, which makes it tragic. Failed schools should be closed. Starving them of resources only hurts the children in them.

President Obama and Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland are pushing their school reform agendas hard. Sitting in Ohio, one can’t help but compare and contrast these efforts. There are similarities but also some interesting differences. Here’s what we see from the Buckeye State.

Where there is agreement: Both the governor and the president want to spend more money on public schools; both, also, want new investments in early education. These are long-standing Democratic positions so no surprises here. But—and this is new—each is seeking more seat time in schools for kids. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan could have been speaking for both Strickland and Obama when he said recently, “I fundamentally think our children are at a competitive disadvantage. The children in India and China who they are competing [with] for jobs are going to school 25, 30 percent more than we are.” Gov. Strickland wants to add 20 days a year to Ohio’s school calendar.

Where they disagree in kind: Both Strickland and Obama say they see quality teachers and better teaching as pivotal to improving student achievement. Here, Strickland’s plan is less bold than Obama’s, but controversial enough that it has garnered the ire of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. The governor’s plan seeks to overhaul teacher tenure (making tenure decisions in nine years, up from the current three), and his plan would create new teacher licensure requirements and a teacher residency program.

President Obama goes further and challenges one of the central orthodoxies of teacher unionism when he proposes merit pay. The president has even hinted at the possibility that such pay should be connected to student test scores. Obama acknowledged that the teacher unions don’t like his plan when he told Hispanic business leaders recently, “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom.”

Where they disagree in full: In both his 2007 and his 2009 budget proposals Gov. Strickland sought to cut funding to charter schools while increasing their regulatory burdens. He has also sought to ban for-profit school-management companies from operating in the Buckeye State. President Obama, on the other hand, has been an advocate for more federal charter school spending and has spoken openly about his support for charters.

The president told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently, “the number of children going to the Cleveland Public Schools who are actually prepared to go to college [is] probably one out of seven or eight or ten. And that’s just not acceptable. It’s not acceptable for them. It’s not acceptable in terms of America’s future. And so we’ve got to experiment with ways to provide a better education experience for our kids, and some charters are doing outstanding jobs.” Further, Education Secretary Duncan, when CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, built one of the country’s premier portfolios of charter schools-which now serves about 23,000 students. This included a 1,450-student school operated by the for-profit charter operator Edison Learning. It also included holding schools - both those run by for-profits and non-profits - to account for results.

From where we sit in Ohio, President Obama seems serious about school reform while Gov’ Strickland seems committed to his largest interest group - the teacher unions.

As Eric just reported, Loudoun County is playing games with its stimulus dollars. Specifically, it’s asking schools to return county dollars and replacing them with federal dollars, presumably to help plug holes in other areas of the county’s budget. The net result is that school spending is staying roughly the same. (Unlike the WaPo, which reported on the story, I don’t see the problem here, but I digress.) While Duncan has warned that these sorts of shenanigans will be dealt with swiftly and harshly, Loudoun’s decision might not be such a bad thing.

Duncan made it clear that there were some serious reform strings attached to the stimulus dollars. The county is still using the feds’ money and is still subject to those stipulations. But by supplanting instead of supplementing, it’s not using the old trick of buying more reform with more money, which is typically how the unions and other status quo supporters have been forced into swallowing it. As Bruce Fuller explains, “[You] need bright, shiny new dollars to assuage skeptical teacher unions to experiment with merit pay.” But in this case, the county has now handed Loudoun schools shiny new dollars with plenty reform strings attached and yanked the dull old dollars with no strings. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic about how much “reform” the feds can really extract from states and districts with the stimulus, but could this possibly be an example of more reform for the same price? And if yes, shouldn’t we be celebrating?

Fordham’s April 9 event—”Can Budget Cuts Catalyze Education Reform”—began airing on C-SPAN at 10 am this morning (watch it streaming online here or buy it on DVD here). It was a great event/discussion with featured guest Marguerite Roza from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. The video should be up on our website later today as well. In the meantime, you can take a look at her PowerPoint presentation and enjoy the following pictures from the event.

Marguerite Roza spoke in our conference space in downtown DC.

A C-SPAN camera focuses on Fordham President Checker Finn.

Checker Finn, left, and Dwight Holmes, Senior Policy Analyst, School Finance & Economics Unit at the National Education Association

As a homeowner whose property taxes recently went up to support the Columbus City School District’s November 2008 levy and bond issue, I was pleased to see this editorial in today’s Columbus Dispatch asserting that, “As Ohio families continue to choose public charter schools, officials at traditional public schools need to become nimble in adjusting their budgets to match shrinking enrollments.”

Every day, families and businesses adjust spending to reflect changing circumstances. So do charter schools, which often make multiple, mid-year corrections to staffing levels and school spending plans. Yet traditional districts in the Buckeye State have responded far too slowly to factors like changing enrollment.  Perhaps, as the Dispatch points out, that’s because despite a decline in the number of students they serve, many districts have actually seen an increase in funding over the past decade:

Nevertheless, large enrollment reductions, repeated through the years, should trigger staff reductions and consolidation of students into fewer buildings. The district’s closure of more than 15 buildings since 2002 has not kept pace with the enrollment drop in that period of more than 12,000 students.

Moreover, a 2006 analysis showed that because of increases in state funding, Columbus schools collected $20.3 million more in state aid for the 2005-06 school year than in 1999, even though it had 6,000 fewer students. Figure in the district’s local property-tax revenues, which are unaffected by the departure of students to charter and private schools, and officials have even less backing for their claim that charters are costing them money.

Much has been much written about the challenges of understanding Ohio Gov. Strickland’s school-funding plan. For example, the Akron Beacon Journal asked, why some “wealthy districts receive more state money than much poorer ones? How were the costs calculated for components of the key funding factor, the Instructional Quality Index?” (see here and here). If, however, the numbers are a mystery for traditional school district officials they are—stealing a line from Winston Churchill—”a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” for charter schools.

The accompanying graph shows a sample of charter schools in Dayton and how their funding would improve, or suffer in 2010 under the governor’s Evidence Based Model of school funding. The numbers were shared in mid-March through a simulation provided by the Ohio Department of Education. The X axis shows student enrollment in each school while the Y axis shows the revenue gain/loss in thousands of dollars for each school in the scatter plot.

What one sees here is that there are some winners, and some big time losers. Why are there such extreme differences in funding? There is no clear answer. In looking at the data it seems, at first blush, that the smaller a school is - that is, the fewer children it serves - the more it gains under the governor’s plan. The small Dayton sample in the graph tends in this direction, and when looking at numbers for charters across the state this also seems to be the trend.

The reason small schools may benefit is because the proposed funding model is based on a series of “organizational units.” One of these units is for all nonteaching staff in a school. Thus, funding for a charter school includes one “administrative organizational unit” whether the school serves 40 kids, 100 kids or 1,000 kids. Smaller charters gain and larger charters lose because the funding for administration is static regardless of how many students a school serves. It is a classic one-size-fits-all budgeting model that assumes a charter serving 48 students needs as many administrators as one serving 657 students.

But, when one looks deeper this explanation doesn’t fully satisfy. Even with the small Dayton sample this doesn’t make sense because the Trotwood Fitness and Prep Academy (TFPA) is an outlier. It serves 286 students while the Dayton Early College Academy (DECA) serves 285 students, yet the TFPA would receive a net gain of $333,000 in 2010 under the Governor’s plan while DECA would see a hit of $536,000.

Other possibilities for such strange and extreme funding differences could relate to things like students with special needs, children in poverty and the like, but those differences exist in the state’s current school-funding formula. Yet, there aren’t nearly the extremes in the current formula that one sees in the governor’s plan.

Again, using DECA and TFPA as examples, in 2009 DECA received $1.9 million in state funding while the TFPA received about $2.2 million. This was a funding difference of about $300,000 which could be attributable to things like differences in special education students and students in poverty. But, under the governor’s proposed funding formula, which must assume the schools are serving the same types of students in 2010 as they served in 2009, the difference between funding for DECA and TFPA jumps to a whopping $1.12 million.

The final riddle here relates to academic achievement. The governor’s plan as written would punish the charter schools that are most successful while rewarding those that are mediocre or downright terrible. Some schools with a long track record of academic failure would see a bump in new state dollars while some high flyers would see serious cuts in funding.

One final explanation for these discrepancies is that the numbers shared in the simulation are simply inaccurate. They neither accurately reflect the current numbers for charter schools nor the proposed numbers under the Governor’s plan. If this is indeed the case, it helps explain why the Governor has outsourced the rewrite of his plan to “fix” school funding to outside consultants at Driscoll and Fleeter in Columbus. But if true, then such incompetence raises real concerns about other parts of the Governor’s education plan that would increase the responsibilities and authority of the state department significantly in coming years.

It is good to know that the governor, the House and the Senate are all working hard to revise version 1.0 of the Governor’s school reform plan as it is indefensible in its current manifestation. Hopefully, for the children and taxpayers of Ohio, version 2.0 will be debugged and much improved.

This morning, the Department of Education posted all the information you could ever want about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (phew). But we’re still interested in exploring budget cuts and whether they can catalyze education reform. Are you? Then be sure to sign up for our April 9 event featuring work by Marguerite Roza from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Who knows, after slogging through pages and pages of government documents, you might just be ready to talk about trimming the fat.