A couple of weeks after Election Day, the giddiness — or the dyspepsia, depending on which side of the Issue 2 fault line you lined up — likely is fading. Behind us, I hope, are the raw emotions, the overblown rhetoric and ads. But still staring us in the face are some stark facts we need to absorb, both as individuals and as communities, if we are serious in Ohio about maintaining a public school system that can carry the weight of the future.
The majority of new school levies on the Nov. 8 ballot failed. That hardly passes as news anymore. A floundering economy has left masses of shell-shocked taxpayers who appear to be in no mood to vote for new property taxes for schools.
But that is not all the reason local schools have been coming up short so many times on financial support. In many districts, the percentage of residents who have children in the public school system is very low. (About 20 percent of Akron residents have children enrolled in the Akron Public Schools, for instance.) The declining number is not simply because private and charter schools and home-schoolers are drawing away households that otherwise would be part of the public system. Without question, state legislative policies in recent years certainly make that a factor. More important, though, is that current demographic trends are not always on the side of schools. Add a graying population to the fact that younger people are having fewer children, and you have a situation where fewer households have a direct and immediate interest in issues relating to schools.
Economists tell us we are fairly rational beings who make pocketbook decisions on the basis of how much we expect to benefit, sooner or later, from a transaction. In other words, we calculate how much of our assets to put on the line, how much skin to put in the game, based on what we expect to gain in return. In that sense, we play a pocketbook-versus-expectations game in which, unfortunately, levies for public education are coming out at the short end much too frequently.
Such are the realities we come back to in funding public education, now that the shouting is over. Tough as it is now to raise local funds for schools, it promises to be grimmer still if the number of households with children enrolled in public schools continues to drop, along with commitment and interest.
Of course, in a sour economy, with money so hard to come by, the first and most practical response is for schools to “do more with less.” For all the right reasons, a school efficiency movement already is well under way. As labor leaders have trumpeted during the past few months, long before hard-charging legislators lobbed Senate Bill 5, bargaining units and school officials already were responding to the pressure for change and looking for ways to save on operations, wages and benefits such as health care. If anything, the unpleasantness of the S.B. 5/Issue 2 episode has served to hold their feet to the fire to show results. Which is not a bad thing at all.
No less encouraging is that several educational organizations, most prominently the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ohio Grantmakers Forum and Ohio Education Matters, a subsidiary of Cincinnati-based KnowlegdeWorks, are actively engaged in the effort to retool the business of education, identifying and promoting best practices, preaching collaboration and working with districts internally and across districts for change.
Without taking anything away from the emphasis on efficiency, it seems to me that Ohio faces another critical challenge — one worth at least as many millions of dollars as has been spent fighting over collective bargaining. The challenge is to tackle the “expectations gap,” a sense that as an institution, the public school system is not as relevant as it once was to the interests of the larger society. And by expectations I am not talking simply about lagging achievement, discipline issues and all the other things that unhappy taxpayers usually hold up as reasons not to “throw money” at public schools.
I have been reminded recently, and quite powerfully, about a fundamental function that communities have long depended on public schools to perform to a degree that other institutions could not. It is the quaint, old melting-pot ideal. They still do, in schools across Ohio such as Akron’s Jennings Community Learning Center, with students from dozens of countries speaking a myriad languages. To the extent that the schools succeed in providing a common base — in language, knowledge and experience — for the diverse society that we are, we all stand to benefit. The payback certainly is not immediate, but if the public schools are not strong enough to play well this underlying role, I don’t know who else can or will.
Ofobike is Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or be email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com
