This report examines variations in per-pupil funding across states and further analyzes funding differences between districts within each state. In order to make comparisons in funding between states, it adjusts for local costs by looking at of the percentage of taxable resources each state spends on education.
This report examines variations in per-pupil funding across states and further analyzes funding differences between districts within each state. In order to make comparisons in funding between states, it adjusts for local costs by looking at of the percentage of taxable resources each state spends on education. This becomes known as a state’s “effort.”
The study finds that the average percentage of taxable resources spent on education or “effort” across states was 3.8 percent. In comparison, Ohio spends an average of 4.5 percent of total taxable resources on education. However, it should be noted that when making comparisons like this richer states would have to spend a much larger number of total dollars to reach a certain percentage than a poorer state. Therefore states like Illinois and Texas (which have two of the largest state GDPs) spend below that national average at 3.7 percent and 3.4 percent respectively.
When making comparisons between districts within a particular state, the report only accounts for state and local portions of per-pupil spending. When evaluating intrastate funding on education, equity measurements were divided into two categories: measures of “spread” and measures of “progressivity.” Measures of spread refer to the degree in which per-pupil spending varied from the state average. Measures of progressivity gauge the level of spending in districts with a high percentage of low-income children.
Ohio ranks in the bottom half of the country in all measures of spread according to the report. Districts in Ohio have wide variation from the per-pupil average, and in some respects, this could represent high levels of inequity. However, Ohio also ranks as one of the top 15 states according to most of the measures of progressivity. This indicates that Ohio is placing a large amount of their “effort” into funding high poverty schools.
Although Ohio has a relatively inequitable, yet progressive school district funding plan, several states like Texas, Illinois, and Louisiana are lagging behind in terms of both equity and progressivity. Regressive states like these are failing to provide funds to their highest poverty districts and thereby denying resources to the students with the most need.
Measuring Inequity in School Funding
Dianca Epstein
Center for American Progress
August 2011
This recent report by the United States Census Bureau looks at the relationship between an individual’s level of education and their earnings. This report first uses Synthetic Work-life Earnings (an estimate of the amount of money a person might make over the course of their lifetime) to discover basic relationships between education and earnings. Next, the report goes deeper and looks at whether any differences between racial and gender groups exist. Data for this report came from the Multiyear American Community Survey conducted between 2006 and 2008. Data comes from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, and all earnings estimates are reported in 2008 dollars.
The level of education in the U.S. has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past 70 years. In the 1940 Census, 25 percent of people aged 25 and over had a high-school diploma. In 2008, 85 percent of this group had a high-school diploma. Unsurprisingly, this report finds a positive relationship between education and earnings. Annual earnings of those studied ranged from $11,000 per year for a part-time worker without a high-school degree, to over $100,000 for a full-time worker with a professional degree. Education level also plays a large part into whether someone is employed full-time or part-time. Sixty-eight percent of people with a doctorate degree are employed full time, compared to 38 percent of people with less than a high-school diploma.
Significant differences also exist between gender and racial groups. Women lag behind men in terms of earnings at every level of education. Asian women with a bachelor’s degree are somewhat competitive with some male groups such as Hispanics, but on the whole still earn much less than their male counterparts. Overall, the report confirms that the relationship between education and earnings are strong, and that gender and race play a significant factor into this as well. These findings are also relevant for Ohio as only 36 percent of the state’s population has an associate’s degree or higher. Of those who graduate with a bachelor’s degree an overwhelming 83 percent of those are white and only 2 percent are Hispanic.
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Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earnings Estimates |
After an unusually busy spring and summer passing major education reforms, the General Assembly isn’t ready to stop quite yet. September saw renewed debate in the House and Senate over education issues, most notably those bills that impact K-12 school choice.
An amended version of House Bill 136 (Huffman) cleared the House education committee last week. The bill creates the Parental Choice and Taxpayer Savings Scholarship Program (PACT), a private school scholarship program open to all students statewide whose families meet a maximum income threshold (see our earlier coverage of the bill here and Terry’s related editorial above).
Supporters of the bill say it will help allow more families to send children to the school of their choice. Under the current version of HB 136, families making up to $95,000 per year could receive private school scholarships (amounts would vary based on family income). There are no geographical or school performance-based restrictions on the scholarship.
Opponents’ concerns are several. The primary argument is that the program will drain scarce resources from public schools. The bill attempts to mitigate this concern with a gradually escalating statewide cap on scholarships and by limiting how many students per district could use the scholarship to the number that could be supported by the district’s state per-pupil aid (i.e., if a district receives $25 million per year in aid from the state, the amount of scholarships paid out to students from that district could not exceed $25 million). But even in districts that aren’t highly reliant on the state for funding, a significant number of scholarships could still be financed.
Worthington City School Board President Marc Schare testified earlier in September about the economic impact the bill would have on his district. His 9,400-student district receives about 30 percent of its funding from the state – roughly $3,888 per student or $36.8 million in 2009-10. More than 6,300 PACT scholarships could theoretically be funded in the Worthington district (the bill calls for the state to deduct $5,783 from a district for each PACT scholarship student).
In 2009-10, New Albany-Plain Local Schools in Franklin County received 13.7 percent of its total funding from the state, the lowest percentage for any district in Ohio. This equates to $1,663 per student in the 4,100-student district, or $6.9 million, enough to fund nearly 1,200 scholarships.
While it’s not likely that a great number of students would qualify for the scholarship in New Albany (where just seven percent of students are classified as “economically disadvantaged”) or would elect to leave the high-performing district in droves, the potential impact of the bill on districts’ enrollments and budgets shouldn’t be easily discounted.
In addition to the negative economic impact, concerns have been aired about the lack of accountability for private schools under the bill (see Terry’s editorial above calling for common performance metrics across all schools of choice). HB 136 does provide for the Ohio Department of Education to publish disaggregated performance data about participating private schools; however, private schools do not lose eligibility to participate in the program based on poor performance. (An unrelated bill, SB 229 [Sawyer], was introduced last month and would require the Ohio Department of Education to conduct a performance review of all private schools accepting students under the current Ed Choice program.)
Opponents also fear that private schools participating in the program will only enroll high-performing students. Instead, they suggest participating schools should not be selective and should accept all scholarship students who wish to attend. An amendment offered by Rep. Fedor would have required private schools that accept the scholarship to enroll all students who apply, but the amendment was tabled.
Supporters of the bill say it is still a work in progress. House Speaker Batchelder and Senator Lehner, chair of the Senate education committee, have publicly indicated the bill will need additional work in order to progress further. Rep. Huffman, the bill’s sponsor, says he is open to additional amendments and changes to the measure.
The Senate education committee heard debate last week about a bill that would restrict students’ school choice options. Senate Bill 175 (Schiavoni) would prohibit students from enrolling in a charter school if the student’s home district school has a higher state academic rating than the charter school. The law wouldn’t apply to students with disabilities, and all parents could petition their child’s home district school principal for permission to attend the charter school. It is unclear how the bill would impact students who do not have a home district assigned school (for example, Cincinnati Public Schools does not assign high school students to schools based; students must choose a school).
As with opponents of HB 136, supporters of SB 175 put money front and center as the impetus for the bill. Regardless of how much per-pupil state aid a district receives, the state deducts about $5,700 from the district for each child that leaves for a charter school. This funding method has long been criticized by charter school foes and supporters alike. Boardman Local Schools Superintendent Frank Lazzeri testified that his district loses nearly a million dollars annually to charter schools, all of which are lower-performing than his district. Representatives of other high-performing districts, including North Olmsted, have offered similar information. Supporters think the bill would provide a strong incentive for low-performing charter schools to improve and further ensure that the state was making wise investments in education programs.
Opponents of the bill fear it will undermine school choice and say it ignores the fact that high-performing schools don’t necessarily serve all students equally well.
Recently introduced, but not yet up for a committee hearing, are two additional choice-related Senate bills. SB 220 (Sawyer) would put in place a ban on interdistrict open enrollment until an open-enrollment study is conducted by ODE and examined by the General Assembly. Currently, more than 500 districts allow students from outside their boundaries to attend their schools via some form of open enrollment.
Sen. Sawyer has also proposed a measure (SB 219) to lift the exemption for drop-out recovery schools from the state’s charter school academic death penalty. Drop-out recovery schools are special programs serving students who have dropped out of high school or are at great risk of doing so. While they receive an annual report card and rating like other public schools, they are not subject to automatic closure for poor performance. Of the 44 drop-out recovery schools that have at least three years of state performance ratings, nearly half (21) would be subject to closure this year if this bill were currently in place.
The House education committee may resume meetings this month but the Senate education committee isn’t likely the reconvene until after the November 8 election.
This week the Columbus Dispatch ran an article about recently released performance ratings of some 7,500 teachers in central Ohio, including those in Columbus City Schools and South-Western City Schools. Note, while the ratings – which identify teachers’ impact on student learning last year (in grades 3 through 8) – are “part of a larger movement to revamp the way Ohio judges teacher quality,” they are not part of the mandate to adopt a comprehensive teacher evaluation system by July 2013 as required by the state budget. (When those teacher evaluation systems go into effect, they must categorize teachers into four tiers of effectiveness: accomplished, proficient, developing, and ineffective, and student growth will only count for half of the rating. Multiple other measures will also factor into the rating.)
It’s unclear from this article how the ratings were determined exactly (how much student growth differentiates a “most effective” teacher over an “above average” one?), but one thing is clear: there are far more teachers delivering adequate or excellent student gains than not. And, despite all the alarm among educators and unions about using student growth to evaluate teachers’ performance, the breakdown of ratings – in the aggregate – seems pretty intuitive. And they’re probably more accurate, inasmuch as the distribution of teachers is more spread out than in the current binary rating system under which 98 percent of teachers are “satisfactory.”
In Columbus City Schools, for example, 27 percent of teachers (in reading and math for grades 3-8, considering only student value-added data and no other measures) were above average while 22 were below. A full 51 percent were “average” or delivering about a year’s worth of gains. Only 9 percent were “least effective.” That means in a school of 22 teachers, only about two would really be on the bottom-most rung. For those of us know have worked in schools before – especially urban public schools – that number feels accurate. Certainly two teachers in each school are minimally effective, while many more are good or even great.
The percentages for Columbus and South-Western are broken down below in a graph, which also includes the state average.
Percent of teachers by rating (2010-11)
This mirrors what one might expect in any sector, not just education, when it comes to job performance. And it aligns with what Mike Miles, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, shared with central Ohio superintendents and northern Ohio school district leaders and others last month when he outlined his district’s reforms to evaluation and compensation. The goal, of course, is to move more teachers along the quality spectrum toward maximum effectiveness. But in reality, most will congregate somewhere in the middle. (South-Western is the exception in this graph, with many more teachers above average than the breakdown for the entire state.)
As the article points out, this represents only one year of data and for a small subset of teachers (in grades 3-8). It goes on to quote Columbus Education Association president Rhonda Johnson, who says that these ratings are “only a fraction” and don’t “tell the whole picture.” This is true, which is why the other 50 percent of teacher evaluations matters so much. The state budget put in law the requirement for districts to base half of a teacher’s evaluation on student growth, but districts may come up with other indicators to fill out the remaining 50 percent. This might include commitment to one’s school community, “professionalism” (which could account for timeliness and interactions with parents), and of course – classroom observations.
Despite the clarion call that student test scores shouldn’t be the sole determiner of a teacher’s rating, I’ve yet to hear of this being proposed anywhere as a legitimate policy option. Of course there should be multiple measures that are fair, transparent, robust, consistent, and accurate. But teachers and unions would be hard-pressed to admit that when it comes to the distribution of themselves and their colleagues along a quality spectrum, that value-added results like the ones released this week are already more accurate than what current systems depict.
This report examines variations in per-pupil funding across states and further analyzes funding differences between districts within each state. In order to make comparisons in funding between states, it adjusts for local costs by looking at of the percentage of taxable resources each state spends on education. This becomes known as a state’s “effort.”
The study finds that the average percentage of taxable resources spent on education or “effort” across states was 3.8 percent. In comparison, Ohio spends an average of 4.5 percent of total taxable resources on education. However, it should be noted that when making comparisons like this richer states would have to spend a much larger number of total dollars to reach a certain percentage than a poorer state. Therefore states like Illinois and Texas (which have two of the largest state GDPs) spend below that national average at 3.7 percent and 3.4 percent respectively.
When making comparisons between districts within a particular state, the report only accounts for state and local portions of per-pupil spending. When evaluating intrastate funding on education, equity measurements were divided into two categories: measures of “spread” and measures of “progressivity.” Measures of spread refer to the degree in which per-pupil spending varied from the state average. Measures of progressivity gauge the level of spending in districts with a high percentage of low-income children.
Ohio ranks in the bottom half of the country in all measures of spread according to the report. Districts in Ohio have wide variation from the per-pupil average, and in some respects, this could represent high levels of inequity. However, Ohio also ranks as one of the top 15 states according to most of the measures of progressivity. This indicates that Ohio is placing a large amount of their “effort” into funding high poverty schools.
Although Ohio has a relatively inequitable, yet progressive school district funding plan, several states like Texas, Illinois, and Louisiana are lagging behind in terms of both equity and progressivity. Regressive states like these are failing to provide funds to their highest poverty districts and thereby denying resources to the students with the most need.
Measuring Inequity in School Funding
Dianca Epstein
Center for American Progress
August 2011
This recent report by the United States Census Bureau looks at the relationship between an individual’s level of education and their earnings. This report first uses Synthetic Work-life Earnings (an estimate of the amount of money a person might make over the course of their lifetime) to discover basic relationships between education and earnings. Next, the report goes deeper and looks at whether any differences between racial and gender groups exist. Data for this report came from the Multiyear American Community Survey conducted between 2006 and 2008. Data comes from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, and all earnings estimates are reported in 2008 dollars.
The level of education in the U.S. has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past 70 years. In the 1940 Census, 25 percent of people aged 25 and over had a high-school diploma. In 2008, 85 percent of this group had a high-school diploma. Unsurprisingly, this report finds a positive relationship between education and earnings. Annual earnings of those studied ranged from $11,000 per year for a part-time worker without a high-school degree, to over $100,000 for a full-time worker with a professional degree. Education level also plays a large part into whether someone is employed full-time or part-time. Sixty-eight percent of people with a doctorate degree are employed full time, compared to 38 percent of people with less than a high-school diploma.
Significant differences also exist between gender and racial groups. Women lag behind men in terms of earnings at every level of education. Asian women with a bachelor’s degree are somewhat competitive with some male groups such as Hispanics, but on the whole still earn much less than their male counterparts. Overall, the report confirms that the relationship between education and earnings are strong, and that gender and race play a significant factor into this as well. These findings are also relevant for Ohio as only 36 percent of the state’s population has an associate’s degree or higher. Of those who graduate with a bachelor’s degree an overwhelming 83 percent of those are white and only 2 percent are Hispanic.
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Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earnings Estimates |
