the bistro off broadway

Toledo Blade
Kasich set to unveil school funding plan
Area districts brace for unknown
By Jim Provance & Nolan Rosenkrans 

COLUMBUS — It’s been a decade since the Ohio Supreme Court issued its fourth and final ruling declaring the state’s funding of schools unconstitutional because it placed students in poorer districts at a competitive disadvantage with their wealthier counterparts. 

With that, the high court ended its participation in what had been an 11-year fight. 

Each modern-era governor has attempted to put his brand on an ever-changing funding formula. This week, Gov. John Kasich will try to deliver on his promise two years ago to craft his own plan as fellow Republicans dismantled the attempts of his Democratic predecessor. 

Mr. Kasich has kept the details close to the vest. 

“I’m not sure what all to anticipate, but there will be significant changes, and those will be for the purpose of trying to assist some of the poor districts,” House Speaker Bill Batchelder (R., Medina) said last week. He said to expect “a big ball of wax.” 

Mr. Kasich has promised his plan will target more funding to classrooms rather than district bureaucracies. He’s promised that state aid will follow students if they forsake traditional public schools for charter schools or voucher-assisted private and religious schools. 

He’s expected to continue to move more toward tying teacher pay to performance, a process begun in the current two-year budget and continued with a law reforming Cleveland’s public schools last year. The plan will also likely direct new state dollars toward programs for both gifted and learning-challenged students. 

And, as his predecessors before him, he has promised to address the age-old criticism framed in those 1997-2002 DeRolph school funding court decisions: local school districts’ disparate abilities to raise revenue from property taxes. 

“I want the child — no matter where they live, no matter what the wealth is in their district — to be able to compete effectively with a child in every other district…,” Mr. Kasich said last month. “Everybody deserves a chance.” 

Much of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland’s second two-year budget passed in 2009 was spent building the “evidence-based” model: the number of teachers needed per subject, classroom sizes, all-day kindergarten, and other things that it purportedly takes to maintain a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” as required by the Ohio Constitution. 

It took legislative Republicans just a couple of votes to repeal that model after they retook power in Columbus; the plan was never fully funded anyway. 

Read the rest of the article at the Toledo Blade



 
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