Cost of Kasich Veto Substantial

As I have reported, Gov. John Kasich decided to cut education funding with his veto pen a couple days ago. Now we know the district-by-district impact of those cuts, thanks to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission projection. Here's the bottom line:

• Overall cut is $90.2 million
• Cleveland is cut the most at more than $13 million
• There are now 114 out of 612 districts that will receive less money in the 2016-2017 school year than the state sent them last school year
• A total of 25 school districts will get cut by more than $1 million
• Mayfield City Schools will see a 40% cut
• Warrensville Heights -- one of the state's poorest districts -- will see a more than $1 million cut

And it's worse if you look at how schools have fared since the 2010-2011 budget. Now 263 districts will receive less money than they did during that Recession budget. If you adjust for inflation, there is now $187 million less money for schools than there was in the 2010-2011 budget and 334 districts receive less.

As I've said, Kasich's veto was devastating to schools and children. Districts need more than the year Kasich generously gave them to adjust to these cuts.

This is not the last thing I'd want families in my home state to remember as I launch a Presidential bid. But, then again, I'm not. So I could be wrong.

John Kasich's Trouble With Promises

Gov. John Kasich is soon to announce his run for President. Good for him. Not everyone can do that. But before anyone goes too crazy over this, I want to explain a little bit about how Kasich has displayed little regard for long-held promises made to Ohio's school children.

As a backdrop, remember that four times the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state's school funding formula unconstitutional because it relied too much on local property taxes to fund education. It was up to the state to develop a better formula that involved more state dollars.

Whether this matters is up to you. But I wanted to make a record of the many promises that have been kept by Ohio Republicans and Democrats during the last five decades that Kasich has simply undone with seemingly little thought or concern. Then blamed public schools for failing to prepare for.

I'll start with the most recent.

Tangible Personal Property Tax Reimbursement

In 2005, the Republican legislature and Governor, Bob Taft, passed House Bill 66 -- the now infamous budget that started Ohio's slow elimination of the state income tax. I'm not getting into the merits of that policy here, but in that bill, there was also the elimination of the so-called Tangible Personal Property (TPP) Tax. 

For you and me, the TPP was a state-created, locally raised tax on business that allowed local communities and schools to collect tax revenue on inventories held by businesses in their communities. It was especially hard on businesses that had lots of equipment, like car manufacturers. There was a widespread belief that the TPP was an impediment to business, and I am among them. It was a tax that tilted heavily against the very businesses our state needed to grow -- manufacturing. 

The trouble was, the tax raised about $2.3 billion for schools. So what could districts do to replace this lost revenue?

Obviously, public education advocates were concerned about this. And the state made a deal with the schools: Go along with the TPP elimination, and we'll replace it for you with a chunk from the new, broad-based Commercial Activity Tax on business until we find a suitable replacement for your lost, locally raised revenue. They put in a five-year window to come up with a replacement, but they never did. So the reimbursement payments (as this TPP replacement thing came to be called) remained in subsequent state budgets, unchanged.

Until Gov. John Kasich came into office.

In his first budget, he whacked the TPP reimbursements substantially as part of his record-breaking $1.8 billion cut to schools. And he didn't replace it with anything, nor did he ever acknowledge that that was ever a part of any deal, even though it was.

He essentially told districts that it was always meant to go away, and it's districts' fault for not preparing for it.

Two nights ago, Kasich completed his full elimination of the TPP reimbursement by line-item veto, eliminating a budget item that in 2011 was about $920 million -- about as much as the state spends on charter schools today, by the way.

Yes, state aid has increased since 2011, but it has yet to exceed the inflation-adjusted amount that was spent in the 2010-2011 budget -- the one that was developed during the Great Recession.

And don't forget that TPP payments were always on top of state aid payments, not included as part of the state aid calculation.

And whenever the governor and legislative leaders talk about "record" increases in school funding, don't forget it follows record cuts in school funding. The current leadership's baseline is the cut year when it really should be the years prior to the cut year. 

The Evidence Based Model

In 2009, Gov. Ted Strickland developed the Evidence-Based Model, with some help from yours truly. The plan, which replaced the so-called "Building Blocks" formula, called for a 10-year implementation of the model that was slated to infuse an additional $3.2 billion in state money for education. Over three years, the formula was examined, implemented and improved by a bipartisan advisory council.

It even received a national award from the Education Commission of the States for being the country's most "bold, courageous and non-partisan"education reform of the year, earning praise from Race to the Top reviewers as "trend-setting."

Kasich's first move was to blow it up, throwing districts for a loop and essentially ignoring the good, hard work put into it over three years by earnest people on both sides of the aisle. He took an extra year to develop his own funding formula that was eventually so panned that even his own political party ended up dumping it in favor of a kind of altered Building Blocks formula -- the same quasi-formula we have today.

Property Tax Rollback

In the 1970s, when Ohio passed its income tax, part of the deal to get that passed was the state said it would use some of the money to essentially pick up 12.5% of the property tax that was being paid for schools and other local community agencies.

In 2013, Kasich eliminated the rollback for future new money levies that are passed, essentially raising property taxes on all future school levies by 14.3% (a $12.50 increase on every $100 is 14.3% of the $87.50 that taxpayers would have paid). 

In all these instances, Kasich simply undid sometimes decades-long agreements between the state and public schools that kept their finances in order. And it's not like he is replacing the money. He's simply saying, "Deal with it whiners."

But I cannot abide Kasich claiming that the TPP is restoring his formula to its pure form. First of all, the state's funding formula isn't his -- it's the legislature's because they dumped his. Second of all, the TPP reimbursement payments were never a part of any formula. They were supplemental payments to make up for lost local revenue that the state promised to would replace some day.

Until John Kasich came along and reneged on that promise. 

When Strickland took office in 2007, he kept the tax package from his predecessor -- a tax package I know he didn't like, but he recognized that the people of Ohio deserved some policy stability beyond political parties. Yes, it was also for political reasons, but it did bring stability.

Kasich, on the other hand, just didn't care that people gave up their lives for three years developing a funding formula, nor did he care that districts had been promised things by his Republican predecessors, nor did he care that he wasn't replacing any of this revenue he was cutting.

He just did it, then blamed districts for not preparing for the state to go back on its word after sometimes decades of keeping it.

I don't know if the havoc Kasich has wrought on Ohio education finance will ever be repaired. Will districts ever trust what the state tells them again? Will the state ever make any more promises that they can possibly be held to beyond the elected lives of these officials?

Part of the deal when you're an elected leader is to respect, understand and work with the precedents that came before you. Yes, even ones you don't like. The people have to deal with your decisions far beyond your stay in office, just as they have had to deal with decisions made long before you ever took office. It is a solemn and serious charge.

The way Gov. John Kasich has treated past promises makes it seem he thinks the state's history began and will end with him. 

That isn't how leaders think. 

That, my friends, is how my 6-year-old thinks. 

Ohio School Children's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how Ohio's charter schools had a week that revealed that no entities misspend public tax dollars more than they do, several convictions came down regarding charter school operators and bribery and that several charters were going to be closed by the state for failing academics.

What a difference a week makes. Now it's the 1.6 million kids in Ohio's local public schools who ended up getting the short end of the stick from this state's elected leaders. Let's go through the last week's carnival.

First, a week ago, the Ohio Senate -- out of nowhere -- creates a dictatorship in Youngstown, essentially undoing the will of the people of that great city.

Then, the Ohio General Assembly fails to pass the first meaningful charter school reform bill since the program started, even though a a majority of the Ohio House was willing to pass the much-improved bill that flew through the Ohio Senate unanimously. So the two-year-long, bipartisan effort to reform Ohio's nationally ridiculed charter school system came up short, keeping this state's national joke of a system in place.

And last night, literally in the middle of the night, Gov. John Kasich took a break from his presidential campaign to cut another $78 million from school districts by eliminating tangible personal property (TPP) tax reimbursement payments in the 2016-2017 school year. While it will take some time to do a district-level analysis of this veto's impact, suffice it to say that small districts like Mogadore and urban districts will get the brunt of the cuts, as will some wealthier districts.

But before this governor started wiping out TPP reimbursements in his first budget, the state's urban districts received about $180 million from them, and more than $900 million of the payments were made statewide, with every district (not just the wealthy ones, as Kasich claims) got at least some reimbursement, with 203 getting more than $1 million. Now that none will be made, it means every district will have to find ways to ensure children don't suffer from these cuts.

Yes, the state has about made up for the TPP reimbursement payments by increasing state aid overall since 2011, but districts still are getting less in this budget than they did five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And that budget was developed at the height of the Great Recession.

I wish I could say this outcome has surprised me. But as a legislator and now a policy analyst, it's pretty well par for the course.

All we can do is keep fighting. Hard.

As my mentor once told me: "If they're getting away with it, it's your fault."

One More Way Campaign Cash Keeps Protecting Bad Ohio Charters

I know we're perhaps 24 hours away from a meaningful piece of Ohio Charter School reform. However, reminders keep popping up about just how limited these reform measures are. That's because Ohio's for-profit operators, who have given millions to politicians over the years are legislative and administrative ninjas.

The latest example? Apparently, E-Schools don't have their poor test scores counted for the first year a student attends the school -- traditionally the worst testing year for these students.

Need I remind you that the two largest individual campaign contributors since the charter program started are William Lager, who runs the nation's largest for-profit school The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, and David Brennan, who runs OHDELA, another E-School? Lager's school got all Fs and 1 D on the state report card, while Brennan's school has the worst overall test scores of any statewide Ohio E-School.

Imagine how bad these schools would be if the state actually counted their first year? How did this happen? Like it always has here -- in the tiny legislative details that make human eyes go cross. Here's how the Beacon Journal described it:

"Academic performance is so inexplicably bad for first-year students in online charter schools that the state, when deciding to shut them down, has chosen to ignore thousands of test scores not only for the online schools, but also for all charter schools.Two years ago, Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio legislature approved a law that threw out first-year test scores after it was discovered that student performances plummeted when they switched from a traditional public school to a stay-at-home charter school."

That's right. The students' performance is so "inexplicably bad" that we just won't count it. So that must be the same for local public schools, right? I mean, it's only fair. Except ... it's not. Of course, if the students come back from the E-School, the local district is absolutely accountable for their performance from Day 1. 

To be fair, I guess the returning student's poor performance is explicable -- they just came back from a horrible Ohio E-School.

This is why even with meaningful reform apparently coming down soon, we must remain vigilant. Against ninjas.

Ohio Senate Proposes Dictatorship in Youngstown

I'm not given to hyperbole. I'm not one of these guys who tells you that something is the "Death of Democracy", or that education reform efforts are trying to completely privatize the public education system. I really try to be level headed when analyzing various education policies, no matter how out there they may be.

But when I received an amendment to House Bill 70 -- the plan to fix Youngstown City Schools -- I was absolutely stunned. It is, without a doubt, a direct attack on Democracy. Why some feel the best way to fix a school system is to create a dictatorship, I have no idea. Democracy's biggest problem is what has always been Democracy's biggest problem -- we keep electing people who think that the best way to fix a school system is to give absolute power to one person ... and other crazy stuff.

According to the amendment, which I've posted here, Youngstown (and any other district that's in "academic distress," but for the moment only Youngstown) would be taken over by a "Chief Executive Officer" who would have "complete operational, managerial, and instructional control" of the district.

That's right. All those elected officials the people of Youngstown bothered putting into office? Forget them. Because, apparently, the problem with the elected board is they're not making decisions fast enough? I really don't get this.

Anyway, the amendment would allow this CEO to make all decisions. In fact, throughout the amendment, the CEO would be given "sole" authority to reconstitute buildings, put any whackadoodle in charge there, decide which schools get which resources, which schools get turned into charters, etc.

By the way, it bugs the crap out of me when education officials are called CEOs. I get it. You want to run schools like a business. Yet they can never explain which business education should look like. Wal-Mart? Costco? Anne's Donut Shoppe?

And there would be zero input from the public. That's right. He (or she) could just do this because they felt like it. Total dictatorship.

And here's the thing. Only when the district gets an overall C grade on the state report card will the district even start to get out of this academic distress thing. So, essentially, we are creating a city-wide, more or less permanent dictatorship in Youngstown.

Why do I say this is permanent? Because all the grades on the state report card are based on test scores, which are nearly perfectly correlated with a district's poverty rate. So Youngstown, with its nearly 100% poverty rate has almost zero chance of ever getting out from under this dictator's thumb.

We've seen how dreadful this situation has worked in Michigan. Why, in God's name, would we want this to work here?

Look, we know what works to turn schools around. First of all, it's recognizing that test scores are an extremely limited way of looking at schools' missions in our most needy communities. They are a part of the story, absolutely. But urban schools -- especially in places like Youngstown -- serve so many other purposes, like community centers, places of safety and comfort for kids, places where hungry children can eat, etc. that judging their community value based just on test scores is extremely unfair.

The best way to improve schools is to engage the community in a community-based solution. Will some schools need to become charters. Perhaps.

But let's not get nuts with the charter thing because 40% of the money sent to charters from Youngstown go to charters that perform the same or worse on the state report card. Yes. Even in the state's one academically distressed district that is allegedly in such bad shape we need a dictator, charters are still outperformed a significant portion of the time.

I digress.

The point is this: Dictatorship should never, I mean never be the solution for the public sphere. We fought a pretty big war (World War II) over this principle. In fact, the reason we were told we needed to get Saddam Hussein and other guys like that is because they were dictators who ignored and tortured their people.

After fighting dictatorships (and founding our country to get out from under a king's thumb), why do we then say the very thing we have spent the last nearly 240 years fighting against is the solution for our own communities?

If I'm a vet, I'm pissed.

Look, Democracy isn't perfect. Yes, sometimes school boards are obstinate and don't function well. But I have a hard time thinking that the legislative body that has ignored the Ohio Supreme Court for nearly 20 years is in any better position to dictate terms.

I would always side with our communities over removing their power to self-determination. Youngstown is a struggling community. My wife's from that area. A significant portion of my family's from there. I am quite fond of it. Yes, it has its quirks. Yes, there are areas where the wilderness has claimed back what once was an asphalt jungle. But I can tell you that the people there are hard-working, tough, proud, and want exactly what every Ohioan wants -- a better future for them and their kids.

By eliminating their voice in their community's future, you are telling the people of Youngstown this:"You are so messed up that the only way to fix it is for us to bring you the form of government we thought was so awful we spent trillions of dollars and millions of lives fighting."

I doubt even if the CEO ended up being Jim Tressel (a Youngstown God), the community would be happy about their new "benevolent dictator."

This is Youngstown, after all. Of all the cities in Ohio to mess with, Youngstown is the last one on my list.

Good luck, General Assembly.

Good luck, Gov. John Kasich.

Plain Dealer Shows Faith in Authorizers Misplaced, and David Brennan's Power

An absolutely amazing story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer came out yesterday the demonstrated emphatically why all this charter reform talk focusing on sponsors (authorizers in every other state) is so flawed.

In it, the PD explained that the worst-performing general education schools in the state -- E-Schools -- are not being counted by the state when they calculate the performance of sponsors. SO, for example, even though the Ohio Council of Community Schools sponsors two of the worst-performing schools in the state -- the Ohio Virtual Academy and David Brennan's OHDELA, the astounding number of Fs those schools get on the state report doesn't count for OCCS's rating. So the state says they're academically perfect, even though OCCS gets $1.5 million in taxpayer money to oversee these schools.

The other schools not counted? Dropout Recovery schools. So the schools David Brennan earns his money on aren't counted on sponsor ratings? So that means that no sponsor should fear oversight of a horrible White Hat school, especially now that they'll only be online schools or dropout recovery schools, because they won't count.

Amazing what $4 million will buy you these days, isn't it?

I've said from the beginning that one of the biggest flaws in the current charter reform effort is the almost singular focus on sponsors, whose effectiveness in this state has been feckless, rather than the schools themselves. I would much rather figure out how to close the schools in which children are being "educated", not the sponsors, who don't actually have the kids.

This amazing PD story demonstrates the point clearly to me.

White Hat Sale Proves Ohio Charter Regime Failing

Finally.

Now we know what White Hat Management is all about. There was always a pretty strong indication that White Hat was about making money, not educating children.

After all, when you get exactly 1 A on a state report card and have 72 opportunities to get an A, you're probably not in the game for the same reasons most educators are.

When you've collected more than $1 billion in taxpayer money without having to make a single appearance before a legislative committee, as White Hat founder David Brennan has been able to do, you're probably not in the game for the same reasons most educators are.

When you contribute more than $4 million to politicians, you're probably not in the game for the same reasons most educators are.

But then we got the news last week that Brennan's White Hat Management was going to sell off their least profitable, "highest performing", and most at-risk for closure schools to a group run by K12, Inc.'s founder Ron Packard. That's right, the same guy who gave us the Ohio Virtual Academy and all its "success."

But White Hat will keep its cash cow online school, OHDELA, which has the worst performance index score of any statewide E-School -- and that's saying something, given how abjectly horrible Ohio's statewide E-Schools perform. Its performance index score actually dropped more than 4% from four years ago, the only statewide E-School to see such a precipitous drop. Again, that's saying something.

It will also keep its other bloated carcass -- Life Skills -- which proudly graduated 2 out of 155 students in one of its locations last year. But don't worry, the state won't ever be able to close these schools because Brennan had the legislature essentially create an exemption for his atrociously performing schools.

So White Hat is now able to sit back and rake in the money from its online operation (the state pays OHDELA enough that the school could provide 15:1 student-teacher ratios, $2,000 laptops to every child every year and still clear 34.5%), while continuously milk Ohio taxpayers through the perpetually operating Life Skills schools, which will never be able to be closed even though no one in their right mind would possibly think that graduating 2 out of 155 children is, in any way, serving our communities' most at-risk children.

Why am I cynical about this sale? Well, look at the reasons White Hat has had schools close. The only ones to ever close because of the state's closure law were the Hope Academies (now called simply the Academies). Five of those schools have closed overall (then re-opened under different names). Only one Life Skills has ever closed, and that was for slipping enrollment, which means the school wasn't hitting their profit margin. This relative instability in the Academies led to this sale, not any other reason.

What's so ironic is the Academies are White Hat's best performing schools. Again, a little perspective is helpful. When your other schools don't get As or Bs on the state report card and graduate as few as 2 out of 155 students, that's not a very high bar. But the 1 A and 5 Bs White Hat schools earned on the state report card last year came out of the Academies. So the company is dumping its "highest performing schools" so it can keep their worst performing schools because they don't really have to worry about closing.

Is there a greater indictment of the state's charter school regime, by the way, then saying it makes business sense to keep your worst schools because at least they'll stay open?

Obviously, the greatest danger to White Hat's bottom line is a strong state school closure law. Even this state's pretty weak one (only 24 of the 571 schools that have opened in Ohio have ever been closed under that statute) has nailed a few White Hat schools.

So this sale will minimize any instability in the White Hat portfolio. They will just sit on their remaining, horrible educational options, collect their millions from us taxpayers, and enjoy their lives.

If only the children they refuse to serve could too.

I know it was automatically generated, but I found meaning in the fact that the link to the Cleveland Plain Dealer story about the White Hat sale ended in "opera" (short for operation) because that's exactly what the Ohio White Hat story has been -- a Wagnerian, tragic, endless tale of cursed gold, hopelessly flawed, even evil gods, and fallen heroes. Only this isn't an opera. It's kids lives -- lives that have been sacrificed so one man's epic quest for gold can continue.

Where is our kids' Brunnhilde? We need her to brave the flames. Now.