RtT Report: Ohio's 3rd Grade Unfunded Mandate a Significant Challenge

Ever since Ohio won its $400 million Race to the Top (RttT) grant in 2010 -- about a year before the current regime took office -- the federal government has generated annual progress reports. This year's just came out today.

Nothing in Ohio's progress report was particularly noteworthy as excellent, unlike other states' (only Ohio's inability to get district buy-in on equitable distribution of teachers caught EdWeek's eye). However, I noticed something interesting on page 4 of the report. Here's how it reads under the overall "Challenges" section:

Legislative changes throughout Year 3, including changes to the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and modifications to State requirements for the student growth component of educator evaluation ratings, posed significant communication and implementation challenges for the State.

 As you, dear reader, know, the Third Grade Reading Guarantee in Ohio has been one of the hallmarks of Gov. John Kasich's plan for education reform. And it sounds good, right? I mean, who doesn't think that all kids should be reading by the end of Third Grade?

Well, instead of investing about $1 billion in the initiative during the preliminary phase, as Florida did when it instituted the guarantee in 2002 (during a recession, I might add), which put reading coaches in every K-3 classroom in the state, Ohio put $13 million into it during the first year. That amount, even House Education Chairman Gerald Stebelton agreed, was "inadequate."

In Gov. John Kasich's new school funding formula, there is about $100 million a year earmarked for early reading. However, because the state now includes several line items in the formula that used to be on top of the formula amount, that $100 million is, in effect, much less.

There is little doubt, though -- even assuming the full amount set aside is spent on early reading -- that the investment in ensuring student success is much less in Ohio than it was in Florida, which still has kids repeating Third Grade, by the way. However, that number has been cut in about half since the initiative began.

By the way, there remain serious questions about whether retaining kids will actually hurt them in the long run, leading to higher dropout rates and other serious consequences.

Irrespective of that, though, what the RttT report demonstrates pretty clearly is that the current leadership's decision to implement one of the most potentially onerous unfunded mandates ever thrust upon school districts (estimates place the number at nearly 20,000 Third Graders being retained ) poses significant challenges to districts that are already struggling with significantly fewer resources than they had two biennia ago, as well as significantly more money going out the door to less successful charter schools and, increasingly, private schools.

So there is more required of schools, and far fewer resources with which to accomplish those very laudable requirements. If even federal program reviewers recognize the enormous challenges these unfunded state mandates pose to Ohio's educational system, I hope that Ohio's leaders recognize the potential issue they have created as well. That way they can actually fund the initiative so it has a reasonable chance of success, or do a phased-in implementation to allow the program to grow slowly into success.

Otherwise, I fear all lawmakers have done is set up schools and, more importantly, children for failure.

Ohio School Districts Get By With Same State Aid as They Got 12 Years Ago

One aspect of school funding that has always driven school districts crazy has been the fact that the state tells them they're getting a certain amount of state support, but the amount of state support districts end up getting is often far less.

How can this be so? Simple. School Choice programs. And as these School Choice programs have increased in size and scope, the relative amount of state money going to the school districts for which the money was originally designated (and districts were told to expect) has also dropped. 

Significantly.

In the 1998-1999 school year, when the only real school choice option was open enrollment because Charter Schools and Vouchers were in their infancy, districts received 98.4% of the funding the state said they needed.

In this school year (2013-2014), that number has dipped to 82.7% -- an amount essentially unchanged from last school year. In fact, the percentage has been dropping every year except one -- 2010 when the percentage increased by .4%, and this year's .1% bump.

Today, school districts receive at the end of the day about the same amount of money they received in the 2002-2003 school year. Last year was the lowest amount since the 2001-2002 school year.

And the difference is even more striking when accounting for inflation. The three lowest net foundation payments on record occurred during the last three school years under Gov. John Kasich's two recent state budgets.

If the state had kept pace with inflation since the school year during which the last Ohio Supreme Court school funding ruling was made (2002-2003), there would be $1.5 billion more going to Ohio's school districts. Instead, they are receiving 21.2% less than that inflationary increase.

This is the result for more than $1 billion annually going out the door to Charter Schools and Vouchers, the vast majority of which perform far worse than the public school districts.

It is time to examine the quality of these programs that have left school districts operating with essentially the same revenue they had 12 years ago.

As the state continues to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into "solutions" that have provided no better results and children in traditional schools with far less revenue with which to succeed, it is imperative that state leaders take a hard look at these programs' efficacy. 

For what matters is what works for kids, not what works for the adults. 

Source: Ohio Department of Education SF-3, PASS, Bridge and SFPR Reports. FY2014 Report based on March #1 Payment.

Lottery Two-Step Alive and Well

I've been on vacation for the last few weeks with my family. It was great fun and very, very hot. But I'm so glad to be back in Ohio where it's, well, very, very hot. Like I never left.

Back to work...

Remember not long ago how Ohio School Districts were told that gambling interests would come to their financial rescue? Well, my friends at www.plunderbund.com noticed something interesting: despite record Ohio Lottery profits, school districts are seeing no additional revenue. How is this?

It's something I call the Lottery Two-Step. Others more familiar with government finance-ese will understand it as "supplantation". When the Lottery was created in the 1970s, one of it's major flaws of its creation was not restricting the ability of politicians to supplant General Revenue Fund money in schools.

What does that mean? It means legislators and governors routinely remove General Revenue Fund money from schools and replace it with the same amount of Lottery money, which means schools receive zero additional financial benefit from the Lottery money. It also means that other areas of the budget receive the benefit intended for schools by the People of Ohio.

I should make it clear this is a bipartisan problem, though some have been more willing to admit what the state does than others who deny it. The fact is that the language of the Constitution does not forbid the Lottery Two-Step.

Another interesting tid-bit in the Plunderbund post, though, is the amount that was accumulated by the Lottery this year. It was $771 million -- a record. What's fascinating is that Charter Schools received a total of $771 million from the state this year too.

What's that mean for traditional school districts? Even if the state weren't supplanting General Revenue Fund money with Lottery money, all the Lottery money is eaten up by Charter Schools anyway.

So either way, school districts receive no additional benefit from the Ohio Lottery, whose funds (and resulting additional financial benefit) were intended to serve as a financial savior for traditional public schools.

The Lottery Promise made four decades ago in Ohio reminds me of this exchange from the movie version of Charlie Wilson's War:

“A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.” But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “we shall see.” The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We shall see.” The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We shall see.”

Will Ohio's leaders ever treat the Lottery money the way it was originally intended?

We shall see.

UPDATE: Dispatch: Vouchers Popular. Popular = 3/4 of Slots Remaining Open?

Note: I overlooked a sentence in the Dispatch story that mentioned the 60,000 vouchers, as pointed out to me by the reporter. So now it's just the headline writer who thinks that having about 3/4 of vouchers remain unfilled means it has proven popular. My apologies to Jennifer Smith Richards for the oversight, though I made it very clear in my original post that it was not she who wrote the headline.

Remember when state leaders trumpeted how great it was that the number of EdChoice voucher slots were increased from 14,000 to 30,000 this school year and 60,000 next school year? Why, then, are only 17,438 vouchers being used next school year -- an increase of maybe 500 from last year, according to the Columbus Dispatch story?

Even more interesting: this school year represents the first school year since the EdChoice voucher program started where less money is being transferred to private schools from public schools through the vouchers than the previous year. It equates to about a 5.4% cut in the EdChoice voucher program.

So if more than four times as many parents could have chosen to use vouchers next year as two years ago, why is it then that only about one-third did? And is the Dispatch headline -- "School-voucher Programs Prove Popular" -- really true?

Not once in the Dispatch story was it ever even mentioned that 60,000 vouchers could have been taken next year. Perhaps if it had,  So the question is: Why didn't the headline writer write something different. Something like this perhaps?

"Parents More Satisfied with Public Schools than Politicians"

Or something like that.