THE
OHIO EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bi-Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 2, Number 29. December 17, 2008
The Gadfly is taking a few weeks off to enjoy the holiday season. Our next issue will buzz into your inbox in early 2009!
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Doing more with less really does require a whole new approach
The dismal economic news for Ohio keeps piling up. State revenues continue to plummet and economic forecasters are predicting a shortfall, at best, of more than $7 billion for the next two-year budget. Buckeye State government is going to have to figure out how to do more with less. This is particularly true for education, where per pupil cuts of at least 10 percent are likely. Last week, Gov. Strickland even trotted out the cataclysmic possibility of a 25-percent across-the-board cut in spending for all departments, including education (see here). That much out of the education budget amounts to more than a $4 billion reduction in spending for our children.
Kudos to the governor for trying to focus our attention, but whether we're talking about nearly $2 billion or--God forbid--more than $4 billion in cuts, it is now time to take a serious look at what we spend money on and how we spend it. It is time to revolutionize our thinking on spending--from the state superintendent's office to the school boiler room. Tough economic times make possible political decisions and actions that aren't feasible during ordinary times. These are extraordinary times. Done thoughtfully, and equitably, we can develop a plan that can actually strengthen and improve the state's school system over the long haul. Here are four ideas for taking advantage of tough times to strengthen Ohio's K-12 system and help it run more effectively:
Ohio is facing historic economic challenges. Lawmakers should seize the opportunity to not only help the state's education system make it through this crisis, but make it through in a way that results in a stronger and more effective system. Spending less on doing things as usual is a plan for long-term failure. We have so much more to do and so much less with which to do it, that we now need new thinking and bold action.
A version of this op-ed originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer (see here).
by Terry Ryan
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Public pension funds threaten us all
State Rep. Larry Wolpert, R-Hilliard,
is completing his fourth term in the Ohio House and will leave the General Assembly
because of term limits. Fearful of what looming public pension fund deficits
would mean to future state budgets, he introduced House Bill 645 (see here)
requiring that new public employees be enrolled in so-called defined-contribution
pension plans, rather than the defined-benefit plans that are dominant now for
teachers and school administrators. Wolpert shares his case for this change
below. These comments do not necessarily reflect those of the Ohio Education
Gadfly and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, but we think they are important
to share with our readers. In fact, we recently issued a report on the State
Teachers Retirement System and have commented on this issue in the past (see
here).
In the last century at the height of the Industrial Age, it was common for employers
to provide workers with pension benefits. Most of these pensions were based
on a defined benefit: that is, a specific pension amount was based on years
worked and salary earned. Now, in the 21st century, it's becoming apparent that
a defined-benefit pension program creates major liabilities for employers (including
public-sector employers) and, in many instances, these liabilities cannot be
met (see New York City as an example here).
To remain competitive and still provide workers with a pension benefit, many
private-sector pension plans have been converted to defined-contribution plans--plans
in which the retirement benefit is based on contributions made to the pension
plan by the employer and the worker. Since benefits are keyed to contributions,
these plans are unlikely to have unfunded liabilities.
Around 70 years ago Ohio created a defined-benefit program for all state and local government workers. At the time, Ohioans were relatively well off and earned about 10 percent more than the average American. These government employee plans remain some of the best pension plans in the country--public or private. According to the Ohio Legislative Services Commission, Ohio government employee compensation now exceeds Ohio private-sector employee compensation by six percent, mainly because of the benefit of a defined-benefit pension.
However, Ohio, unfortunately, is not economically as rich as it was. We are, in fact, becoming poorer and grayer. Our economy is stagnant, we have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and the state is barely maintaining its population level. Even before the current housing bubble burst, Ohio's per capita income was 10 percent below the national average. Out of the 50 states we rank 46th in personal income growth. On average 1.5 percent more people move out of Ohio than move in. Ohioans who remain in the state are becoming older. The only reason we are not seeing population decline is births exceed deaths.
With the crash in the equities and real estate markets, there are even more concerns about preserving the commitments made to Ohio's government workers. If our state pension systems cannot make their financial commitments, ultimately Ohio's already hard-pressed taxpayers must make up the shortfall. State pension benefits are guaranteed under Ohio's constitution and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for meeting these commitments. Increasingly, Ohio's taxpayers are either retired (often before they want to be) and living on limited fixed incomes, or they're working in lower-paying jobs that have replaced higher-paying industrial jobs. If state pension systems run out of money because they cannot continue to pay these generous government pensions, Ohio taxpayers could easily be stuck with a bill for billions of dollars in pension promises.
I introduced House Bill 645 to short-circuit a looming financial disaster for the state that would be far greater than what we face now. The idea is to protect both the incomes of retired Ohio government workers and Ohio's taxpayers. The bill simply states that any new entrant into a state pension system must be under a defined-contribution plan instead of a defined-benefit plan. The intent of the bill is to reduce any future unfunded liabilities in the pension systems. There is no time in the 127th General Assembly to pass this pension reform bill and I am leaving public service at the end of 2008. But I hope that this bill will be used in the next General Assembly as the basis for reform as financial pressure continues to grow on these generous government benefit programs.
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Arne Duncan a good choice to bridge education differences
Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr., Tuesday, hailed President-elect Barack Obama's pick for education secretary.
Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who has headed the Chicago school system for the last seven years. Duncan, 44, earned a reputation for pushing hard for better schools, including charter schools, in Chicago while at the same time reaching out to teachers, parents, and the business community (see here).
"Arne Duncan is a terrific pick, and not just because he's close to the President-elect and speaks Chicago-ese. He's a proven and committed and inventive education reformer, not tethered to the public-school establishment and its infinite interest groups, nor bedazzled by blandishments and commands from Washington," Finn said (see here).
Duncan will need all his experience to resolve the disagreements among education advocates, teachers unions, and civil rights groups concerning improving America schools (see here).
The Gadfly likes many of Duncan's initiatives. Under his leadership, charter schools in the nation's third-largest school district were expanded (while also held accountable for results) and performance-pay was introduced. He also supports recruiting people as teachers who have little classroom experience but solid academic backgrounds. In 2006, he called on Congress to substantially boost funding for the No Child Left Behind Act. Under Duncan, more Chicago students are taking challenging courses and student results on the Illinois state achievement tests have gone up.
So we're doing better (what a relief), but, yikes, still falling behind?
The fifth in the series of biennial
national and state-by-state report cards for higher education is out this month.
Ohio, like much of the nation, is doing better, as usual, but not good enough.
Technically, it's called National Report Card on Higher Education but
we like the short version--Measuring Up 2008 (see here).
The report is issued by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Much of the report seems same-old, same-old, although, like a really frightening horror movie it still scares the stuffing out of you each time you read it. It certainly ought to be scary reading for Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, who has ambitions of expanding enrollment in the state's colleges and universities by 230,000 students (see here). The new report reveals plenty of roadblocks a very able Fingerhut will have to circumvent, including an already prostrate state budget for the next biennium.
For Ohio (see here), the report finds that eighth graders perform well in science, math, and reading but don't write well at all; blacks still lag substantially behind whites in high-school graduation rates, college enrollment, and in attaining college degrees. We get a B-minus for student preparation.
Overall college-enrollment rates for Ohio high schoolers are at the national average. The chances of a high-school freshman enrolling in college by age 19 are fair but adult enrollment is low. What's really disturbing, although not surprising, is that college is completely out of reach for a poor family in Ohio, which, according to the report, must devote 57 percent of its income to college expenses, even with tuition assistance and other financial aid. For families generally, the share of income needed to pay for college has risen substantially in Ohio.
Tuition and fees at Ohio State University, for example, have increased 98 percent since 2000-2001, according to the Board of Regents. At Ohio University, they're up 75 percent. In Ohio, students and families also pay more than families in the best-performing states. So we get an F for affordability, although so does Massachusetts, who earned an A for student preparation. The state is looking at such a deep budget hole it, likely, will be impossible to maintain even inadequate levels of help to needy college students.
The Measuring Up reports were inaugurated in 2000 and this year's edition has a number of new data sources and compares results over time. All this measures more accurately what is becoming the mantra of the results of American K-12 education--we're getting better at preparing our children for college but other nations are getting better even faster and we're falling behind--just as we were in the 2006 report.
One of the best parts of the Measuring Up reports are the graphs, which are done well and provide a huge amount of quick and pertinent information. Here's what the 2008 report tells us overall: American students are more likely than in previous years to take courses that prepare them for college but too many students are still graduating high school unprepared to be first-year college students. In the last decade, the likelihood that a high-school freshman will enroll in college by age 19 (roughly four years later) has increased only from 39 percent to 42 percent. And the proportion of 18-to-24 year olds enrolled in college has increased even less. College enrollment for working age adults is declining nationally. Once enrolled, the actual completion rate for American students is poor, according to the report. See a table listing all the index scores used in the report here.
There's a healthy economics lesson in this issue. As has been reported extensively in recent press accounts (see here), colleges and universities are pricing students out of the market. Higher-ed costs, on average, are rising faster than family incomes, food, medical care, and housing. The increase has made it more difficult for many students to attend college and could very readily explain the drop in adult enrollment. More students also are borrowing to attend higher ed institutions.
"State leaders face a crucial option for higher education policy as they balance their budgets," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center, summing up the new report. "They can respond as most states have in the past, by continuing to allow tuition to rise dramatically and passing the brunt of the financial distress onto students and families. Or they can establish state policies for tuition and financial aid that balance the financial burden among the state, the institutions of higher education, and students and families. This second option protects educational opportunity at a time when the states and the nation need a better-educated citizenry."
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A
Child-Centered Solution to School Finance in Ohio
Brian Gottlob
The Buckeye Institute
December 2008
The Buckeye Institute is the latest organization to weigh in on how to improve Ohio's school-funding system. Its recommendation: fund education through a statewide property tax and distribute the funding via a free market, universal voucher system. Under this system, per-pupil dollars would be sent to parents in the form of payment vouchers that parents would then give to the school their child attends--be it a district, charter, or private school. Per-pupil funding would be weighted based on a child's educational needs and include a facilities component. Schools would still be permitted to charge tuition above the public funding level, but a privately funded tuition tax credit scholarship would be available to "promising or deserving" students who want to attend a more costly school. Likewise, if a child enrolled in a school that charged less than the public voucher amount, his family could use the money for tutoring, educational books or materials, or approved education services.
The notion of funding students, not schools, staff, or programs, is a smart one and a primary tenet of weighted student funding, for which Fordham has long-advocated (see here and here), and Ohio would do well to expand quality school choices. But, accountability must accompany choice, something this report leaves out. A Child-Centered Solution to School Finance in Ohio calls for minimal regulation of schools, asserting that "nearly 2 million children and their parents, free to choose from among many schools, can monitor the quality and viability of schools more effectively than can rigid state regulations, enforced by a small number of government officials."
But as Ohio has seen first-hand with its charter schools, families choose schools for a litany of reasons that don't always include academic performance. And parents rarely have perfect or even reliable and easy-to-digest information about the academic performance of their child's school. As a result, our state has low-performing charter schools that languish for years without seeing all the children and families flee as one would expect in a rational choice market (see here). This is a problem that would only grow in the charter, district, and private sectors if accountability standards were relaxed. Read the report here.
Core
Problems: Out-of-Field Teaching Persists in Key Academic Courses and High-Poverty
Schools
Richard Ingersoll
The Education Trust
November 2008
This study starts with an unassailable premise: "Teachers cannot teach what they do not know." Yet teachers are still being assigned to teach subjects they haven't mastered themselves, finds this valuable EdTrust report. Veteran teacher analyst Richard Ingersoll used the latest federal Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) (see here) to determine not only that too many teachers have neither an academic major nor a state certificate in the subjects they teach, but that this problem is particularly prevalent in middle schools, math classes, and high poverty/high minority schools.
To wit, while only 17.2 percent of core academic subjects (i.e. English, math, social studies, and science) are assigned to out-of-field teachers in high schools, a whopping 42 percent were so assigned in middle schools. And high-poverty schools saw twice as many out-of-fielders than low-poverty schools (27.1 versus 13.9 percent). Even more troubling is how little has been done to ameliorate this problem. While No Child Left Behind tried to make some headway with its Highly Qualified Teachers provision, Ingersoll discovered that states have been severely under-reporting their out-of-field teachers. In the Buckeye State, the state education department reports that 93 percent of core classes are taught by highly qualified teachers. Yet SASS, a survey of teachers themselves, suggests that about 62 percent of classes are taught by teachers with certification in the subject they teach.
In conclusion, the study suggests a few sensible solutions. First, colleges and universities need to continue to improve their teacher preparation programs, perhaps following in the footsteps of UTeach at University of Texas at Austin (see here), which is now being replicated as part of the National Math and Science Initiative (see here). Second, districts can grow excellent teachers through their own "teacher residency programs," such as those in Boston or Chicago. (President-Elect Obama has promised to replicate these.) Third, districts could take a page from programs like Teacher for America (see here) and the New Teacher Project (see here), which have blazed new trails in recruiting good math and science teachers. Finally, districts can use incentives to attract quality teachers through differentiated compensation programs and specialty bonuses. You can find this comprehensive report here.
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The Ohio Education Gadfly is published bi-weekly (ordinarily on Wednesdays, with occasional breaks, and in special editions) by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Have something to say? Email the editor at [email protected]. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email [email protected] with "unsubscribe gadfly" in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward the Gadfly to others, and from our website you can even email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message. To read archived issues, go to our website and click on the Ohio Education Gadfly link. Aching for still more education news and analysis? Check out the original Education Gadfly.
Nationally and in Ohio, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, along with its sister organization the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, strives to close America's vexing achievement gaps by raising standards, strengthening accountability, and expanding high-quality education options for parents and families. As a charter-school sponsor in Ohio, the Foundation joins with schools to affirm a relentless commitment to high expectations for all children, accountability for academic results, and transparency and organizational integrity, while freeing the schools to operate with minimal red tape. The Foundation and Institute are neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.