BuckeyeBlog

It seems some government officials can’t take “no” for an answer. Several school districts in the Cincinnati area are seeking voter approval to raise taxes after being rebuffed in the recent past. Two districts’ pleas have been rejected three times, another district’s requests have been voted down twice.

As in the past, school district officials say there will be dire consequences if the levies fail. Of course, these levies failed in the past and it still seems these districts have managed to keep their doors open.

These discricts will certainly have less revenue than school district officials desire. The threat to stop sports programs or shut down clubs if taxes aren’t raised is a reaction to poor planning in the past. As I wrote about here, on the state level much of the budget problem can be attributed to the growth in size of state government employment as well as the increase in pay to state workers. While I haven’t crunched the numbers, I suspect something similar is going on in these school districts.

The fiscal problems being experienced there should serve as an incentive for the districts to look at their hiring practices, how much they pay employees, and how much employees contribute to their pensions and health care. Real savings could be found in these areas, I imagine. A little foresight could prevent a repeat of these troubles during the next recession.

Ohio University professor Richard Vedder discusses how government policies to make college more affordable have actually made it much more expensive:

Earlier this year, the Buckeye Institute released a study written by Dr. Vedder and me critiquing the Ohio Board of Regents plan for Ohio’s higher ed future.

Reason TV has a new video out on the folly of President Obama’s proposed higher education entitlement:

Dr. Richard Vedder and I sounded many of the same themes in our critique of the Ohio Board of Regents’ higher education plan.

There will be a new report coming out this summer that shows how well for-profit colleges do in educating at-risk students. In fact, from preliminary reports, this study will show these for-profit colleges do better than other types of institutions for this at-risk group.

This research bolsters two studies the Buckeye Institute released earlier this year. The first, Which Way for Higher Education in Ohio, is a critique of the Board of Regents plan to expand higher education institutions in Ohio. Specifically, there is a desire to locate a new community college in Youngstown. As the report discusses, there is little need for a community college in that town due to its shrinking student base as well as the presence in Youngstown of for-profit education institutions. As the new research shows, these for-profit institutions may actually be better for the area than a new community college.

The second report, Higher Education Vouchers in Ohio: Towards a CollegeChoice Program, outlines a new way to fund higher education in the state. Ohio students would receive a voucher they can spend at any Ohio higher education institution, including for-profit schools. This would be especially beneficial for at-risk students in Ohio.

The Columbus Dispatch editorialized last week about the Strickland plan for public schools:

Strickland’s plan and his proposed budget would lock Ohio’s schools into business as usual, only with more money. It invests huge amounts of money in simply hiring more teachers, counselors, nurses and other employees — hence the enthusiastic union support — as if simple hiring ratios can fix what’s wrong with public schools.

Meaningful change would come from bypassing this inertia-prone system and, instead, allocating state dollars to individual students, taking into consideration any special needs such as disabilities and lack of English-language proficiency, and allowing families to apply those dollars to the schools they think are the best fit for their child’s unique needs.

What would an Ohio education finance system that allocates dollars to individual students look like? See our report “A Child-Centered Solution to School Finance in Ohio” for a detailed road map on how to move from our current status quo-centered finance system to one that is truly family friendly and quality oriented.

Kudos to Ohio State Rep. Seth Morgan who has filed suit with the Ohio Supreme Court seeking the Court’s backing in his quest to secure information for the Governor under Ohio’s Open Records Act (found in Ohio Revised Code’s Chapter 149).

Unfortunately the Governor has stiff-armed Rep. Morgan’s request for the evidence Strickland used to formulate his ‘Evidence-Based Education’ plan for state school spending. 

The Administration’s recent, repeated attempts to hide its workings from the people raise important concerns about the Governor’s commitment to freedom and liberty in Ohio.

The Founders knew that the consent of the governed, upon which the legitimacy of the government they were designing would rest, would mean nothing if government were to deliberately obscure its workings.  An opaque government would invalidate popular consent, and with it, the legitimacy of governmental authority.

No transparency, no freedom.  Even Gorbachev understood the connection in offering glasnost to the Soviet people twenty years ago now.  Remember that, Governor? 
(more…)

The news that Governor Strickland’s education finance proposal is being modeled not by the analytical research resources of the Ohio Department of Education but by a private firm of Driscoll and Fleeter is worth noting on several levels.

First, the Akron Beacon Journal among others scores the move for its obvious obfuscation of the workings of government.  Observers can’t see how ’the sausage is being made’ as they could have when the ODE was doing such work.  We’ve long pointed out that one of the characteristics of a government worthy of a free people is that its inner workings are thoroughly transparent to citizens.  When the Governor hides from public scrutiny the development of the policy he has staked his incumbency on, he is, in effect, insulting the freedom of Ohioans.    

Second, the Governor has turned to a firm which has enjoyed a cozy relationship with a key vested interest in the school funding debate.  As the AP notes Driscoll and Fleeter are “….on the payroll of a private tax institute run by the Ohio School Boards Association…”.  That’s a pretty generous assessment as any examination of the public record would reveal that the OSBA, their so-called private tax institute (”Education Tax Policy Institute”) and Driscoll and Fleeter are a thoroughly integrated entity.  Just take a look at the ETPI’s tax filing submitted in August of last year (available through Guidestar service, free registration required) and you’ll see it was initially ’signed’ by Rich Levin, a former partner in Driscoll and Fleeter and now the state’s tax commissioner — some 18 months after Levin had left private practice for his current position. 

Much research has documented that school finance in Ohio is a largely a political exercise distributing tax dollars among and according to the interests of adults who work in the system and the bureaucracies they control, all according to their relative political power.  The interests of children and their parents, relatively powerless in the universe of school politics, come in a distant second in this exercise.  (See for example, this report by our Matt Carr.)  

By outsourcing the design of his proposed system to the OSBA, the Governor continues to put the interests of education bureaucrats over that of children and parents. 

Finally, we just have to ask why the Governor allows himself the freedom to choose a for-profit provider in the vital task of designing a new school finance system when he won’t permit the same choice to Ohio children and their parents seeking to get the best possible education?   Clearly Strickland’s objections to for-profit schools are not based on consistently applied principles.  And our research shows that they aren’t based on fact, either.  The reality is the Governor just continues to serve up special interest politics when it comes to school finance reform.

Dr. Rich Vedder talks with David Hansen on how Ohio’s higher education policy has gone astray on the latest edition of Buckeye Voices.

Check out our latest two pieces on higher education.  First, a critique of proposed policy by the Board of Regents found here, and then an alternative that funds students’ educations, not institution’s peragatives – found here.

Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Education Deborah L. Delisle had this to say about Gov. Strickland’s education plan announced (in part) today.

“There is so much there you could almost ‘gasp’,” said state Superintendent Deborah L. Delisle.

Let’s see, by the Governor’s proposal:  teacher union power grows, top-heavy bureaucracies grow, parental authority is diminished, schools continue to be run primarily for the benefit of adults rather than kids, and there’s no relief or even mention of messes such as communities where dropouts outnumber graduates.

While Superintendent Delisle gasps, the rest of us parents and taxpayers just moan.

Buckeye Institute President David Hansen and Education Policy Director Matthew Carr spoke with 1370  WSPD-AM’s Brian Wilson Thursday during a Liberty and Learning tour.  Listen as they discuss the recently released Buckeye Institute roadmap to educational success, “A Child-Centered Solution to School Finance in Ohio,” charter schools and education transparency.