Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio
Yesterday Ohio Representatives Robert Cupp (R-Lima) and John Patterson (D-Jefferson) released a much needed, bipartisan proposal for a new Ohio school funding formula. The Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan, of course, is preliminary. It will be proposed as the substance of the Ohio House Education Budget and would have to be enacted by the Legislature. (Quotes in this post come from the preliminary PowerPoint presentation from Monday afternoon’s session.)
Conceptually the plan described yesterday afternoon would raise the level of state support for K-12 public education to a more adequate level and additionally address what is currently inequitable distribution of funding across the state’s 610 school districts. The Cupp-Patterson Plan considers not only each school district’s capacity to raise funds from its local property tax base but also considers the amount and concentration of family poverty.
The details are not yet available, and of course, the details matter a lot in a school funding formula. A state can make its formula more equitable, while at the same time underfunding the total allocation of state funds; such a plan merely levels down all districts. We’ll need to look at the amount of funding the Cupp-Patterson Plan recommends. Then, of course, because this plan is intended to serve as the basis of the Ohio House Education Budget, we’ll need to look at what the Legislature agrees to fund. A workable school funding formula would need to be fully funded.
In recent years without a fair and adequate formula, Ohio has merely imposed punitive, outcomes-based school accountability—punishing the lowest scoring schools and school districts. Currently Ohio rates and ranks schools and districts on a state report card largely derived from aggregate standardized test scores—which have for decades been shown to correlate less with school quality and more with family and neighborhood poverty. The state CONTINUE READING: Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio | janresseger