The video below shows a program organized by the Fordham Foundation and conducted at Cleveland State University on March 14.  The title of the program was “Doing More With Less In K-12 Education — A Timely Discussion For Ohio”

Doing More with Less in K-12 Education: Cleveland State University from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

After opening remarks by Chester Finn, President of the Fordham Foundation, the first speaker, Nate Levenson, a “strategic planning management consultant,” formerly Superintendent of Schools for Arlington Public Schools in Massachusetts, stated that the goal of public education is clear — we know what we are trying to accomplish — we simply need a good strategy establishing clear priorities of what most contributes to accomplishing that goal.

This basic structure of Levenson’s proposition seems valid, but his foundation — we know what we are trying to accomplish — to me seems weak, because in the current setting, the bottom line thinking that directs what districts are trying to accomplish emphasizes producing results on objective tests. In Ohio, school districts put all of their energy into getting high marks from the Ohio Department of Education — on tests of minimum competencies.  Without a better vision of aim / purpose of public education, the effort to “accomplish more” is certain to be misdirected.

Levenson says that the quality of teachers is what matters most, yet, in a time of budget cuts, districts are tempted to stop funding effective programs for teacher development and teacher mentoring.  He says that in a time of decreasing dollars, school systems must invest even more in generating and analyzing data.  He says, “Information is power, and during tough times we need more information, not less.” Levenson urges his listeners to study effective districts. He says some districts have figured out how to have high achievement, while at the same time making cuts in staff members and making other cuts as well. “We can learn from them,” he says.

The second speaker Steven F. Wilson is founder and president of Ascend Learning, a charter school management organization in New York City, and a former executive vice president for product development at Edison Schools.  Wilson says that today’s education reformers have a rare opportunity. He says, “Maybe once a century we have an opportunity to completely change what we do in schools. … we need to break what we do now and start over again.”

Wilson says, in education, we are spending huge amounts of money on teachers, but what we are buying — seniority and advanced degrees — has no relation to teaching efficacy.  He says we need to “get rid of the least effective teachers — with gusto. … We’ve been running an employment system, not an education system, for the last 40 years. We need to change what we do and put students first.”

The biggest current strategy for improving education — reducing class sizes — according to Wilson, has been proven wrong and much money can be saved by modestly increasing the number of students in each class.  The plan Wilson advocates is for schools to increase class size and dramatically change how teachers are compensated.  He says, as it is now, the teaching profession is riddled with incompetents who themselves were poor students, graduating at the bottom of the high schools and colleges they attended. To attract better candidates to teaching, Wilson says schools must pay higher salaries, sooner, based on merit.

Missing from Wilson’s point of view, it seems, is a vision of what professionalism should mean for teachers — and the structure of a system that would empower teachers with the status and responsibilities of professionals.  As I hear Wilson, he would see even the more qualified and more highly paid teachers he advocates, as remaining basically blue collar workers in a hierarchical organization in which they would have few professional prerogatives. To attract better candidates to teaching, it seems to me, there must be a restructuring of the system of education that gives teachers more responsibility, more freedom to meet that responsibility, and more opportunity for the expression of individual creativity.

See: Does Ohio’s Low Standard For School “Excellence” Hinder Authentic School Improvement?

The graphs below show the voting pattern in Kettering, Ohio for the 2010 election. Each graph shows the total universe of registered voters in Kettering and shows how sub-groups voted, or failed to vote.

The universe of all Kettering registered voters is divided according to six age groups (the rows in the chart) And each age group, in turn, is divided into six divisions (the columns in the chart). The six columns are: Republicans who voted, Democrats who voted, Independents who voted, Republicans who did not vote, Democrats who did not vote, and Independents who did not vote.

Here is a breakdown of those voting:

• 88% of Republicans voted — 9220 out of 10,488
• 75% of Democrats voted — 8549 out of 11,400
• 31% of Independents voted — 6096 out of 20020

In Kettering 57% of registered voters actually voted in the November, 2010 general election. What these graphs do not show is the number of eligible voters in Kettering who have never registered. Nationwide, it is estimated that 30% of eligible voters never register to vote.  In Kettering 57% of registered voters went to the polls, but I don’t have the data to calculate the turn-out rate of all eligible voters.  In Ohio, the overall turnout of eligible voters was estimated at 48%.  Here is a cloer look at two of the groups — one older, one younger

76% of Kettering registered voters age 60-69 voted:

• 93% of Kettering Republicans age 60-69 voted (1745 out of 1876 voting)
• 84% of Kettering Democrats age 60-69 voted (1796 out of 2149)
• 47% of Kettering Independent age 60-69 voted (790 out of 1674)

28% of Kettering’s registered voters age 18-30 voted:

• 65% of Republicans age 18-30 voted — 374 out of 579
• 46% of Democrats age 18-30 voted — 432 out of 943
• 21% of Independents age 18-30 voted — 1160 out of 5542

The graph shows a huge dip in registered voters from the age group 50-59 to the age group 60-69, then a big gain for the 70+ group. A better graph that showed more the age divisions — say, 20 instead of 6 — would show a more accurate representation, and smoother transitions from each age group. I’m planning on redoing thes graphs to improve them.

I am accumulating this data via a FileMaker program on my iMac, and I have all of the voting records of Montgomery County to work with. I used the iMac “Numbers” program to produce these charts and graphs.

I’m intend on making more analysis — particularly comparing the voting patterns in the 2008 election with the 2010 election. This graph below is the same data — again, the six columns together represent the total universe — 41,908 potential participants — of registered voters in Kettering.

In this You-tube video, Zach Schiller, the research director of Policy Matters Ohio, discusses Governor Kasich’s budget proposal. The organizer of the program is Dan Moulthrop, the “curator of conversation” for a northeast Ohio organization called the Civic Commons.

I’d like to know more about Civic Commons. This article says that it was initially funded with a $3 million grant from the Knight Foundation.  Moulthrop comes from a radio background —   former host of Cleveland’s WCPN 90.3 FM, “The Sound of Ideas” program.

Prior to joining Policy Matters in 2001, Schiller was a business reporter for The Plain Dealer and Business Week.  In this interview, Schiller says the Kasich budget is a plan to “Seize $2 billion over a two year period from libraries, local governments and schools.”

Schiller explains that sources of revenue long established for local communities is being eliminated in Kasich’s budget proposal.  Some of these changes go back to the 2005 Tax Reduction Act, that changed the taxation structure of business tax.  For some time, local schools and local governments were reimbursed by the state for the reduction in these taxes.  Now, the Kasich budget is eliminating these reimbursements.

One interesting point Schiller makes is that most Ohioans don’t appreciate the excellence of the state’s library system. Schiller says that Ohio has outstanding libraries — that Ohio regularly wins 30% of the awards for best libraries, with a population of 3.5% — and that part of what has made the library system great is state funding.  In Ted Strickland’s last  budget, the state reduced library funding by 23%.  Now Kasich is cutting library funding even more.

I received an interesting note from Mike Robinette, who is now involved in a new organization that I’d like to know more about, Integral Development. In his note, about the Kasich budget, Mike said:

• Local governments and schools districts are hit hard, facing nearly $2 billion less in total payments from the state in 2012 and 2013 under Gov. John Kasich’s budget proposal, according to details released shortly after noon.
• The Local Government Fund is cut by $555 million in the $120 billion, two-year budget which amounts to a 25 percent cut in the first year and a 50 percent cut in the second year. Additionally, the Kasich budget makes tax policy changes raiding a trio of reimbursement fund payments that local governments and schools receive, costing the entities roughly $1.3 billion.
• The tax changes quicken the pace of phase-outs of payments to local governments and school districts for previous changes in state policy. The changes were made during electric deregulation in 1999 and when lawmakers overhauled business taxes in the 2005 budget. That $1.3 billion is then moved into the state’s general revenue fund to pay for state government programs.
• Kasich’s budget also includes extensive privatization moves, including selling off five state prisons for $200 million and the leasing of the state’s liquor distribution network to JobsOhio, Kasich’s private development board.
• The budget proposal takes steps to prepare for the possible sale of the state turnpike, but the sale proceeds are not included in the budget.
• The main payment made by the state to school districts — known as the state’s foundation formula — goes up slightly in Kasich’s budget — 1.4 percent in 2012 and 1.3 percent in 2013.
• However, the total amount that school districts get drops by 11.5 percent in 2012, and 4.9 percent in 2013. That adds up to a drop of $3.14 billion over both years combined — a sum that includes the loss from the tax policy changes as well as the loss of federal stimulus funds used to prop up the current budget.  Library funding under Kasich’s plan drops by 5 percent each year for a total cut of $168 million over both years.
• Timber sales and oil and gas drilling on state parkland is included in Kasich’s plan and a sentencing reform piece that keeps low-level offenders out of jail is also part of the two-year spending blueprint.
• At the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, the state’s largest single agency, a $6 million pot of money for funding children’s hospitals is zeroed out.
• It isn’t immediately clear how expected Medicaid restructuring within ODJFS shakes out in Kasich’s budget, but major savings are expected to come in this area.
• The state’s Medicaid program, which serves 2.1 million low-income children, families, older adults and Ohioans with disabilities, represents roughly 30 percent of the state’s general revenue fund budget.
• Overall, the state’s “all-funds” budget is $120 billion, a drop of 5.3 percent in the first year and a 1.3 percent rise in the second year when compared with the state’s current all-funds budget. In terms of the state’s general revenue fund numbers, the budget rises by 5.1 percent in 2012 and 6.3 percent in 2013.
• The Kasich administration says in the budget proposal that it is expecting continued modest economic growth, with employment rising by 1.1 percent in 2012, and 1.3 percent in 2013. The tax policy changes that hit local governments and schools, combined with natural tax revenue growth, will mean revenues growing by 7 percent in each year of the budget.