.JPG)
2012 Cincinnati Reds
Thurgood Marshall graduation 2012
Badin vs. Versailles
Home > Blogs > Lakota Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > December > 31 > Entry
Report is faulty?
A recently released report about the way Ohio schools fund education has lead to a rebuttal from another organization. Here is the original report and below is the rebuttal. This was sent to me by Lakota treasurer Craig Jones.
On The Money - Vol. 127, No. 52
A Rotunda Publication Vol. 127, No. 52 By Driscoll & Fleeter December 26, 2008
Education Trust Report: Making Oversimplification into an Art
On December 22, 2008, the Education Trust released a brief report about education spending in Ohio’s 14 largest school districts (No Accounting for Fairness). Education Trust makes the full text available at its website: http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust.
The report claims that Ohio school districts do not direct additional State and federal funding for economically disadvantaged pupils to those schools with the greatest need for such supplemental dollars. The report focuses on the distribution of school funds within each school district. As a result, it attempts to compare low poverty school buildings with high poverty school buildings within the same school district. As a further refinement of emphasis, the report apparently concentrated on data about elementary school buildings. The report’s argument consists of three steps.
First, an analysis of data from the 14 school districts supposedly shows that the districts spend more money on teacher salaries in the low poverty elementary schools than the same district spends on teacher salaries in high poverty elementary schools. This relationship occurred in 11 of the 14 districts.
Second, because the districts tend to spend more dollars on salaries in the low poverty school buildings, the additional assistance intended to reach pupils from economically disadvantaged backgrounds does not reach them. The report explains why low poverty schools have higher salary expenditures than high poverty buildings as follows:
How does this happen? As teachers accrue experience and credentials, they generally
earn higher pay and greater ability to choose where they teach. Higher paid veteran
teachers often choose to teach in schools with more affluent students, perhaps believing these schools pose fewer difficult challenges. When these teachers move to such schools, their larger salaries follow them, and the positions they vacate in high-poverty schools most often are filled with less experienced, and thus lower paid-teachers. No Accounting for Fairness, p.5.
Third, while State and federal programs may fund additional programs at school buildings where economically disadvantaged pupils attend, such additional programmatic funding does not actually occur. Even though data do not exist to show expenditures by school building in Ohio, the Education Trust relied on data from across the country.
On The Money - Vol. 127, No. 52 support the belief that Ohio does not fund additional poverty programs in the schools where the greatest need for those programs exist.
Of course, school districts might be targeting additional resources to high-poverty
schools in ways that are not reflected in the salaries of teachers and other professional
staff. For instance, some schools might be providing additional after-school learning
time or other supplemental services. However, meticulous studies conducted in
school districts across the country by Marguerite Roza at the Center for Reinventing
Public Education suggests that this is unlikely to be the case. Indeed, most school
districts not only spend less on teacher salaries in their high-poverty schools, but they
also spend less of their special program funds and other discretionary resources in their
highest poverty schools. No Accounting for Fairness, p.7.
Thus, the Education Trust determined that the allocation of teacher salary expenditures acts as a proxy to indicate all aspects of fairness in funding among school buildings within school districts.
The report proceeds to discount the use of additional funds for class size reduction as a useful tactic for attacking poverty-related education issues. Its recommendations include the improvement of school building level financial reporting and the establishment of a new budgeting system in which each pupil at a school implies a certain amount of revenue for that school based on the specific needs of that pupil. Ultimately, this system would become a building-based system in which the alleged inequitable distribution of salary expenditures among schools within each school district would disappear.
Comment
The conclusions and recommendations in No Accounting for Fairness extend far beyond the foundation of data used in the report. The report uses general categories without attention to the nature or magnitude of the differences shown in those categories in the data itself. As a result, it paints a very misleading picture of the status of funding for pupils in high poverty schools in the 14 Ohio school districts that are the subject of this report. While the recommendation to improve school based reporting of fiscal data deserves serious consideration, the extension of improved reporting into a rigid formula for allocating dollars among school buildings has no real support in the data presented.
The evidence simply does not justify the broad accusation that “federal and state funds
specifically intended to boost the achievement levels of students from low-income
families often do not end up in the schools these students attend.” While this statement
might be true “across the country”, no specific evidence to support the veracity of this
statement as it applies to Ohio’s 14 largest school districts was presented in this paper.
1) The report’s methodology for identification of high poverty schools is flawed. The report compared school buildings based on the number of pupils whose household fell below the federal poverty line. While the poverty line is one measure of economic disadvantage, other measures exist. For example, in Akron, the report claims that 93% of the pupils in the district’s high poverty elementary schools are poor. For the low poverty On The Money - Vol. 127, No. 52 Akron elementary schools, it reports a 45% enrollment of poor pupils. Based on this comparison, it concludes that teachers in the “low poverty” schools earn about $4,900 more in salaries than the teachers in Akron’s “high poverty” elementary schools.
Other poverty data shed a completely different light on this analysis. When a definition of “high poverty” elementary schools relies on the eligibility for federal free or reduced lunch, 37 of Akron’s 39 elementary schools qualify as 100% impoverished. The other two schools have lower poverty rates - 99% and 98%. Thus, while one definition of “poverty” may enable a distinction between “high”and “low” poverty elementary schools in Akron, another broader indicator shows that ALL elementary schools in the district have high poverty.
2) The report correctly points out that teachers receive higher salaries with the accumulation of experience. The fact that teachers in some school buildings receive higher salaries than those in other buildings enabled the report to imply a dichotomy between highly experienced teachers who work in low poverty schools and inexperienced teachers who work in high poverty schools. The quotation from p. 5 of the report as shown above delivers this implication quite unambiguously as it refers to “veteran” teachers who receive higher salaries and “less experienced” replacements who receive lower salaries.
Data from Akron schools show how the Education Trust analysis uses the dichotomy between veteran and inexperienced teachers to mislead. Of the 39 elementary schools in Akron, no school had an average teacher experience less than 10.79 years (based on data from the 2006-07 school year). In 31 of those 39 schools, the number of teachers with 0 to 3 years of experience equaled zero. In other words, if “inexperience” is defined as less than four years of teaching, 31 elementary schools in Akron had no inexperienced faculty members. In the remaining 8 elementary schools, the percentage of teachers with less than four years experience in any particular school never exceeded 6%. Research in the field of psychology shows that the acquisition of expertise in a subject or task generally requires 10 years. A practitioner with 10 years experience is an “expert” all other things being equal.
By these definitions every elementary school in Akron deploys a veteran, expert staff.
The fact that some teachers have more experience than others diminishes greatly in
significance to the extent that the entire body of Akron teachers registers high levels of
experience in every school.
3) The contention that experienced teachers tend to concentrate in low poverty school districts rests upon a critical assumption. Reference to the quotation cited earlier shows that the report assumes that teachers move to low poverty school buildings and take their high salaries with them. While such movement may occur, the Education Trust presented no data to support its existence. An alternative explanation exists. If a cohort of 10 new teachers divides evenly between a high poverty and low poverty school building, the attrition rate may be higher over time in the high poverty building. After five years, if four teachers in the high poverty building have left teaching entirely, and only one On The Money - Vol. 127, No. 52 teacher in the low poverty building has left teaching, the low poverty building will have a more experienced staff even though none of the teachers moved between buildings at all.
4) The report criticizes reliance on class size reduction as a strategy for attacking the disadvantages of poverty. It fails to note that the use of this strategy results from State poverty based aid mandates rather than from decisions made by school districts.
5) Similarly, the report focuses on differences in salary expenditures in elementary
schools as representative of a mal-distribution of all money intended to address problems
related to poverty. This “analysis” fails to note that the earmarking of Poverty Based Aid
in Ohio occurs in such a way that its outcome would not appear as more per pupil
expenditure on elementary school pupils. For example, all-day kindergarten aid expands
both funding and enrollment so that it would not increase per pupil expenditures.
Dropout prevention aid, community outreach aid, and professional development aid
would not necessarily follow specific building by building patterns.
6) The report confounds expenditures on salary and additional funding intended for poverty programs. As the second quotation presented above indicates, the report asserts that most school districts not only spend less on teacher salaries in their high-poverty schools, but they also spend less of their special program funds and other discretionary resources in their highest poverty schools…
This sweeping generalization relies upon national research. It has no support in actual Ohio education funding data.
Conclusion
Policymakers could benefit from a better understanding of how teacher experience varies by school building. If patterns of migration from high poverty to low poverty schools exist, the documentation of those patterns would help to inform policy and funding decisions. However, a realistic assessment of school staffing issues must show a more nuanced comprehension of the teacher labor market than the report’s simplistic approach displays.
Currently, no objective measure enables an evaluation of teacher quality. Experience and level of training to the MA or Ph.D. level can provide proxies for quality, but no easily accessible data enable researchers to differentiate the quality of two teachers. Gross patterns of experienced versus inexperienced teachers in different school buildings may indicate a problem. The small differences identified in the Education Trust report simply fail to document such patterns.
“On The Money” (c) 1995-2008 Rotunda Inc. 21 West Broad Street, Suite 1000, Columbus, Ohio 43215. All Rights Reserved. Phone Number (614) 227-5820
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Hot topics
Tweet
Comments
By Rick
January 4, 2009 11:55 AM | Link to this
Lindsey, The Education Trust is apparently another one of those organizations that is enraged that there is economic inequality. Such folks don’t care that rich people and middle class people got that way by applying themselves in school and working hard afterwards. Let’s think about the word “fair” from the perspective of the rich and middle class. Here they are in homes they own, and pay a lot of taxes on. They read to their children when they were young. They took them to museums and concerts and all sorts of venues. The paid for private music, singing, tennis, soccer, dance, art, etc lessons. They moved to where the schools are good and have extracurricular activities that mesh with the abilities of their children. An now the socialists want to take even more from them, reduce the quality of schools; they want to take the funding and apply it to schools whose pupils had bad parents. My advice to such parents: get off the drugs and booze, don’t gamble, quit having sex with everybody, get a job and work hard, and, most importantly, get involved in your children’s education. If they would do that, the problem would be solved.
By hotel Türkei
February 16, 2010 10:32 PM | Link to this
Myself Advice,result hall selection journey blood drive cos your last vary realise due present consequence threat down remain scientist flower degree lose benefit research below social largely offer keep our shake night watch pub similar village light majority clothes publication issue escape adopt pretty cheap career shake white about key rain special take severe occasion employ white why jump land twice method examine into competition block farm article economic death extend tooth average employee match choice for climb cos welfare match device able appeal check care seek