Ohio Schools Must Prepare for Worst (OH)

July 22, 2010

Ohio’s education policy makers need to get real.

The Ohio Department of Education’s proposed budget for the upcoming two years is ridiculously unrealistic. Everyone in education knows that — unless they’ve been living under a rock.

Meanwhile, a new school funding commission, charged with recommending and advising how much schools should get from the state in an ideal world, also has proposed a big jump in state aid. Among other things, the commission doesn’t believe that the state is compensating districts for the true cost of paying teachers.

Ohio faces up to an $8 billion shortfall in its coming two-year budget. (Currently, the budget is about $50 billion.) So it’s absurd to think that, in this next budget cycle, lawmakers will be interested in making everything right and fair for schools (or anyone).

Put aside, for a minute, the funding commission’s belief that districts aren’t being given enough state support to adequately pay their teachers. The education department’s plan alone would increase education spending by $929 million. But that’s not accounting for the fact that the current budget was bailed out by $845 million in federal stimulus aid for schools, money that cannot be counted on to be there again.

This means t hat to do just what the education department proposes, lawmakers would have to find another $1.7 billion. All told, the education department wants spending on schools to grow by 4.5 percent the first year and 3.4 percent the next, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Both the education department’s spending plan and the funding commission’s proposal are designed to keep the state on track to pay for Gov. Ted Strickland’s “evidence-based” funding model. That program was designed to incrementally create a constitutional school funding system built on eight years of spending increases. The problem, of course, is that no one knows where the necessary new money is going to come from.

What with Ohio’s school funding method having been declared unconstitutional four times, the governor has the right goal and some good ideas. But he has yet to say how he will pay for his changes. With state revenue expected to increase only minimally for a good time to come, there isn’t any easy solution.

The state desperately needs a jolt of realism. Legislators and policy makers are right to be in reform mode. But the reforms they should be promoting need to be about saving money. They have to find ways to maintain critical state services while spending less.

Smart local school leaders and their school boards are already preparing for the worst. They have to believe that the downsizing that many of them have been going through won’t be stopping any time soon. Every school district should be working on a contingency plan for that very real possibility. Teachers’ unions across the area, for instance, have been agreeing to contracts with low or no raises.

Floating fantasies that a state funding increase could be around the corner is only distracting schools from the hard work that needs to be done.