Breaking through the rhetoric and complex numbers in the Education Debate
Guest blog post by My School, My Choice special advisor and former state budget director Greg Browning.
We know there is an intense state budget debate taking place in Ohio over the future of our schools and school choice.
We know Governor Strickland’s FY 2010-2011 budget and the Ohio House proposed community school funding cuts will reduce school options affecting more than 80,000 students who currently benefit from school choice.
We know these budget proposals are creating confusion and misinformation.
What many Ohio parents may not know is exactly what these competing proposals mean for our schools, our students and the future of education in our state.
As a former state budget director and current special advisor for My School My Choice, I am providing key points to help parents and others cut through the noise and rhetoric so they can understand, based on preliminary information, what they are up against in the proposed state budget.
1) Community (charter) schools are treated differently than traditional
schools.
– Under the governor’s plan, funding will change from a “per pupil” foundation guarantee ($5,732) that follows students into community schools to an “evidence-based” model for all students, but with the model being applied differently to community schools. This results in substantial state funding reductions totaling over 19% in FY 2010 for all community schools and over 65% for e-schools.
2) Though the Ohio House eliminated the prohibition against for-profit community school operators proposed by the governor, it also made matters worse by reducing community school funding by an additional $25 million in FY 2010 and by $21 million in FY 2011 compared to the governor’s plan. This means that instead of FY 2010 funding dropping over 19 percent it is falling by nearly 26 percent compared to FY 2009.
3) These deep funding cuts are severe yet will yield limited savings because:
–The cuts will likely result in a number of community school closures that will force students to enroll in other community schools or to return to traditional schools.
4) Simply Put: The governor and the Ohio House have produced funding proposals that destabilize community schools and school choice in Ohio.
