Ohio Punishes Poor School Districts with Low Rankings without Providing Needed Funds
Last week the Ohio Education Policy Institute, in research funded by the Ohio School Boards Association, the Buckeye Association of School Administrators and the Ohio Association of School Business Officials, once again documented that school districts serving a large number and high concentration of children in poverty scored lowest on the state’s standardized achievement tests and ranked poorly on other statistics being used by Ohio to measure academic success. Although the state’s ratings remain primarily symbolic this year and will not affect most state policy, it is true that schools and school districts are being branded with low marks and that the state’s ranking of school districts affects the desirability of communities in the housing marketplace. The ultimate result is that the state’s ratings of schools are driving racial and economic segregation across Ohio’s metropolitan areas.
The Plain Dealer posted the data, whose implications reporter Patrick O’Donnell explains: “Districts with less than 10 percent of students considered ‘economically disadvantaged’ graduate 97.4 percent of students while the poorest districts graduate 73.9 percent. That’s a 23.5 percent difference—almost one out of every four students… Districts with the least poverty send nearly twice as many students to college as districts with the highest poverty—82.5 percent to 44.4 percent.”
Jim Siegel, reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, quotes Senator Peggy Lehner, chair of the Ohio Senate Education Committee: “If there’s one thing we ought to be pretty well convinced of at this point is that parents’ income makes a big difference on school performance. But what to do about it is the big question.”
Howard Fleeter, an expert on public finance who conducted the analysis for the Ohio Ohio Punishes Poor School Districts with Low Rankings without Providing Needed Funds | janresseger:
