Competitive Grants: Winners and Losers? or A Just System for All?
Bill Phillis is the Executive Director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding. Bill was Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction when I met him over twenty-five years ago. I have always known him to be a champion for justice for Ohio’s children.
The Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding is the coalition that brought theDeRolph School funding case back in the early 1990s. In DeRolph v. State, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled four times that Ohio’s school funding is inadequate, inequitably distributed, and overly reliant on local property taxes. Then just over ten years ago, new members were elected to the Ohio Supreme Court, and the Court released jurisdiction in the case, in essence telling the legislature it was not required to produce a remedy.
This morning Bill critiques the idea of competitive grant programs as part of school funding. At this time when our federal education policy emphasizes competition in programs like Race to the Top, Bill advocates for making the school funding system work to provide education as a civil right for all children. He emphatically rejects the path we seem to be following instead—creating competitions by which some schools or school districts can qualify for public funding,