Uncle Ted sends a message to charter schools!
After trying unsuccessfully two years ago to ban for-profit companies from managing charter schools, Strickland is taking a new tactic this time around. He's still targeting for-profit school managers, but this time he's added a new club to the bag: a nearly 20 percent cut in funding.
Charter schools are getting $617 million this year, a number that would drop to about $497 million next year under Strickland's proposal, before rising to $534 million in 2011.
"A double-digit reduction in the funding of charter schools is crippling," said Bill Sims, president and chief executive officer of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "It's a separate but unequal strategy for starving charter schools and their students to a slow death."
About 82,000 Ohio students attend the state's 332 charter schools.
"The funding disparity is grossly disproportional to charter schools that serve high proportions of disadvantaged students," Sims said.
Administration officials defend the plan, which for the first time would give charter schools their own line-item and their own separate funding formula.
"They should be able to operate on the dollars we are providing them," said John D. Stanford, the governor's top education adviser. "We don't agree with the statement that we're trying to put charter schools out of business."
State Budget Director J. Pari Sabety said charter schools would be funded for teachers, aides and other things differently than traditional schools, "based on the current business model we see in evidence in Ohio's charter-school movement."
For example, the new formula does not pay for a superintendent or treasurer in charter schools, because the schools do not employ them.
Strickland "has not supported this idea of a for-profit management company being a part of the charter-school educational system or the public educational system," Stanford said.
While Democrats have grumbled about charter schools, including the salaries paid to some administrators, Republicans have argued that it shouldn't matter who is running a school, as long as it's providing students a quality educational option.
The issue is likely to spark a heated legislative battle in the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate.
Teachers unions, which have raised a number of concerns about privately run charter schools, gave more than $600,000 to legislative Democrats in the past election cycle. At the same time, David Brennan, the state's largest charter-school operator, and William Lager, who runs a major online school, gave Republicans nearly $840,000.
Meanwhile, Strickland also hopes to end the practice of paddling students.
Rep. Brian G. Williams, an Akron Democrat who sponsored a bill last session to ban corporal punishment, said only 10 to 12 districts still practice it. The bill passed committee last year but never got to the House floor for a vote.
"Not everybody supports it. I can't believe it in the 21st century," Williams said.
Those who oppose the ban often raise issues over local control.
Most schools stopped spanking students in the mid-1990s when the legislature said that if a district wanted to continue the practice, a school board had to opt in and conduct a study by a local committee.
posted by Kathie Bracy at 6:19 PM
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