BuckeyeBlog

This morning, Joel Riley of 610 AM WTVN in Columbus spent three hours discussing the Buckeye Institute’s proposal for merit pay for Ohio teachers. Below is Joel’s discussion with David Hansen, President of the Buckeye Institute:

The entire show is available on WTVN’s podcasting page.

National Review Online has posted an interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  Since leaving office, he has remained involved in education reform through the Foundation for Excellence in Education.  One part of the Q&A caught my attention in particular: 

NRO: In your opening remarks at the conference, you said that our education system is like “an 8-track system living in an iPod world”? What changes do you think need to be made to bring our education system into the 21st century?

  

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As S.B. 57, passed by the Ohio Senate, gears up in the Ohio House, there’s little doubt that the teachers unions, Democrat party and Gov. Ted Strickland will be angling toward the veto. The bill would establish scholarships for students with disabilities.

Strickland’s view is, “Funding private schools with public tax dollars deprives the state and its taxpayers of proper oversight .”

Yep. Proper oversight.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a few free individuals are allowed to do what actually works, rather than report to bureaucracies and do the happy dance when their ignorance ratios move from 56 percent to 55 percent. Teachers, students, parents and those who care about getting actual things done for actual children have opened a school that avoids patterns in the decoration, installs obscuring, movable screens over mirrors - all things that are important to autistic students.

Autistic students gained their ability to benefit from funds spent for them several years ago, thanks to efforts by many people, including state Rep. Jon Peterson, R-Delaware.

Too bad students with other disabilities won’t be able to do the same.

In justifying his veto last year of a voucher program intended to help disabled children achieve better in their educations, Governor Strickland offered up two of the teacher unions’ tried and true critiques of school choice. One was the fallacy that regulatory accountability is both effective and the only tool for conforming public expenditures to public goals. We’ll explode this notion elsewhere on BuckeyeInstitute.org in a couple of days or so.

Strickland then offered the familiar assertion that school choice hurts the children who remain in public schools, through draining resources in a way that would harm “…the vast majority of students, including disabled students, who attend public schools.”

Unfortunately, the facts don’t back the Governor up on this assertion.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have looked at the Florida McKay Scholarship, the program model for Ohio’s special needs voucher, and found that:

Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.

Disabled public school students’ largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.

The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program.

Strickland has threaten to veto SB 57, Sen. Coughlin’s and Rep. Peterson’s latest version of a statewide special needs scholarship.

If he follows through on his threat, we’re wondering exactly how the Governor will explain to the parents of disabled children across Ohio, both those who would have taken advantage of the voucher and those who wouldn’t have, why he chose to ignore the facts about a special needs voucher and favored the prerogatives of teacher unionists and other adults over the needs of their children.

For a fuller briefing on the special needs voucher, visit BuckeyeVoices.org where a podcast with report author Winters has just been posted.

Follow this link to get a copy of a motion filed recently in the case of a modern era Brown v. Board of Education.

Our Matt Carr’s excellent work on intradistrict spending inequities in Ohio is Exhibit A for the plaintiffs.

The Buckeye Institute will not be intimidated by union bullies who seek to silence those who speak truth to power. The CEA attacked us today because we have facts showing how teacher union contracts in Ohio shortchange children, and especially disadvantaged children.

The Buckeye Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit think tank that engages opinion leaders, policymakers, media and the public with scholarly analysis and commentary. We promote free market solutions, not candidates. We support ideas, not political parties. We have nothing to hide. Sadly, the CEA cannot say the same.

Read the report and once you notice that Columbus schools aren’t even mentioned in the study, you’ll realize how groundless and politically motivated the CEA’s actions are.

The Tax Foundation’s Chris Atkins reviews the impact the cottage industry of increasing school spending through litigation has had on state budgets over the past decade or so in our latest BuckeyeVoices podcast.

Far from being a homegrown, grassroots reaction to school spending disparities, the DeRolph case is just one example of over 20 where the state school spending lobby has tried to enlist activist judges in overruling the spending decisions of elected officials.

Interestingly, Chris’s analysis backs up what Ohio Republicans have often claimed, which is that they responded to DeRolph by significantly increasing state spending on public schools.

Too bad many of these same Republicans have vigorously denigrated the Tax Foundation’s and Chris’s competence in assessing Ohio’s job-killing 5th-in-the-nation state and local tax burden (and you know who you are, Ron Amstutz and Bill Sietz) when the facts didn’t serve their purposes.