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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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